Relaxing in a Roman piazza on the hottest day of summer, surrounded by a pristine antiquity, lends a certain clarity to the bewildering swirl of technological innovations brewing back home in the United States. Here, we’re approaching a level of biotechnology where cause and effect can no longer be clearly identified—rather like the flower and the bee. The flower needs the bee in order to pollinate and reproduce, while the bee needs the flower’s nectar to survive. Yet while neither can exist without the other, one can’t easily discern which came first. But sitting in Rome drinking my beer, staring at a statue of Giordano Bruno in the center of the square, I could see another age of scientific revolution frozen in time.

The statue commemorates the site where Father Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition on February 17, 1600. As a Benedictine monk, he left something to be desired, being in certain respects rather more Buddhist than Catholic; he believed that the universe was eternal and that God was in all things. His undoing came in accepting the findings of Copernicus, that the Earth revolved around the sun. It was an inevitable conclusion, given the period’s technological advances in optics. But it also cut to the core of the medieval view that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Bruno’s successor, Galileo Galilei, was not so foolish—faced with the Inquisition, he chose to renounce scientific truth about the relationship of the sun and the earth and save his own life.

Before we too quickly condemn the insular medieval mindset, we should recognize that we occasionally react in much the same way to today’s more challenging technological advances. Average people, churches, and governments—not just Luddites—fight and fear discoveries of the same magnitude as those that brought Father Bruno to the stake. Today’s new technologies challenge people’s core religious and cultural beliefs about their place in the universe. The most obvious are cloning and medical research involving human embryos and stem cells, but the list hardly stops there. Three lines of technical development—transistors, recombinant DNA, and nanotechnology—pose the greatest potential for controversy, because each has the ability to alter or influence activities human beings consider their sole prerogative: thinking, reproduction, and life itself.

Invented in 1947 at Bell Labs, the transistor is essentially an electronic switch that has been used to develop everything from better radios to Thinking Machines —including the Internet, whose existence relies intrinsically on billions of transistors. At its heart, the recombinant DNA process developed in 1973 is simply a convenient way to snip and tuck large organic molecules. Perhaps as significant in human history as the discovery of fire, DNA manipulation has sparked enormous growth in commercial biotechnology, as well as fueling research into cloning and the Human Genome Project. Finally, there’s nanotechnology—the idea of building tiny machines, smaller than the eye can perceive, essentially consisting of a handful of motorized atoms, which was suggested in 1959 by eminent physicist Richard Feynman, in a speech called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” Nanotechnology is just entering commercialization today, and most people recognize it’s a humdinger of an idea that holds great promise.

As these technologies ripen and mature, they challenge our sense of control and our identify as a unique and important species—just as developments in astronomy and physics forced Renaissance folk to challenge their concepts of God’s creation and His prerogative to create. We have, however, sped the process up considerably since then. Today, new technologies resemble waves in an ocean of ideas. Roiling and unpredictable, they churn inexorably at society, frightening people who find themselves cast adrift like small boats flung about in storms of change at the whims of an uncaring scientific establishment. But heretical or not, these advances are as inevitable as the tides, and it is only good sense to ride out the storms.

So I ordered another beer, thinking again about the flower and the bee. Which came first? A traditional scientist might say that they evolved together, occupying a symbiotic relationship in a unique ecological niche. Yet causation is a slippery idea. Consider the bee as the flower’s technology, or tool. Flowers manipulate the bees’ behavior by developing uniquely attractive nectars—with the result that the survival of both life-forms is assured, and the flowers’ beauty and genetic diversity is enhanced. But from the flowers’ perspective, bees are a tool with an attitude problem. They don’t always come when needed, and they’re frequently distracted by outside circumstances—notably stinging enemies, which tends to get them killed.

And what about us? Will we develop technologies that relate to us as the bee does to the flower—tools on which we depend completely, yet which need us to ensure their own survival? Of course we should expect this to occur. Transistors have already evolved to produce the Internet; conscious artificial intelligence is merely a further step forward. Recombinant DNA already allows us to refine our own genetic codes; generating new carbon-based species lies not far beyond. And nanotechnology, as it evolves, may give us in vivo silico—living beings based on silicon. Exactly when or how these developments will happen remains unknown, but we can expect them to occur just as surely as we watch ourselves evolve.

I wonder what Father Bruno might say about this if he were alive today. Probably he would tell us that we shouldn’t worry about being so special, because we’re not! He knew humans were not at the center of the universe, that technology arises from the same sources that gave birth to humanity, and therefore that both are equally natural. If we hope to become as enduring as the flowers, we’ll have to learn to share nature’s garden with a whole bunch of bees—that is, to live with technology rather than controlling it.

I suspect Father Bruno would understand that metaphor—and that he might also advise us not to worry too much about the details, pausing instead simply to marvel at the process.

Copyright 2005 P. J. Fischer