When, less than a half-century ago, James D. Watson and Francis Crick first revealed to the world the structure of DNA, no one imagined how rapidly genetic technology would develop. Within a few years, we shall see the completion of the Human Genome Project, disclosing the DNA sequences of all 100,000 human genes. And even without complete genomic knowledge, biotech business is booming: according to a recent report by the research director for Smith Kline Beecham, enough sequencing data are already available to keep his researchers busy for the next twenty years, developing early-detection screening techniques, rationally designed vaccines, genetically-engineered changes in malignant tumors leading to enhanced immune response, and, ultimately, precise gene therapy for specific diseases. In short, the age of genetic technology has arrived.

This technology comes into existence as part of the large humanitarian project to cure disease, prolong life, and alleviate suffering. As such, it occupies the moral high ground of compassionate healing. Who would not welcome surgery to correct the genetic defects that lead to sickle-cell anemia, Huntington’s disease, and breast cancer, or to protect against the immune deficiency caused by the AIDS virus?

And yet genetic technology has also aroused considerable public concern. Even people duly impressed by the astonishing achievements of the last decades are nonetheless ambivalent about these new developments. For they sense that genetic technology, while in some respects continuous with the traditional medical project of compassionate healing, also represents something radically new and disquieting. For their own part, enthusiasts of this technology are often impatient with such disquiet, which they tend to attribute to scientific ignorance or else to outmoded moral and religious notions.

In my own view, the scientists’ attempt to cast the debate as a battle of beneficent and knowledgeable cleverness versus ignorant and superstitious anxiety should be resisted. For the public is right to be ambivalent about genetic technology, and no amount of instruction in molecular biology and genetics should allay its—our—legitimate human concerns. In what follows, I mean to articulate some of those concerns, bearing in mind that genetic technology cannot be treated in isolation but must be seen in connection with other advances in reproductive and developmental biology, in neurobiology, and in the genetics of behavior—indeed, with all the techniques now and soon to be marshaled to intervene ever more directly and precisely into the bodies and minds of human beings. I shall proceed by raising a series of questions.

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What Is Different About Genetic Technology?

At first glance, not much. Isolating a disease-inducing aberrant gene looks fairly continuous with isolating a disease-inducing intracellular virus; supplying diabetics with normal genes for producing insulin has the same medical goal as supplying them with insulin for injection.

Nevertheless, despite these obvious similarities, genetic technology is also decisively different. When fully developed, it will wield two powers not shared by ordinary medical practice. Medicine treats only existing individuals, and it treats them only remedially, seeking to correct deviations from a more or less stable norm of health. Genetic engineering, by contrast, will, first of all, deliberately make changes that are transmissible into succeeding generations and may even alter in advance specific future individuals through direct “germ-line” or embryo interventions. Secondly, genetic engineering may be able, through so-called genetic enhancement, to create new human capacities and hence new norms of health and fitness.

For the present, it is true, genetic technology is hailed primarily for its ability better to diagnose and treat disease in existing individuals. Confined to such practices, it would raise few questions (beyond the usual ones of safety and efficacy). Even intrauterine gene therapy for existing fetuses with diagnosable genetic disease could be seen as an extension of the growing field of fetal medicine. But there is no reason to believe that the use of gene-altering powers can be so confined, either in logic or in practice.

For one thing, “germ-line” gene therapy and manipulation, affecting not merely the unborn but also the unconceived, is surely in our future. The practice has numerous justifications, beginning with the desire to reverse the unintended dysgenic effects of modern medical success. Thanks to medicine, for example, individuals who would have died from diabetes now live long enough to transmit their disease-producing genes. Why, it has been argued, should we not reverse these unfortunate changes by deliberate intervention? More generally, why should we not effect precise genetic alteration in disease-carrying sperm or eggs or early embryos, in order to prevent in advance the emergence of disease that otherwise will later require expensive and burdensome treatment? Why should not parents eager to avoid either the birth of afflicted children or the trauma of eugenic abortion be able to avail themselves of such alteration?

In sum, before we have had more than trivial experience with gene therapy for existing individuals—none of it thus far successful—sober people have called for overturning the current (self-imposed) taboo on germ-line modification. The line between these two practices cannot hold.

Despite the naive hopes of many, neither will we be able to defend the boundary between therapy and genetic enhancement. Will we reject novel additions to the human genome that enable us to produce, internally, vitamins or amino acids we now must get in our diet? Will we oppose the insertion of engineered foreign (or even animal) genes fatal to bacteria and parasites or offering us increased resistance to cancer? Will we decline to make alterations in the immune system that will increase its efficacy or make it impervious to HIV? When genetic profiling becomes able to disclose the genetic contributions to height or memory or intelligence, will we deny prospective parents the right to enhance the potential of their children? Finally, should we discover—as no doubt we will—the genetic switches that control our biological clock, will we opt to keep our hands off the rate of aging or our natural human lifespan? Not a chance.

We thus face a paradox. On the one hand, genetic technology really is different. It can and will go to work directly and deliberately on our basic, heritable, life-shaping capacities, at their biological roots. It can take us beyond existing norms of health and healing—perhaps even alter fundamental features of human nature. On the other hand, precisely because the goals it will serve, at least to begin with, will be continuous with those of modern high-interventionist medicine, we will find its promise familiar and irresistible.

This paradox itself contributes to public disquiet: rightly perceiving a difference in genetic technology, we also sense that we are powerless to establish, on the basis of that difference, clear limits to its use. The genetic genie, first unbottled to treat disease, will go its own way, whether we like it or not.

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How Much Genetic Self-knowledge Is Good for Us?

Quite apart from worries about genetic engineering, gaining genetic knowledge is itself a legitimate cause of anxiety, not least because of one of its most touted benefits—the genetic profiling of individuals.

The deepest problem connected with learning your own genetic sins and unhealthy predispositions is neither the threat to confidentiality and privacy nor the risk of discrimination in employment or insurance, important though these issues may be. It is, rather, the various hazards and deformations in living your life that will attach to knowing in advance your likely or possible medical future. To be sure, in some cases such foreknowledge will be welcome, if it can lead to easy measures to prevent or treat the impending disorder, and if the disorder in question does not powerfully affect self-image or self-command. But will and should we welcome knowledge that we carry a predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, or some other personality or behavior disorder, or genes that will definitely produce at an unknown future time a serious but untreatable disease?

Still harder will it be for most people to live easily or wisely with less certain information—say, where multigenic traits are involved or where the predictions are purely statistical, with no clear implication for any particular “predisposed” individual. The recent case of a father who insisted that ovariectomy and mastectomy be performed on his ten-year-old daughter because she happened to carry the BRCA-1 gene for breast cancer shows dramatically the toxic effect of genetic knowledge.

Less dramatic but more profound is the threat to human freedom and spontaneity, a subject explored 25 years ago by the philosopher Hans Jonas. In a discussion of human cloning, Jonas argued eloquently for a “right to ignorance”:

That there can be (and mostly is) too little knowledge has always been realized; that there can be too much of it stands suddenly before us in a blinding light. . . . The ethical command here entering the enlarged stage of our powers is: never to violate the right to that ignorance which is a condition for the possibility of authentic action; or: to respect the right of each human life to find its own way and be a surprise to itself. [Emphasis in the original]

To scientists convinced that their knowledge of predispositions can only lead to rational preventive medicine, Jonas’s defense of ignorance will look like obscurantism. It is not. Although everyone remembers that Prometheus was the philanthropic god who gave to human beings fire and the arts, it is often forgotten that he also gave them the greater gift of “blind hopes,” precisely because he knew that ignorance of one’s own future fate was indispensable to aspiration and achievement. I suspect that many people, taking their bearings from life lived open-endedly rather than from preventive medicine practiced rationally, would prefer ignorance of the future to the scientific astrology of knowing their genetic profile. In a free society, that would be their right.

Or would it? This leads us to the next question.

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What About Freedom?

Even people who might otherwise welcome the growth of genetic knowledge and technology are worried about the coming power of geneticists, genetic engineers, and, in particular, governmental authorities armed with genetic technology.¹ Precisely because we have been taught by these very scientists that genes hold the secret of life, and that our genotype is our essence if not quite our destiny, we are made nervous by those whose expert knowledge and technique touch our very being. Even apart from any particular abuses or misuses of power, friends of human freedom have deep cause for concern.

The English humanist C. S. Lewis put the matter sharply in The Abolition of Man (1965):

In reality, . . . if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them. . . . Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

Most genetic technologists will hardly recognize themselves in this portrait. Though they concede that abuses or misuses of power may occur, they see themselves not as predestinators but as facilitators, merely providing knowledge and technique that people can freely choose to use in making decisions about their health or reproductive choices. Genetic power, they will say, thus serves not to limit freedom but to increase it.

But as we can see from already existing practices like genetic screening and prenatal diagnosis, this claim is at best self-deceptive, at worst disingenuous. The choice to develop and practice genetic screening and the choices of which genes to target for testing have been made not by the public but by scientists—and not on liberty-enhancing but on eugenic grounds. In many cases, practitioners of prenatal diagnosis refuse to do fetal genetic screening in the absence of a prior commitment from the pregnant woman to abort any afflicted fetus. In other situations, pregnant women who still wish not to know prenatal facts must withstand strong medical pressures for testing.

While a small portion of the population may be sufficiently educated to participate knowingly and freely in genetic decisions, most people are and will no doubt always be subject to the benevolent tyranny of expertise. Every expert knows how easy it is to get most people to choose one way rather than another simply by the way one raises the questions, describes the prognosis, and presents the options. The preferences of counselors will always overtly or subtly shape the choices of the counseled.

In addition, economic pressures to contain health-care costs will almost certainly constrain free choice. Refusal to provide insurance coverage for this or that genetic disease may eventually work to compel genetic abortion or intervention. State-mandated screening already occurs for PKU (phenylketonuria) and other diseases, and fullblown genetic-screening programs loom large on the horizon. Once these arrive, there will likely be an upsurge of economic pressures to limit reproductive freedom. All this will be done, of course, in the name of the well-being of children.

Already in 1971, the geneticist Bentley Glass, in his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, enunciated “the right of every child to be born with a sound physical and mental constitution, based on a sound genotype.” Looking ahead to the reproductive and genetic technologies that are today rapidly arriving, Glass proclaimed: “No parents will in that future time have a right to burden society with a malformed or a mentally incompetent child.” It remains to be seen to what extent such prophecies will be realized. But they surely provide sufficient and reasonable grounds for being concerned about restrictions on human freedom, even in the absence of overt coercion, and even in liberal polities like our own.

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What About Human Dignity?

Here, rather than in the more talked-about fears about freedom, lie our deepest concerns. Genetic technology, the practices it will engender, and above all the scientific teachings about human life on which it rests are not, as many would have it, morally and humanly neutral. Regardless of how they are practiced and taught, they are pregnant with their own moral meaning, and will necessarily bring with them changes in our practices, our institutions, our norms, our beliefs, and our self-conception. It is, I submit, these challenges to our dignity and humanity that are at the bottom of our anxiety over genetic science and technology. Let me touch briefly on four aspects of this most serious matter.

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• “Playing God”

This complaint is too facilely dismissed by scientists and nonbelievers. The concern has meaning, God or no God. By it is meant one or more of the following: man, or some men, are becoming creators of life, and indeed of individual living human beings (in-vitro fertilization, cloning); not only are they creating life, but they stand in judgment of each being’s worthiness to live or die (genetic screening and abortion)—not on moral grounds, as is said of God’s judgment, but on somatic and genetic ones; they also hold out the promise of salvation from our genetic sins and defects (gene therapy and genetic engineering).

Never mind the exaggeration that lurks in this conceit of man playing God: even at his most powerful, after all, man is capable only of playing God. Never mind the implicit innuendo that nobody has given to others this creative and judgmental authority, or the implicit retort that there is theological warrant for acting as God’s co-creator in overcoming the ills and suffering of the world. Consider only that if scientists are seen in this godlike role of creator, judge, and savior, the rest of us must stand before them as supplicating, tainted creatures. That is worry enough.

Not long ago, at my own university, a physician making rounds with medical students stood over the bed of an intelligent, otherwise normal ten-year-old boy with spina bifida. “Were he to have been conceived today,” the physician casually informed his entourage, “he would have been aborted.” Determining who shall live and who shall die—on the basis of genetic merit—is a godlike power already wielded by genetic medicine. This power will only grow.

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• Manufacture and Commodification

But, one might reply, genetic technology also holds out the promise of a cure for these life-crippling and life-forfeiting disorders. Very well. But in order truly to practice their salvific power, genetic technologists will have to increase greatly their manipulations and interventions, well beyond merely screening and weeding out. True, in some cases genetic testing and risk-management to prevent disease may actually reduce the need for high-tech interventions aimed at cure. But in many other cases, ever greater genetic scrutiny will lead necessarily to ever more extensive manipulation. And, to produce Bentley Glass’s healthy and well-endowed babies, let alone babies with the benefits of genetic enhancement, a new scientific obstetrics will be necessary, one that will come very close to turning human procreation into manufacture.

This process has already crudely begun with invitro fertilization. It will soon take giant steps forward with the ability to screen in-vitro embryos before implantation; with cloning; and, eventually, with precise genetic engineering. The road we are traveling leads all the way to the world of designer babies—reached not by dictatorial fiat but by the march of benevolent humanitarianism, and cheered on by an ambivalent citizenry that also dreads becoming simply the last of man’s man-made things.

Make no mistake: the price to be paid for producing optimum or even only genetically sound babies will be the transfer of procreation from the home to the laboratory. Increasing control over the product can only be purchased by the increasing depersonalization of the entire process and its coincident transformation into manufacture. Such an arrangement will be profoundly dehumanizing, no matter how genetically good or healthy the resultant children. And let us not forget the powerful economic interests that will surely operate in this area; with their advent, the commodification of nascent human life will be unstoppable.

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• Standards, Norms, and Goals

According to Genesis, God, in His creating, looked at His creatures and saw that they were good: intact, complete, well-working wholes, true to the spoken idea that guided their creation. What standards will guide the genetic engineers?

For the time being, one might answer, the norm of health. But even before the genetic enhancers join the party, the standard of health is being deconstructed. Are you healthy if, although you show no symptoms, you carry genes that will definitely produce Huntington’s disease, or that predispose you to diabetes, breast cancer, or coronary artery disease? What if you carry, say, 40 percent of the genetic markers thought to be linked to the appearance of Alzheimer’s? And what will “healthy” or “normal” mean when we discover your genetic propensities for alcoholism, drug abuse, pederasty, or violence? The idea of health progressively becomes at once both imperial and vague: medicalization of what have hitherto been mental or moral matters paradoxically brings with it the disappearance of any clear standard of health itself.

When genetic enhancement comes on the scene, standards of health, wholeness, or fitness will be needed more urgently than ever, but just then is when all pretense of standards will go out the window. “Enhancement” is a soft euphemism for “improvement,” and the idea of improvement necessarily implies a good, a better, and perhaps even a best. If, however, we can no longer look to our previously unalterable human nature for a standard or norm of what is regarded as good or better, how will anyone know what constitutes an improvement? It will not do to assert that we can extrapolate from what we like about ourselves. Because memory is good, can we say how much more memory would be better? If sexual desire is good, how much more would be better? Life is good; but how much extension of life would be good for us? Only simplistic thinkers believe they can easily answer such questions.

More modest enhancers, like more modest genetic therapists and technologists, eschew grandiose goals. They are valetudinarians, not eugenicists. They pursue not some faraway positive good but the positive elimination of evils: disease, pain, suffering, the likelihood of death. But let us not be deceived. Hidden in all this avoidance of evil is nothing less than the quasi-messianic goal of a painless, suffering-free, and finally immortal existence. Only the presence of such a goal justifies the sweeping-aside of any opposition to the relentless march of medical science. Only such a goal gives trumping moral power to the principle, “cure disease, relieve suffering.”

“Cloning human beings is unethical and dehumanizing, you say? Never mind: it will help us treat infertility, avoid genetic disease, and provide perfect materials for organ replacement.” Such, indeed, was the tenor of the June 1997 report of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on Cloning Human Beings. Notwithstanding its call for a temporary ban on the practice, the only moral objection the commission could agree upon was that cloning “is not safe to use in humans at this time” because the technique has yet to be perfected. Even this elite ethical body, in other words, was unable to muster any other moral argument sufficient to cause us to forgo the possible health benefits of cloning.

The same argument will inevitably also justify creating and growing human embryos for experimentation, revising the definition of death to facilitate organ transplantation, growing human body parts in the peritoneal cavities of animals, perfusing newly dead bodies as factories for useful biological substances, or reprogramming the human body and mind with genetic or neurobiological engineering. Who can sustain an objection if these practices will help us live longer and with less overt suffering?

It turns out that even the more modest biogenetic engineers, whether they know it or not, are in the immortality business, proceeding on the basis of a quasi-religious faith that all innovation is by definition progress, no matter what is sacrificed to attain it.

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• The Tragedy of Success

What the enthusiasts do not see is that their Utopian project will not eliminate suffering but merely shift it around. We are already witnessing a certain measure of public discontent as a paradoxical result of rising expectations in the health-care field: although their actual health has improved, people’s satisfaction with their current health status has remained the same or declined. But that is hardly the highest cost of medical success.

As Aldous Huxley made clear in his prophetic Brave New World, the conquest of disease, aggression, pain, anxiety, suffering, and grief unavoidably comes at the price of homogenization, mediocrity, pacification, trivialized attachments, debasement of taste, and souls without love or longing. Like Midas, bioengineered man will be cursed to acquire precisely what he wished for, only to discover—painfully and too late—that what he wished for is not exactly what he wanted. Or, worse than Midas, he may be so dehumanized he will not even recognize that in aspiring to be perfect, he is no longer even truly human.

The point here is not the rightness or wrongness of this or that imagined scenario—all this is admittedly highly speculative. I surely have no way of knowing whether my worst fears will be realized, but you surely have no way of knowing that they will not. The point is rather the plausibility, even the wisdom, of thinking about genetic technology, like the entire technological venture, under the ancient and profound idea of tragedy. In tragedy, the hero’s failure is embedded in his very success, his defeats in his victories, his miseries in his glory. What I am suggesting is that the technological way of approaching both the world and human life, a way deeply rooted in the human soul and spurred on by the Utopian promises of modern thought and its scientific crusaders, may very well turn out to be inevitable, heroic, and doomed.

To say that technology, left to itself as a way of life, is doomed, does not yet mean that modern life—our life—must be tragic. Everything depends on whether the technological disposition is allowed to proceed to its self-augmenting limits, or whether it can be restricted and brought under intellectual, spiritual, moral, and political rule. But here, I regret to say, the news so far is not encouraging. For the relevant intellectual, spiritual, and moral resources of our society, the legacy of civilizing traditions painfully acquired and long preserved, are taking a beating—not least because they are being called into question by the findings of modern science itself. The technologies present troublesome ethical dilemmas, but the underlying scientific notions call into question the very foundations of our ethics.

This challenge goes far beyond the notorious case of evolution versus biblical religion. Is there any elevated view of human life and human goodness that is proof against the belief, trumpeted by contemporary biology’s most public and prophetic voices, that man is just a collection of molecules, an accident on the stage of evolution, a freakish speck of mind in a mindless universe, fundamentally no different from other living—or even nonliving—things? What chance have our treasured ideas of freedom and dignity against the teachings of biological determinism in behavior, the reductive notion of the “selfish gene” (or for that matter of “genes for altruism”), the belief that DNA is the essence of life, and the credo that the only natural concerns of living beings are survival and reproductive success?

In 1997, the luminaries of the International Academy of Humanism—including the biologists Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, and E.O. Wilson and the humanists Isaiah Berlin, W. V. Quine, and Kurt Vonnegut—issued a statement in defense of cloning research in higher mammals and human beings. Their reasons were revealing:

What moral issues would human cloning raise? Some world religions teach that human beings are fundamentally different from other mammals—that humans have been imbued by a deity with immortal souls, giving them a value that cannot be compared to that of other living things. Human nature is held to be unique and sacred. Scientific advances which pose a perceived risk of altering this “nature” are angrily opposed. . . . As far as the scientific enterprise can determine, [however] . . . [h]uman capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals. Humanity’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover. . . . Views of human nature rooted in humanity’s tribal past ought not to be our primary criterion for making moral decisions about cloning. . . . The potential benefits of cloning may be so immense that it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning.

In order to justify ongoing research, these intellectuals were willing to shed not only traditional religious views but any view of human distinctiveness and special dignity, their own included. They fail to see that the scientific view of man they celebrate does more than insult our vanity. It undermines our self-conception as free, thoughtful, responsible beings, worthy of respect because we alone among the animals have minds and hearts that aim far higher than the mere perpetuation of our genes. It undermines, as well, the beliefs that sustain our mores, institutions, and practices—including the practice of science itself. For why, on this radically reductive understanding of “the rich repertoire” of human thought, should anyone choose to accept as true the results of these men’s “electrochemical brain processes,” rather than his own? Thus do truth and error themselves, no less than freedom and dignity, become empty notions when the soul is reduced to chemicals.

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There is, of course, nothing novel about reductionism, materialism, and determinism of the kind displayed here; they are doctrines with which Socrates contended long ago. What is new is that, as philosophies, they seem to be vindicated by scientific advance. Here, in consequence, is the most pernicious result of our technological progress—more dehumanizing than any actual manipulation or technique, present or future: the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.

Hence our peculiar moral crisis: we adhere more and more to a view of human life that gives us enormous power and that, at the same time, denies every possibility of nonarbitrary standards for guiding the use of this power. Though well-equipped, we know not who we are or where we are going. We triumph over nature’s unpredictabilities only to subject ourselves, tragically, to the still greater unpredictability of our capricious wills and our fickle opinions. That we do not recognize our predicament is itself a tribute to the depth of our infatuation with scientific progress and our naive faith in the sufficiency of our humanitarian impulses.

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Does this mean that I am therefore in favor of ignorance, suffering, and death? Of killing the goose of genetic technology even before she lays her golden eggs? Surely not. But unless we mobilize the courage to look foursquare at the full human meaning of our new enterprise in biogenetic technology and engineering, we are doomed to become its creatures if not its slaves. Important though it is to set a moral boundary here, devise a regulation there, hoping to decrease the damage caused by this or that little rivulet, it is even more important to be sober about the true nature and meaning of the flood itself.

That our exuberant new biologists and their technological minions might be persuaded of this is, to say the least, highly unlikely. But it is not too late for the rest of us to become aware of the dangers—not just to privacy or insurability, but to our very humanity. So aware, we might be better able to defend the increasingly beleaguered vestiges and principles of our human dignity, even as we continue to reap the considerable benefits that genetic technology will inevitably provide.

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¹ It is remarkable that most discussions of genetic technology naively neglect its potential usefulness in creating biological weapons, such as, to begin with, antibiotic-resistant plague bacteria, or later, aerosols containing cancer-inducing or mind-scrambling viruses.

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