What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.

—John W. Gardner, 1965, upon appointment as the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

Rarely in the modern history of humans has biology played such an important role in human affairs as it does today. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, explorers stimulated the first major advance in biology by bringing back countless new species that Darwin, and others, put into a logical order based on the theory of natural selection. The development of evolutionary thinking and the clarification of the rules of genetic inheritance resulted in the theoretical base for targeted artificial selection—an essential component of progress in biology and agriculture.

A second major advance currently is underway. Due to the basic understanding of inheritance at the molecular level and the tools this has made available to biologists, it no longer is necessary to depend upon natural or artificial selection and breeding of progeny to produce new and improved individuals. Genes from the same or other species can be inserted into a genome, or the activity of a specific gene can be blocked. Further, once the genome has been altered artificially, large numbers of new plants and animals