Lost Horizons

After all of mankind's headlong progress of the past century, science may well have reached its limit for discovery. This startling thought was offered last week by Geneticist Bentley Glass in his valedictory as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The laws of life," he said, "are based on similarities, finite in number and comprehensible to us in the main now. For all time to come, these have been discovered, here and now, in our own lifetime."

What then? Glass quoted Architect Roderick Seidenberg's suggestion that the human race "will remain encased in an endless routine and sequence of events, not unlike that of the ants, the bees and the termites." In short, man will be in danger of massive boredom and mental atrophy.

Maybe; maybe not. One generation's renaissance has always been, in retrospect, another's dark age. Even if Glass is correct, mankind may modestly be considered to have at least a century or so of work ahead if it is to sort out what to do with its vast creative-destructive expertise. The majority of the earth's people, after all, have yet to be touched by technetronic miracles. Even those who have been touched have retained enough violent mystery to occupy several generations of Ph.D.s.

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