Your Flying Car Awaits

Paul Milo

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061960109
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire des sciences

A delightful mixture of science fiction, utopian vision, and just plain crazy ideas, Your Flying Car Awaits is a hilarious and insightful compendium of the most outrageous and completely ridiculous predictions of the 20th Century. Award-winning journalist Paul Milo's collection of "Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century" is true history on the lighter side, a must for fans of Ken Davis and his bestselling Don't Know Much About ® series as well as the popular Darwin Awards books. For an unforgettable journey back through the misguided scientific mindset of the previous century, climb aboard— Your Flying Car Awaits!

Chapter One
OUR BODIES, OURSELVES

In 1946, history’s most famous clump of chicken cells finally died at the advanced age (for chicken cells, at least) of thirty-four.

The cells were kept alive at New York City’s Rockefeller University by Alexis Carrel, a French-born surgeon and pioneer in organ transplantation, from 1912 until his death in 1944. Carrel, a highly respected medical researcher, was aiming to demonstrate that bodily tissues could live well beyond what was commonly perceived as their natural life span. For decades he assiduously drew the poisons from the cells and died believing that the same could one day be done for people. Researchers ended the experiment not because they had regarded it as a failure—after all, the cells had outlived the very person who had sustained them by two years—but because they were sure that the point had been made. Extending life, including human life, was a real possibility.

Two decades later other researchers discovered mistakes in Carrel’s methods, realizing that every time he had drained the toxins from his geriatric tissues he was inadvertently replenishing the sample with fresh chicken cells. But by then the damage had already been done. While the cells were still alive, a newspaper, the New York World Telegram, annually reported the cells’ “birthday” each January and other, sensationalized accounts claimed that Carrel was keeping a whole chicken heart beating. Carrel’s work, flawed though it may have been, had helped inspire science to take over where Ponce de León had failed and so really find a fountain of youth (or at least a fountain of longevity).

And why not? Human life spans did rise dramatically across the world during the 20th-century. An American female born in 1900, for example, lived to an average age of about fifty, but a typical girl born a century later can reasonably expect to be blowing out the candles on her eightieth birthday cake. The folks in the white lab coats were given much of the credit for this.

Doctors had indeed helped people live longer by 2000, by getting much better at treating injury and disease, encouraging sensible hygiene (countless millions were saved after late-19th-century-surgeons simply began washing their hands before diving into a patient), and spreading the word about bad habits such as smoking. But the magical goal Carrel had sought still remains beyond science’s grasp. We may live a lot longer than we used to, but nothing like the 150 or 200 years that some futurists believed we were going to achieve by now.

It’s an appealing concept to think that science will allow us the advances to stave off life’s most uncomfortable realities (death being the most uncomfortable reality of all), but of course the practical constraints of science are often out of sync with our visions for the future. The frailty of the human body makes it a particularly easy target when it comes to predictions. Every year we invest more and more money into the upkeep of our bodies. Every year we continue to wish and hope that science will make the impossible possible.

Even with all the medical advances that the 20th-century saw, there were still predictions about the human body that far exceeded the realm of what was actually feasible. Along with endowing us with centuries of life, medical science was also expected to make those years much better, and in some cases a lot stranger, than they had ever been. Surveying the astounding advances in biology that had been made by then, writers in the 1950s and ’60s looking ahead to the next forty years were absolutely giddy. There would be fantastic cures for previously untreatable diseases and methods for giving us green skin or fishlike gills.

Not everyone was so starry-eyed, however. When Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix shape of DNA in 1953, some researchers likened their achievement to opening Pandora’s box: Once we understood the mechanics of human heredity, some feared it was a short leap to Huxley’s Brave New World, a nightmare where genetically engineered elites would dominate society. Greater understanding of the brain could help in the fight against mental illness—and could potentially hand some 21st-century fascist government the perfect tool to keep the masses in line.

For centuries, each additional bit of knowledge we gained about our biology eventually led to an improvement in our quality of life. But as the 21st-century drew closer, some feared that perhaps we had now learned too much for our own good. The predictions gathered here encompass the doom and gloom as well as the optimistic, providing a cross section of soothsayers who felt that for one reason or another medical science would change how our bodies function. When surveying the overblown fears and fondest hopes regarding what medicine today was to be like, however, it’s probably best to begin at the beginning: childbirth.

Prediction: Baby Factories

In the 1920s the brilliant Scottish geneticist J. B. S. Haldane described a process he termed ectogenesis for creating human life, and it pretty much took all the fun out of making a baby. Instead of a man, a woman, and a bed (or a beach, or the backseat of a car), in the 21st-century sperm would meet egg in a laboratory, and the developing embryo would grow to babyhood in a machine, or “artificial growth medium.”

Haldane believed that by now only a small number of eccentric technophobes would still be “indulging” in traditional childbirth. Assuming the perspective of a fictional 21st-century essayist looking back on 20th-century history, Haldane wrote that France became the first country to adopt ectogenesis and that by 1968, “60,000 children annually [were produced] by this method.” In England, “less than 30 percent of children are born of woman.”

Haldane’s work was picked up later in the century by several other researchers, including the Italian physician Daniele Petrucci, who in the 1960s fertilized a human egg outside the womb and kept the developing embryo alive long enough for arms, legs, and eyes to grow. In 1966, Petrucci assisted Soviet researchers in an unsuccessful attempt to bring a child to term using only artificial means. Petrucci’s work, along with other advances, left many scientists and prognosticators convincedthat the era of the laboratory baby would soon be upon us. Around the time of the Soviet experiment, the futurists Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener described the possibility as “likely” to occur by 2000.

As if this Matrix-esque notion of millions of fetuses growing to maturity in a lab were not outlandish enough, there were also those who took this vision a step further, believing that those fetuses could also be customized according to the parents’ wishes. A French scientist named Jean Rostand imagined a time when embryos would spend just the first few weeks in the uterus and finish their development in a device that he puckishly compared to a kangaroo’s pouch. While the embryo grew, doctors could surgically alter its sex, eye color, or facial features. And since the baby no longer had to pass through the vaginal canal, its head could be much larger so as to accommodate an enhanced brain that had been suffused with additional neural cells. Care for a green-eyed boy supergenius? How about a brown-eyed girl with arms seven feet long?

Not surprisingly, there was a backlash. Petrucci was compared to Dr. Frankenstein and was rebuked by the Roman Catholic Church (an observant Catholic, Petrucci did cease his experiments for a while). Around the same time the magazine New Scientist proclaimed that we “are out of the realm of fancy now. Brave New World is on its way,” in reference to Aldous Huxley’s famous vision of Utopia gone wrong. Huxley’s novel, which depicted a future of assembly-line baby factories and mother being a dirty word, is a satire. But by the 1960s, no one was laughing anymore.

So how close have we come to achieving Petrucci’s and Haldane’s goal? Well, that depends a bit on how you define close. Some might argue we are not far off. Test-tube babies have been around for more than thirty years. When Louise Brown was born in England to what had been an infertile couple in 1978, many believed that Haldane’s prophecy, and one of the Catholic Church’s worst fears, had been realized.

Meanwhile, baby incubators, machines that sustain premature infants until they’re viable, have become much more advanced. Today it’s not uncommon to save babies who are up to three months premature—and as of this writing, that threshold may have been pushed back even further. In February 2007, Amillia Taylor went home after being placed in an incubator at the age of just twenty-one weeks—the youngest surviving preemie to date. When she was born at a Florida hospital in October 2006, Amillia—like Louise Brown a test-tube baby—was less than ten inches long, about the size of a ballpoint pen. Conceived under glass and coming to term on a medical device, Amillia seems to come close to the “motherless” standard envisioned by Haldane eighty years ago.

Still, while the tools of test tubes and incubators have made striking advances, mankind has not put these instruments to the shocking uses that Haldane foresaw. There is nothing like a baby factory today, and as of this writing, nothing like it on the horizon either. Louise Brown, Amillia Taylor, and all their fellow in-vitros may have been conceived outside the womb, but once that process was complete, the tiny embryos were implanted back in a woman’s body. Ectogenic babies, on the other hand, aren’t born but are instead to be “decanted,” plucked from a device where they’ve spent the entire development cycle. No human being has ever come into the world this way; everyone on the planet has spent a good spell inside a human uterus.

Though work on an artificial placenta is being carried out today, most researchers are focusing primarily on ways to assist infertile men and women, not to spare them from delivery altogether. This is partly because the dynamics of embryonic development are very complex; thus a machine that can do what an expectant mother’s body does is probably a long way off (in 2003, writer Ronald Bailey described the artificial womb as one of those breakthroughs that are perpetually just a few years away). And no one really seems to be clamoring for a baby-making machine. Many women may want their labor to be as comfortable as science can make it, and technology may have helped millions of otherwise barren parents have kids, but few mothers appear to be asking science for an escape from the maternity ward.

Prediction: Giving Birth the Painless Way

The doctors who first tried to discover ways to alleviate labor pains two hundred years ago had to overcome many obstacles, including a big cultural one: the book of Genesis. The Bible tells us that when God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, He also attached other punishments to each of them suited to their particular crimes. And since it was Eve who committed the biggest no-no by eating the apple first and daring Adam to do the same, women got the shorter end of the stick. Not only would they forever be “subject” to their husbands, they were also doomed to suffer when giving birth: “Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…”

This passage from Genesis was cited by commentators (almost all male, of course) who believed that God wanted giving birth to be an excruciating experience for the mom, and so the doctors who were trying to make the process a little less traumatic were therefore seen as interfering with the divine plan. Although it may sound downright bizarre—and painful!—to most modern ears, this debate was as divisive back then as today’s arguments about creationism and evolution. Even now there are a handful of women who for religious reasons refuse any pain medication during childbirth. To them, the epidural is the devil’s handiwork.

But the physicians who experimented with the first birth anesthetics had other, more concrete problems to contend with as well. Even as they tried chloroform, ether, and a cocktail of morphine and other drugs known as “Twilight Sleep” to ease the pain of birth, doctors worried about the effects these methods were having on the mother and child. And some believed, even well into the 20th-century, that numbing any part of the woman’s body could short-circuit the labor process altogether. These theories led more than one observer to believe that a practical birth anesthetic would never be found.

“In childbirth the woman under complete anesthesia has no labor and hence no child. Further, many anesthetic materials have a definite poisoning effect on the child, unused as it is to such things,” wrote Yale professor C. C. Furnas in 1936, reporting what was then a common view. Eventually, of course, this prediction proved completely false as researchers came up with reliable methods to take some of the agony out of giving birth, while lingering taboos about what the Bible declared “natural” had largely melted away by the middle of the 20th-century.

Prediction: Me, Me, Me—Human Cloning

While one of the main justifications for making babies in a lab was to spare women the discomfort of pregnancy, another purpose was to introduce a McDonald’s-like efficiency to the haphazard process of passing on genes to the next generation, a way to crank out millions of guaranteed perfect babies. Cloning people, however, was meant to appeal to individuals whose idea of perfection could be found in the mirror.

Every human being who has ever lived gets his or her genes from a mother and a father. Clones are something else altogether. To see how, consider the most common way to create one: a process called nuclear transplantation. The nuclei of male sperm cells and female egg cells each contain chromosomes. When they come together under the right conditions, the two sets of chromosomes become one and the egg spontaneously begins to divide into more cells; an embryo has begun to develop. In nuclear transplantation, however, the nucleus of, say, the egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of the sperm cell. When sperm from the male who contributed the transplanted nucleus now meets that egg, the embryo that’s formed contains nothing but the genetic material of the male (the process can be adapted so females can be cloned, too). The resulting baby isn’t the child of its father or mother but is more like his twin—a duplicate.

As far back as the 1950s, scientists had made a lot of progress in cloning frogs, sea urchins, and other relatively simple creatures. Scientists also tinkered with variations of this process, attempting to create offspring that shared, say, two-thirds of its mother’s genes and one-third of its father’s. One researcher, Landrum Shettles, even claimed in a 1979 interview that he knew precisely how to copy a human being.

The science behind cloning had advanced so rapidly that many respected researchers (including a few Nobel Prize winners) were sure that there would be lots of Multiple Me’s running around by now. Around 1970, scientist Joshua Lederberg tentatively predicted the breakthrough to come within fifteen years. In the late 1960s, a Cambridge University physiologist imagined a time when a government agency would have been set up to issue “licenses” to individuals who wished to clone themselves. Writer Gordon Rattray Taylor, commenting on this possibility, observed that “23 Mozarts would scarcely be tolerable: 23 Hitlers or Stalins at once hardly bear thinking about.”

Rattray Taylor had named one of the greatest fears surrounding cloning: that it would gradually lead to eugenics, in which only those deemed fit would be permitted to literally repeat themselves. Others worried about cloned people becoming “commodified,” bred to provide their “owners” with replacement organs (an idea explored in the 2005 film The Island). Still others, meanwhile, foresaw cloning and ectogenesis together destroying the mother-child bond. “Essentially motherhood will be abolished…The word ‘mother’ may or may not persist, but its essence…will be gone,” one writer predicted in 1969.

The possibility of human cloning shows that there is sometimes a vast gulf between what we could do and what we would do. When Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, even nonscientists immediately grasped the implications and were appalled: cloning salamanders and sea urchins was one thing, but making carbon copies of mammals that are very similar to us genetically was something else. Calls came from many quarters—including from the very scientists who had helped make Dolly—for an outright ban on human cloning. In 2005, the United Nations did pass a nonbinding resolution asking its member countries to outlaw any attempts to create a baby that was a duplicate of another human being. (Some governments would allow cloning to create embryos as a source of stem cells—material that scientists believe could be used to create a supply of tissues for donation—but those embryos would be destroyed long before they develop beyond a very simple stage.)

Today’s bioethicists also worry that not enough is known about cloning to ensure that the copy would be as healthy as the original. Dolly, for example, died in 2003, far short of the normal twelve-year lifespan of a typical sheep, apparently because the aging process was somehow speeded up (she was put down after suffering from arthritis and a lung condition usually only seen in much older animals). Would a cloned person be bald and senile before he reached his twenties? Would he suffer from unimagined, catastrophic diseases because of some glitch in the cloning process? Scientists don’t know and, for the most part, don’t want to find out.

Decades ago, when the technology of cloning was far less advanced, it was a lot easier to believe that cloning a person was inevitable. But as the possibility became more realistic, people became more uneasy with the concept. Around the world, laws are being written to prevent the arrival of the cloned person, yet a few scientists continue to pursue that goal. Time will tell whether lawmakers can continue to stave off the arrival of the human clone.

Prediction: Natural Childbirth Will Be Criminalized

Cloning, ectogenesis, and many other promised medical advances left a lot of people distinctly queasy by the mid-1960s, so much so that lots of parents-to-be sought to turn back the clock. In a nice bit of irony, many bra-burning, liberated women, so forward-looking in other ways, wanted to give birth just like their great-grandmothers did—no beeping machines, no drugs, no sterile delivery rooms. Instead these women, who believed that science had taken all the grandeur out of bringing a life into this world, longed for something more authentic, more natural. That’s where the midwife came in.

Back in the days when applying leeches was a cuttingedge medical treatment, the best advice an expectant mother could get came from a midwife, typically an older woman who had given birth herself or who had assisted at a lot of births. This is still the case today in poorer parts of the world where modern medical care is virtually nonexistent.

But in North America, the midwife began yielding to the gynecologist early in the 20th-century, with more and more babies born in hospitals, and as a result, this traditional occupation had gone the way of the blacksmith by the 1940s. Midwives fell out of favor largely due to an organized campaign begun by medical doctors around 1900. The physicians argued that far too many babies and mothers were lost under the care of a midwife, who lacked both the equipment and the knowledge to assist during difficult births. Later, natural birth advocates took a much more cynical view, contending that the doctors were really just trying to protect their market from competition.

While midwives were still only employed for a small number of births in the 1960s and ’70s, some commentators believed that a panicky medical establishment, fearful that the movement would catch on and a prime source of revenue would be lost, would once again seek to marginalize the midwife—even outlaw her. In 1979, Norma Swenson, who graduatedwith a master’s degree from Harvard’s School of Public Health, warned that by now doctors might have successfully lobbied for laws that would make it a crime for women to give birth outsi...