Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

Most pundits believe that bold scientific advances in the new millennium will greatly enhance the quality of our lives. Men could live to 150 (women, of course, would live longer). Cars will drive themselves automatically and safely, thus doing away with that pesky collision deductible. In the home, theaters and restaurants air-conditioning thermostats will instantly raise ambient temperatures to 82 degrees whenever there are women present. Serenity will reign.

Yet all is not rosy. You would think that the scientists who masterminded the present day genetically engineered food revolution would be satisfied to rest on their laurels what with the development of the seedless watermelon and the introduction of salads at MacDonald's, but that's not happening. I caught a report on a radio talk show a while ago, which claimed one of the labs is coming out with a one-pill meal, which means there will no longer be any need to sit down and eat. (Actually, it's three pills; breakfast, lunch and dinner.)

And based on what I heard, a lot of thought went into this idea. It's no willy-nilly, pie-in-the-sky project. For instance, a man who is generally dyspeptic will feel bloated after taking a pill. Similarly, a woman who's been dieting for thirty-five or forty years will still be hungry after her pill.

Now all this might be fine for New York or LA, but in the rest of America it would be murder, the Early Bird dinner and Blue Plate special would be goners. After all, what guy would lift himself off the couch in the middle of an afternoon to drive somewhere just so he could take a pill. (And if he did, what in the world do you tip for a meal like that?)

Of course, if it turned out that Medicare covered the pills that would be a different story.

Another problem modern science will force us to face is cloning. I shudder to think what the bipartisan rancor in Congress would be like if the movement for human cloning gathered some steam. If Democrats tried to clone, say, Tom Daschle, who could fault the Republicans for countering with a carbon copy of Rush Limbaugh. And the political shenanigans could go even further than that.

It might well be that the zealots of the Green Party would attempt to clone their champion, Ralph Nader, a couple of dozen times. Although a good number of Republicans might support this idea, too, it would never get past the Supreme Court, where, many legal experts feel, a majority of the justices would be inclined to protect the Constitutional rights of Pat Buchanan against such a shameless piece of flimflam.

And immigration would pose some weighty issues - a conundrum, you might say. Take Canada; everyone knows that Canada Geese and Canadians follow the same migratory patterns. In winter they all end up in South Florida (where I live), which is fine - we natives really love them. (Some of my best friends are Canadians.) But with cloning, Canadians become a conundrum. Let's say a Canadian from Winnipeg clones himself at Miami's Health Care South during the winter. Is the clone an American citizen? Would the clone be entitled to the Bush tax rebate? You could see that in this instance, conundrum is a mild word.