JOSHUA LEDERBERG 
tradition. The troubled history of Utopian education warns us 
to take care in rebuilding human personality on infirm philo- 
sophy. 
In our enquiry on man’s future, the aims of human existence 
are inseparable from the power and responsibility for human 
nature. As biological technology dissolves the barriers around 
individual man and intrudes on his secret, germinal continuity, 
we must face the issue of a definition of man, taking full account 
of his psychosocial progeny. We now recognize genetic con- 
tinuity in mechanistic terms as a nucleotide sequence—in due 
course this will itself be subordinate to the psychosocial machi- 
nery. (Our global experiments on human mutagenesis by 
chemicals and by artificial radioactivity are the crude, random 
initiatives.) What will then qualify ““man”’ for the aspirations 
of humanistic fulfilment, apart from the other robots born of 
human thought? 
COMMUNICATION: OTHER WORLDS AND OUR OWN 
In illuminating the chemical mechanism of terrestrial life, 
molecular biology has completed Darwin’s effort at a general 
theory. This coincides neatly with the technical realization of 
space flight and of radio astronomy. The challenge of planetary 
exploration has made us think more deeply about the general 
principles of earthly life. The prime questions of exobiology, 
life beyond the earth, concern molecular biology. Do the 
Martian organisms use DNA and amino acids as we do, or are 
there other solutions to the basic problem of the architecture of 
evolution ? 
How seriously the radio astronomers take the prospects of 
interstellar communication is hard to fathom. At any rate, there 
is nothing in biology to discourage the hypothesis of multifocal 
intelligence in the universe. We have not really thought very 
much about the problem of finding the rapport needed to estab- 
lish the first contact. It is many times more costly to transmit 
than to listen, which can lead to a perplexing stalemate in 
these cosmic negotiations. Hopefully, this technological issue 
will ripen into a more sophisticated theory of communication 
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