Medicine & the Body

“Viewed within a multiparadigmatic framework, cognitive psychology may be the most likely of the existing schools to move psychology to the Kuhnian stage of normal science. However, the apparent emergence of the neuroscientific school allows us to question how long the cognitive school will remain dominant, and it is possible that within the next decade the two schools will directly compete for transcendence.”

“Time: The year is 2010. There are significant technical advances, but the clothes and habits of ordinary people in the 'Donor' World are no different to those of Third World citizens today.”

“In the early history of our planet, when enormous amounts of organic molecules were being produced by sunlight in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, very simple, nonparasitic organisms had a fighting chance. The first living things may have been something like free-living viroids, only a few hundred nucleotides long. Experimental work on making such creatures from scratch may begin by the end of the century. There is still much to be understood about the origin of life, including the origin of the genetic code. But we have been performing such experiments for only some thirty years. Nature has had a four-billion-year head start. All in all, we have not done badly.”