IN THE LAST HALF-CENTURY, HISTORY HAS TAUGHT SOME POWERFUL LESSONS about the need to look before leaping into untested and potentially hazardous technologies. All too often we have addressed such issues only after the fact. With internal-combustion automobiles and coal-fired power plants, for example, we learned quite belatedly to address the pollution they had long been creating. And we made extensive use of pesticides such as DDT until the naturalist Rachel Carson warned of their harmful effects.

Such warnings are indispensable, but if exaggerated, they can stifle valuable research and keep beneficial innovations from reaching those who need them. As in so many areas of life, relative costs and benefits always need to be balanced in deciding how to regulate a new technology. A classic example of this give-and-take occurred irr the 1970s, as molecukirjpiologists learned to work with the processes that form the very basis of life.

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