The avalanche of advances in the current biotech revolution is both exciting and frightening.

As the tour coordinator for K-House, I have a keen interest in international travel. Right now, the obvious question everyone is trying to answer, including myself, is whether it’s safe to travel when there are regions still dealing with coronavirus.

Former President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel stated in 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The Russian dictator Joseph Stalin stated: “Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand – and obtain – total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens.”

In recent weeks, the world has witnessed a global phenomenon that is unprecedented in human history. National governments, businesses, churches, and local communities have responded to the COVID-19 Coronavirus epidemic with, what appears to be, a sudden and severe suspension of people’s individual liberties.

In February 2004, Woo-Suk Hwang made world headlines when he claimed to have cloned human embryos using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, and then to have derived a line of stem cells from the embryos that could be used for medical research.

While there continue to be many serious hurdles yet to be overcome, after over 60 years of research on animals such as sea urchins, frogs and mice, the cloning of commercially relevant mammals finally seems feasible.

The twentieth century has been marked by a rapid growth in knowledge, and the twenty-first will be stranger than we can possibly imagine.  The explosive advances in science and technology have already gone far beyond what even science fiction writers once thought possible.

The avalanche of advances in the current biotech revolution is both exciting and frightening. The promise of new remedies and cures in many diverse fields of medicine has given new hope to many sufferers, but is also increasingly being accompanied with forebodings by some observers. Many fear that the biotechnologists may prove to be the "Sorcerer's Apprentices" of the 21st century.

There have been some fascinating developments in the fight against disease that also portend some astonishing prophetic perspectives.

The influence of population control advocates can be seen in the Tuskegee Study, a scientific research program in which 400 syphilis-infected black men were recruited by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1932. The participants were told that they would be treated for their infections but instead had all effective medicine withheld.

Seldom a week goes by without the discovery of a gene for yet another disease. Genetic explanations are touted for everything from cancer and heart disease to more diffuse conditions like alcoholism, homosexuality, and crime.

The search to decipher DNA and the development of drugs which could address the causes of diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and heart disease is accelerating.