Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Meanwhile, ironists and fatalists draw austere satisfaction from the fire-or-ice scenario, which reflects the quintessential human perception that nobody gets out of life alive. And that's just what makes me suspicious of it. The great lesson of scientific cosmology is that the universe does not usually conform to our time-honored ways of thinking--that to understand it, we need to think in new ways. Integral to modern cosmology are mind-bending 20th century concepts like Einstein's curved space, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the realization that exotic subatomic particles sail through our bodies...
...species that prides itself on its athletic prowess, human beings are a pretty poky group. Lions can sprint at up to 50 m.p.h. when they're chasing down prey. Cheetahs move even faster, flooring it to a sizzling 70 m.p.h. But most humans--with our willowy spines and awkward, upright gait--would have trouble cracking 25 m.p.h. with a tail wind, a flat track and a good pair of shoes...
Nonetheless, the human race is undeniably becoming a faster race. Since the beginning of the past century, track-and-field records have fallen in everything from sprints to miles to marathons. The performance arc is clearly rising, but no one knows how much higher it could climb. At some point, even the best-trained body simply has to up and quit. The question is, just where is that point, and is it possible for athletes, trainers and scientists to push it higher...
...bets are off, however, if genetic engineers find a way to intervene. What slows the human body down is less the architecture of its skeleton than the chemistry of its muscles. The key to speed is making muscles contract faster, and the key to that is gassing them up with as much oxygen as possible. "About 80% of the energy used to run a mile," explains physiologist Peter Weyand of Harvard University, "comes directly from oxygen...
Muscles process oxygen through cellular components known as the mitochondria. Human mitochondria take up only about 3% of the space in a cell. But in animals that run the fastest, mitochondria are far bigger; the mitochondria of an antelope--an animal that easily runs a 2-min. mile and does so in wispy mountain air 7,000 ft. up--are three times larger than ours. "If you could genetically engineer humans to have more mitochondria, bigger hearts and more blood vessels," says Weyand, "we might run about 40 m.p.h...