ABSTRACT
The codeword for criticism of science and scientists is hubris. Hubris is responsible, it is said, for the whole biologic revolution. It is hubris that has given us the prospects of behavior control, psychosurgery, fetal research, heart transplants, the cloning of prominent politicians from bits of their own eminent tissue, iatrogenic disease, overpopulation and recombinant DNA. The biomedical sciences are caught up with physical science and technology in the same kind of critical judgment, with the same pejorative word. To be charged with hubris is therefore an extremely serious matter which is what many of us engaged in science tend to do. It is hard to predict how science is going to turn out, and if it is really good science it is impossible to predict. Since then the word hybrid has assumed more respectable meanings in biology, and also in literary and political usage.
