ABSTRACT
Technical innovations may produce not only the changes they were intended to effect but also lead to consequences which are unexpected and sometimes destructive. There is an intimate relation between technological innovation and political power. Any great advances in reproductive technology are very likely to be controlled and commandeered by the state with all kinds of unforeseeable consequences. In some respects, the new biological and medical technology resembles a situation which obtained with the appearance of nuclear weapons on the stage of history. The powers that possess nuclear weapons have been able to preserve peace, paradoxically enough, by threatening to use them, and yet not daring to use them. It is a strange paradox, new in the history of warfare and of international conflicts. It is referred to appropriately enough by the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In the same way it may not dare to use the power that biotechnology may place in our hands in the future.
