Dialogue: So what? we say, and go back to feeding our faces

Of all the tools that have been granted to us, our ability to absorb change is the most extraordinary.

Early last century, not far from Paris, one of Europe's first aeroplanes landed unexpectedly at lunchtime in a field next to a country restaurant. The lunch diners dropped their knives and forks, abandoned their sauteed snails and ran out into the field to gaze in wonder at this supreme achievement of science and engineering.

After gazing in wonder for a full five minutes, they went back inside and finished their lunch.

In an instant their world had been spectacularly and irreversibly changed. But almost as quickly, they had processed that change, accepted it and realised, an instant later, that their lunch was getting cold.

In his book about the Apollo programme, A Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer recalled a friend who was in some war-ravaged province of Biafra when news spread that the American, Neil Armstrong, was walking on the moon. Suddenly the fighting ceased and silence fell on the war zone. Government troops and rebels laid down their weapons, lifted their eyes to the heavens and contemplated their existence.

But the pause was short. Within the hour the antagonists had regained their senses and resumed lobbing grenades at each other.

Thus do the priorities of the present overwhelm humanity's most extraordinary achievements.

In our lives of endless bustle, we are experiencing more and more change. We have less time to contemplate the changes that shake our lives and we cope with this by accepting change ever more readily.

So it is not surprising that last month one of the most remarkable events in human history occurred almost without remark.

American scientists at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Centre introduced the media to the world's first genetically engineered primate, a rhesus monkey named Andi. Andi is almost a regular rhesus monkey, except that he has jellyfish genes inserted in his DNA.

This doesn't mean that he will wash up on the beach if he goes swimming - after all, more than half of our genetic material is common to the rhesus monkey and the jellyfish - but it does mean that when he grows up, Andi will glow in the dark.

You may wonder why scientists have gone to the trouble of making a monkey glow in the dark when they might have achieved the same result by letting him sift through the rubble of Nato airstrikes in Kosovo, but that's as may be. The scientists have made Andi glow in the dark to prove a point.

Andi joins a long list of genetically engineered animals - Dolly the cloned sheep, Casey the genetically modified cow, and Britney the superchicken designed to lay eggs full of cancer-killing proteins.

But Andi is not a farmyard animal. Andi is a primate, that group (or order) of mammals which includes chimpanzees, gorillas and tax accountants. By glowing in the dark, Andi tells us that our scientists are a hair's breadth away from genetically modifying a human.

There might be nothing wrong with this. I, for one, am all in favour of manipulating human DNA if it means that we can isolate the genes that cause people to become bank managers or to drive at 70 km/h on public holiday weekends.

But what is wrong is that such extraordinary scientific advances have become so commonplace that we hardly even notice them. In any other age, the creation of Andi would have been heralded as a monumental advance in human achievement.

But when our scientists are discovering planets around distant suns, carving words on to individual carbon molecules, smashing subatomic particles together at speeds approaching 660 million miles an hour, and building a space station in orbit the size of a rugby field, the birth of Andi seems a bit ho-hum. That is sad.

We have become so conditioned to large and ongoing change that we have lost the ability to think about what such changes mean to us.

Once upon a time scientific achievements were understood and shared by educated people in the street. Today, science has become so specialised, so advanced and so removed from the everyday world that most people have given up trying to follow it.

As we have seen with our own Royal Commission on Genetic Modification, scientists need to work harder to tell the public about the brave new world they are building.

And for our part, we should make the effort once in a while to step out of our everyday lives and take stock of the extraordinary changes that are taking place.

It might even help if, now and then and for just a few moments, we felt totally and hopelessly overwhelmed.

At least long enough for our lunch to get cold.

* Willy Trolove is an Auckland writer.