Time Essay: Science: No Longer a Sacred Cow

The technologic euphoria which began about 1600 with Francis Bacon and was continued by the 18th century philosophers of the enlightenment achieved its most extreme expression among the 20th century futurologists, who took it for granted that the year 2000 would see the dawn of a technologic Utopia.

—René Dubos, Beast or Angel?

America's euphoric awe of science began to ebb with the Pandoran gift to mankind of the atomic bomb. Yet the most extreme expression of the nation's continued reverence for science and technology—dramatized in the tendency to call products "wonders" (as in...