KNOWING WHAT YOU KNOW (C)1997 Alan M. Schwartz Biology was a vast collection of disjointed observations until DNA technology - molecular biology; protein and nucleic acid sequencing; polymerase chain reaction, site directed mutagenesis; plasmids and other genome insertion vectors; cloning - upgraded the discipline into a rational engineering endeavor. We can now build an organism to specification and, pending atrophy of 18th century morality and its supplantation by probity befitting our abilities, conceive more interesting humans. Before we go playing Mr. Potato Head with our genome we might pause for a cultural moment and apply what we already know to problems which perpetually nip at our heels. We are the first generation whose children are properly nourished (protein, calories, essential and micronutrients). Six-foot males and puberty at age 12 are commonplace. Our farms are massively productive through mechanization and chemical intervention. These are echoes of an industrial culture edging toward biological synthesis (Monsanto's cotton excreting Bacillus thuringiensis insect toxin) and digital micromanagement. Environmentalism is ethic and dialectic directly opposed to progress in its every form. Luddites are storming labs and computer centers. End freon and safe refrigeration! End internal combustion and facile transportation! End animal husbandry, eat beans instead! End plastics, detergents, fishing, industrial manufacture, semiconductors, petrochemistry, and pesticides! We can all live in huts, collect Welfare twice monthly, and compost our feces in a giddy revelry only matched by Gaian garden spots like North Korea, Cuba, Eritrea during the dry season, Bangladesh during monsoons, and Hutus and Tutsies whenever they get within machete range of each other. Soil harbors nasty organisms and weeds which adversely impact agriculture in Iowa or Kenya. Farm soil is routinely fumigated and dosed with herbicides to control unwanted entities. The exercise is frustrated by the ability of buried weed seeds to survive 20-50 years and still germinate under propitious circumstances. What sets them off? Ethylene vigorously triggers germination is most temperate climate seeds. Nitric oxide provokes sprouting in the seeds of prairie grasses and plants, a curious adaptation to site clearance and nutrient release by wildfires. Herbicides would be tremendously more effective if they were accompanied by chemistry to awaken dormant seeds that the nascent plantlets could be whacked. Do we know what we know? We pursue ever more complex and lethal agricultural chemistry. Might it make more sense to address the problem where it is eggshell thin rather than armor plated? Environmentalist hopes will be dashed. Civilization will march forward, seize larger profits, spread affluence, and safely party all the while, laughing. Why don't we do it? Whoa! What about the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency... Excuse me for safely, effectively, and economically boosting farm output. We will pursue a less adventurous and threatening venue. Have you ever tried to get a teaspoon of cold medicine down a kid's throat? Judging from the mercantile volume of the stuff hawked through the Media and stacked in supermarkets, a lot of adults spend a lot of money for the privilege of splattering the sticky colored fluids hither, thither, and yon while aiming for a juvenile mouth puckered into a moue of recalcitrant snit. Imagine the same stuff reworked into a rational delivery vehicle like Cool Whip, chocolate mousse, mayonnaise, pudding, yogurt, or cold cream. Pseudoplasticity, thixotropy; dilatantism and rheopexy - the properties of viscosity changing with shear - are not rocket science. They are stock and trade of the French Chef and house paint. A sick kid should not be confronted with a teaspoon delicately balanced to hold five milliliters of runny liquid. The noisome brat should be pinned at the working end of a medicinal caulking gun calibrated to deliver a single dose of jelled elixir through a tapered nozzle from a disposable cartridge. Is that so hard to imagine? It would also prevent overdosage of adults too stupid to keep track of their progressive intake. It would also allow calibration of dose vs body weight, which is the way medication should be dispensed. One wonders what fragile and endangered ecological niches would be threatened and what noisome inhabitants therein be forever (thankfully) rendered extinct were rational weed management to intrude upon agriculture. One quivers with apprehension lest the administration of patent and prescription medicines to children and disabled (pick your "challengements") adults be refined into an effective art. Do we know what we know? Sure we do! If we were to fully exploit our abilities it would be nothing less than the Devil, Lucifer himself, walking abroad. Fiat lux.