Throughout the industrial age, our society and environment has been
             completely modified by collecting and transforming massive amounts of
             inorganic materials. Numerous metals, minerals, and fossil fuels are
             mined, filtered, dug, and pumped from the earth. They are then burned,
             hammered, soldered, melted, restructured, and recombined to create the
             machines, structures, and artifacts of the modern world.
             We are now adding living human material to the inorganic matter
             being transformed in our system of production. Advances in gene
             technology have enabled us to begin the engineering and commodification
             of the over 100,000 genes of the human body as well as the genetic makeup
             of all other living things (Yount, 50). With current genetic engineering
             technology, it is becoming possible to snip, insert, recombine, rearrange,
             edit, program, and produce genetic materials in almost the same way as
             our ancestors were able to separate, collect, utilize, and exploit inorganic
             Without question, genetic engineering represents the ultimate tool in
             the manipulation of life, the ultimate technology of the human body shop
             (Kimbrell, 145). It extends humanity's reach over the forces of nature, and
             over the human body, as no other technology in history has. Scientists
             have become capable of reprogramming the genetic codes of living things
             to suit our society's social and economic needs. With this discovered
             ability to manipulate and engineer the genes of living organisms, a new
             role in the natural scheme is assumed. For the first time in history,
             scientists have the potential for becoming the co-directors of evolution.
             Though the gene revolution is only a few decades old, its beginnings
             have already taken on mythic proportions. In 1953, two young scientists,
             James Watson and Francis Crick used X rays, molecular model building,
             and the compiled research of many other scientists and dis...