In 1923 the famed genetics professor J.B.S. Haldane, demonstrating a penchant for provocation and prophecy, gave a talk on the future of science, claiming that scientific research would flourish in the years to come and that he would make no prophecies rasher than those made by H.G. Wells in his works (26). One very important aspect of science, to Haldane, had been left out of Wells's imaginary due to the shifting scientific interests of different times, and that was the development of the biological sciences. Physics and chemistry, with their ‘scientific ideas [… of] flying and radiotelegraphy,’ were, by 1923, merely ‘commercial problems’ whereas, he believed, the future ‘centre of scientific interest [lay] in biology’ (26). Some of his prophecies were radical, but proved quite accurate. Haldane was the first to foresee the necessary shift in energy production, from coal and oil to wind and sunlight, and proposed hydrogen-powered machinery (30). In regard to biology, his claims were the most outrageous and garnered the strongest opposition at the time. In a science-fictional essay, supposedly to be read by an undergraduate student of Cambridge University in 2073, on the development of biology in the twentieth century, he claimed, among other things, the birth of the first test-tube baby and genetic selection (41). His account was rather optimistic, both in terms of time frame (positing 1951 as the birth date of the first child by in vitro fertilization, whereas in reality it took until 1977) and in terms of its potential to alter the species and offer ‘great possibilities in the way of the direct improvement of the individual’ (43).

What is even more interesting than his claim about the importance of biological scientific progress, genetics in particular, is his claim that the inevitable human reaction towards it is repulsion. Drawing on the Greek mythological figures of Prometheus and Daedalus, Haldane argues,