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I have come to believe that the repro-biotech revolution poses anew some very old questions: But who do you say that I am? And who is my neighbor? When was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?

General Electric's longtime motto—"Progress is our most important product"—might have served as the American credo for the 20th century. "Is your baby enjoying The Results of Progress in infant feeding?" asked an advertising letter to modern-minded mothers of 1933, signed by Dan Gerber. The letter continued, "When you are confused about anything you do not understand, you ask someone who knows. Why not do this in the vitally important matter of food for your baby?" The advertisement announced that it was also the cover page for a brochure entitled "Progress in Infant Feeding," handed out "to thousands of visitors" at Gerber's Exhibit in the Hall of Science at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. The theme of the Exposition was "Science Discovers, Genius Invents, Industry Applies, and Man Adapts."

Two decades later, during the postwar period, the geniuses of industrial invention focused their attention on the women of a newly burgeoning middle class. Ladies' Home Journal became "The Magazine Women Believe In" (the LHJ motto), and the cumulative question posed by way of advertisement after advertisement was: "Is your baby enjoying the results of progress?" DuPont indeed promised Ladies' Home Journal readers in March of 1955 "Better Things For Better Living … Through Chemistry," the better living embodied in a photograph of three smiling children in their Easter best standing in front of mom, who is wearing pearls and playing the piano. The sterile, uniformly blue backdrop reflects the carefully controlled antics of the childhood models. The "better living" featured in such images involved a particular configuration of "better." As summarized in an Ivory Snow advertisement (Parents' Magazine, 1958) women were to expect purity, safety, and efficiency. Through their buying power, they were to help to ensure these things for their family.

Themes of domestic security were enormously potent in the Fifties. Consider the marketing of nuclear power during that decade. The same year that DuPont Nylon was running its "Better Living" ads in LHJ, President Eisenhower's special assistant on disarmament promoted "Atoms for Peace" to LHJ readers:

Imagine a world in which there is no disease … where hunger is unknown … where food never rots and crops never spoil … Where "dirt" is an old-fashioned word, and routine household tasks are just a matter of pressing a few buttons … a world where no one ever stokes a furnace or curses the smog, where the air everywhere is as fresh as on a mountaintop and the breeze from a factory as sweet as from a rose … Imagine the world of the future … the world that nuclear energy can create for all of us …
—"Atoms for Peace," Ladies Home Journal, August, 1955.

The "Atomic Age" was to provide limitless sources of power, fueling shiny new refrigerators and other gadgets to perform routine household tasks in a jiffy. To naysayers, the author offered an ultimatum. Those American citizens who retained a sense of wariness about the technologically enhanced future needed to "try living in a primitive society without doctors, sewers, medicines and machinery of any but the most basic sort for about six weeks—and then see if they can still work up an argument against it."

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