1. The quotation is a gloss of Benjamin Farrington’s on section 98 of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. See Farrington, Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science (NY: Henry Schumann, 1949): 109-110. Here is Bacon’s text: “... as in ordinary life every person’s disposition... is most drawn out when they are disturbed—so the secrets of nature betray themselves more readily when tormented by art than when left to their own course.” For Bacon, see Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum (NY: P.F. Collier and Son, 1900): 351. The last sentence in the passage from Bacon’s “The Masculine Birth of Time,” The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. III (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853): 534.
2. Jeremy Rifkin, Algeny (New York: The Viking Press, 1983), pp. 50–51.
3. Andrew Scott, The Creation of Life: Past, Future, Alien (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986): 190, 201.
4. Robert Sinsheimer, “The Prospect of Designed Genetic Change,” Engineering and Science Magazine, California Institute of Technology, April 1969. Quoted in Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (NY: Free Press, 1985): 77. Kass adds in a footnote that “Dr. Sinsheimer has since had a chance of heart, and has become one of the advocates of caution and sobriety” (p. 351).
5. “Our comitment to providing safe and abundant foods,” American Farm Bureau Federation flyer, 1990.