The human genome has been mapped. Scientists heralded a brave new world, but skeptics say a genetic breakthrough could usher in a sinister era of perfect people and death to the disabled.

"The further science goes, the further the worst-case scenario goes," Steve Jenkins, a spokesman for the Church of England, told Reuters. "I'm not anti-science but there is no way that God is now out of a job."

He spoke after an international team of researchers said they had mapped 97 percent of the human genome--the genetic makeup of the human body.

Carried out in 16 centers around the globe, the researchers have effectively whittled down the human body to a complex string of letters that should revolutionize the way doctors see the body and treat its shortfalls.

While the scientists emphasized their so-called "book of life" was just the beginning of a long road ahead, doubters said it would benefit few and could turn out to be a giant step back to the sort of eugenics practiced in Nazi Germany.

"Mapping the human genome is a great human achievement," Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, said. "Like climbing Mount Everest, it will benefit few people, leaving most untouched. But unlike climbing Mount Everest, it has the potential to damage large numbers of people." Designer babies could be created, flawed fetuses killed. The stigma of being anything less than perfect could soar.

The completion of the so-called human map offers benefits and nightmares in almost equal proportions. Once unleashed, powerful technologies are tough to contain or control. There was lots of megahype chatter about curing cancer, heart disease and aging, but this is now officially Frankenstein time, the era of the "perfect baby" and human quality control. Unfortunately for the world, it's hard to imagine a more poorly equipped society to deal with the Human Genome Project than the U.S.

Responding to the announcement that the Human Genome Project was complete, President Clinton gushed that, "Today we are learning the language in which God created life."

Maybe. Or maybe we are just trying to steal His job.

When last seen, almost two hundred years ago, Dr. Frankenstein's monster was heading off into the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. If he's still around, he ought to come back. It's safe now. This is Frankenstein time.

It's hard to imagine many societies more arrogant, thoughtless or poorly equipped to deal with the fascinating, even miraculous Human Genome Project than the United States at the beginning of the 21st century.

The U.S., the world capital of technological hubris and arrogance as well as the center of global technological development, may be the most unfortunate repository for so much of this research. The U.S. is also the home of many of the corporations that will attempt to profit from it. In the Corporate Republic, every new bit of science and technology goes into mass-marketing, hype, and product development. That's where the human genetic map is heading, for all the chatter about dramatically improving the human condition.

There is absolutely no doubt that great benefit will come from the gene map, or that many of its creators have the best intentions. But there are also grim dangers. Unthinking technology is always dangerous technology, and few great scientific projects have ever been rushed to completion with as little public consideration as this one.

The Genome Project promises to alter and control the nature of life itself, and hardly any Americans grasp what it might do, how it might work, or what kind of changes might be brought about by its use and misuse.

Genetic research, warns medical ethicist Leon Kass, will inevitably lead to syndromes like "the perfect baby." The perfect baby, he warns, is the project not of infertility doctors, but of eugenic and genetic scientists. To achieve the requisite quality control over new human life, human conception and gestation will need to be brought fully into the bright light of the laboratory, beneath which the child-to-be can be fertilized, nourished, pruned, weeded, watched, inspected, prodded, pinched, cajoled, injected, tested, rated, graded, approved, stamped, wrapped, sealed and delivered. There is no other way to create the perfect baby.

As of this week, quality control is truly possible for humans. Parents inevitably, even understandably, will seek perfect children. On the national political or civic level, outside of rarified technological or academic elites, we haven't even begun to discuss the social, cultural and ethical consequences of eliminating certain diseases, traits, addictions and afflictions.

In a nation that has already surrendered many privacy rights to invasive new software technologies, it's reasonable to assume that the genetic characteristics of most citizens won't stay a secret for long once they're screened. As a society, we may soon be able to get rid of dissent along with cancer and heart disease.

Along with innumerable medical benefits the genetic map may also create staggering social divisions between people who can afford to use it to manipulate the birth and process and the vast majority of the world who won't have access to it for years, if ever.

Much of this genetic information and bio-technology will fall into the hands of new corporatist genetic conglomerates, who already promote conformity and homogeneity and who already wage war against individualism and diversity of expression. Just imagine what they will do with the Human Genome Project, which now gives them the tools to market health, happiness and longevity. What parts of the map will they sell, and to who, and for how much? Who will get access to this research and who won't? And more importantly, how can this information be unleashed in a society which hasn't even seriously considered these issues?

Frankenstein was right when he told his doctor-creator that it was a sin to create things one doesn't take any responsibility for. He was right then, and he's right now, and a lot more timely. The hubris described in Mary Shelley's brilliant novel published in 1818 is a hallmark characteristic of 21st century America.

For all that this research is being hailed as the greatest boon to mankind, it could just as easily become humanity's greatest nightmare.

"How dare you sport thus with life?" asks Frankenstein of his creator, who loved technology but was impatient when it came to thinking much about how he was going to use it. The monster never got an answer. Now we're all waiting.

Prince Charles's simmering anger with the direction of some modern science will blow into a philosophical storm as he argues that the only way to avoid environmental catastrophe is for humankind to rediscover an urgent "sense of the sacred."

In a lecture to be broadcast on Radio 4, he will confront scientific materialism, politicians and business leaders to argue that it is because of humanity's "inability or refusal to accept the existence of a guiding hand that nature has come to be regarded as a system that can be engineered for our own convenience and in which anything that happens can be fixed by technology and human ingenuity."

He will add: "We need to rediscover a reverence for the natural world, … to become more aware of the relationship between God, man and creation."

He asks: "If literally nothing is held sacred anymore, what is there to prevent us treating our entire world as some 'great laboratory of life' with potentially disastrous long-term consequences?"

The Prince of Wales has weighed into the debate over genetically modified foods before, but this time his attack on the scientific approach is broader and deeper. His belief that tampering with nature is an affront to God is spelled out more explicitly than in previous statements.

Peter Melchett, director of Greenpeace, said: "It's long overdue that someone pointed out how bereft and barren of humanity are those people who claim they are acting on the basis of 'sound science.' They say in effect that culture, society, values and religion don't exist."

The cloning of human embryos for medical research, which could allow scientists to create spare parts for the body, is expected to be approved by the British government after an inquiry concluded that the potential benefits outweighed the ethical problems.

A panel of experts led by Dr. Liam Donaldson, the nation’s chief medical officer, has agreed to recommend changes to the law to allow the use of cloned embryos to create tissue to treat the sick. The move will reignite debate on how far scientists should interfere with nature. The Roman Catholic Church insists that "harvesting an embryo" can never be acceptable.

Trudy Burgess stands beside an orange-and-black bus parked in downtown Invercargill, New Zealand, urging residents to think before they eat. Burgess warns passersby of a potential danger they probably faced over breakfast: food from plants that have been genetically altered. "The reality is that 60 percent of all processed foods are at risk," Burgess explains.

Burgess and other activists want to keep genetically engineered (GE) foods off the market while the government studies the health and environmental effects of taking genes from one species and inserting them into another. Throughout Europe and Asia, a growing number of scientists, elected officials, and activists have sounded the alarm over bioengineered agriculture.

Research suggests that genetic engineering of food products could create unexpected new allergens or contaminate products in unanticipated ways, resulting in threats to public health. Critics of the rapid introduction of GE crops into the food supply point to one particularly alarming incident in which dozens of people were killed and 1,500 others afflicted by an excruciatingly painful disorder scientists suspect is linked to a bacterium engineered to produce the food supplement L-tryptophan. In addition, many scientists fear that bioengineered crops could spark widespread ecological damage, creating insecticide-resistant bugs and herbicide-resistant "superweeds."

The potential impacts on human health are the ones that have stirred the most consumer protest. Instead of thoroughly responding to such concerns, critics say, the Food and Drug Administration--the agency charged with safeguarding the food supply--has bowed to the influence of major biotech corporations.

According to internal documents, the FDA ignored objections from several of its own top scientists when it ruled in 1992 that genetically engineered foods are similar to those produced by traditional plant breeding, and are hence "generally recognized as safe." Despite mounting scientific concern, the U.S. government still adheres to that policy, requiring nowhere near the intensity of testing that would apply to a food additive, such as an artificial sweetener--let alone a drug.

Today an estimated 60 percent of all processed foods--from candy bars and tortilla chips to tofu dogs and infant formula--contain at least one genetically engineered component. This year, American farmers planted an estimated 60 million acres--an area the size of the United Kingdom--with genetically engineered crops, accounting for nearly half of all soybeans and a third of all corn in the United States.

There is simply no way to predict what kinds of dangers such foods may pose, say critics of the FDA policy. The current lack of regulation "is like playing Russian roulette with public health," says Philip J. Regal, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. "If it continues along this path, some of these foods are eventually going to hurt somebody."

FRAMINGHAM, Massachusetts--On a rustic expanse of woods and fields and barns not far from here, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in blue coveralls tends a bleating, affectionate herd of goats. The rituals of rural life play out every day: Feed the goats. Milk the goats. The future, it seems, is going to look a lot like the past.

But not entirely. Just yards from the barns and the buggy trail, people in laboratory coats peer through microscopes while expensive machinery whirs. In the century of wonders now dawning, this old dairy farm is likely to be a showplace of the possibilities of technology.

Some of the goats on the farm, which is run by a company called Genzyme Transgenics Corp., have human genes in them. Others have genes not found in nature, genes produced by human artifice. In their milk, the nanny goats produce drugs. One goat is expected to make drug-laden milk worth as much as $30 million a year. Genzyme is competing with two companies to be first to bring to market a drug produced in "transgenic" animals. At all three companies, the logistics of producing drugs this way have largely been solved. What remains is to commercialize the technology, known as "pharming."

"Your drug may soon come from the farm near you," said Sandra Nusinoff Lehrman, Genzyme's president and chief executive.

Genes are instructions for making proteins, some of them useful as drugs. In the late 1970s, at the dawn of the biotechnology era, scientists stuck animal and human genes into bacteria and into hamster cells, essentially hijacking their cellular machinery to create microscopic drug factories. Today, scores of drugs are made this way, in individual cells that grow by the trillions in giant, high-tech vats called bioreactors.

But a building full of these reactors can cost $30 million and up. Such factories can be tricky to run. And some types of complex proteins cannot be made efficiently--or at all--in bioreactors.

Thus in the 1980s, people hit on the idea of sticking human genes into animals. The whole purpose of mammary glands is to produce a suspension of proteins, otherwise known as milk. Milk glands are, in effect, miniature bioreactors.