My knowledge (and, admittedly, my interest) about this subject is limited--I'm not really a science kind of girl. I do know that when I first saw the movie "Frankenstein" as a kid, the thought of science gone awry scared the crap out of me. That feeling was reinforced when I read about the fictional breeding farms in "Brave New World", which was on the required reading list in high school, and then learned in history class about the reality of Hitler's "master race" experimentations during World War II.
We once passed over White Sands, New Mexico in an airplane while on a family trip, and our pilot described the sand turning into glass during the explosion of the first atomic test bomb. I don't remember anything else he told us, but I recall being awestruck by that fact. My uncle and my dad worked as an electrician and an apprentice electrician respectively at Los Alamos prior to World War II. The location of the lab was such a highly kept secret that a nondescript storefront in Santa Fe served as the official gateway to the secret city of Los Alamos. I just finished reading the book 109 East Palace, which tells the undercover tale of Los Alamos. My uncle told a story of once standing atop a desk to fix a ceiling light in an office, and looking down to see top-secret blueprints accidentally left out on the desk. His heart skipped several beats as he realized the gravity of the situation he was unknowingly thrust into. My uncle and my dad joined the Navy and Army during World War II, but were never sent overseas since they had worked at Los Alamos and it was feared that they might "know too much" and spill secrets under situations of duress.
I also recall the seeing the leftover bomb shelters during my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. There was one close to where we lived in Farmington. When I asked my parents about it and they explained its purpose, I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach thinking about a scary, unknown, Twilight-Zone world where such a disaster could happen.
The first test tube baby was born after I graduated from college, and I know there were many people who considered this a foreboding prelude to eventual genetic engineering and cloning. They saw it as science interfering with nature and doctors "playing God." But today, after many years of using in vitro fertlilization in medicine, much of the controversy has died down and most people do realize more benefits coming from this practice than harm. Now there are similar fears regarding embryonic stem cell research--a subject I know next to nothing about, except for the fact that it caused a lot of raised eyebrows at the Baptist university where I work when one of my student assistants did her senior paper on the topic! Despite my lack of knowledge, I'm well aware that science has many amazing benefits but when it's left untempered by discretion and humanity, science can also lead us down a controversial and ultimately terrifying path to violence and destruction.
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