not guarantee longer, healthier lives any more than expensive, sophisticated, high-tech weapons guarantee world peace. The United States deploys about 14 percent of its total economy to maintain the world's most technologically advanced medical system. Yet American life expectancy at birth ranks behind that of 15 other nations, all of which spend proportionately far less on health care. The infant mortality rate in the United States is higher than in 21 other countries, and black babies are more than twice as likely to die in infancy as white babies.

The American experience should warn us not to be dazzled by the mere firepower of medical technology. The triumphs of biotechnology are saving some individuals from some diseases. They give us exciting and finely detailed molecular descriptions of what we are. But they cannot, in the end, save us from who we are.