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Joseph LeConte once recalled that in the 1890s, the only electrical power on campus was generated by the engineering laboratory. Lighting consisted of a string of arc lights that frequently failed. “I remember one night when President Kellogg was given his annual reception,” he wrote. “Three lamps went out of action at critical locations, so that we in our dress suits climbed the poles and got them going while on our way to the reception.” It was an inauspicious beginning for the century-plus of engineering innovation at Berkeley that has followed. Perhaps more than any other state, California has been defined by its inventions and engineering feats: equipment to extract ore from the Sierra, dams and canals to water the Central Valley, bridges to span the Bay, ships and planes to fight World War II, and missiles to wage the Cold War. In his book, Blue Sky Dreams, David Beers wrote of the elán that in the 1960s infused the families whose homes, like his, were built in the “Valley of Heart’s Delight,’’ and whose menfolk, like his dad, spent their days in the aeronautical departments of Lockheed or FMC, but were forbidden to speak of what they did there. When Beers wrote his book, in the 1990s, the blue sky futurism he describes had long since drained from his neighborhood, only to be replaced by the even higher velocity confidence of the engineers and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, as the Valley of Heart’s Delight is now called. But what writer Paul Saffo describes in this issue as ghost dancing—a running away from our inventions rather than toward them—had begun at least 50 years earlier with the invention that, more than any other, spawned our ambivalence toward technological progress. The atom bomb was developed from discoveries in the Berkeley labs of Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer. And the Brotherhood of the Bomb, as it’s been called, eventually was itself rent over what it had created, most notably when Oppenheimer’s colleague, Edward Teller, turned against him. Our deepest fear now is that their invention will be turned against us by ghost dancing Islamicists bearing backpacks. It shocked me to learn, from the Berkeley researchers who created for the Pentagon what they’ve dubbed the “Big Bang Report,” that they believe such an attack is likely; international studies director Steve Weber gives it a 50-50 probability in the next five years. The report, revealed to the public for the first time in this magazine, struggles with the question of how to contain the damage from such an attack, particularly how to prevent the nuclear war that could annihilate us. If the unimaginable scenario imagined by the Berkeley team touches our worst anxieties, embryonic stem cell research represents, particularly for the chronically ill and their families, Californian’s great hope. But as Sally Lehrman reports, calibrating our hopes for cures with the obstacles—and real dangers—facing scientific researchers will be difficult, particularly as highly charged debates over funding priorities play themselves out in public. In making our way through these debates, California may lead the nation not only in stem cell research, but also in inventing new methods and language for reasonably evaluating the risks and benefits of our own inventions. Kerry Tremain
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