In science, the gap between prophecy and fact has narrowed amazingly. The most remote-seeming theories are speedily turned into fact, at least in the lab. Hence the future often seems to arrive with the morning mail—and now, with a flick of the TV dial. A late-season sleeper called The 21st Century, narrated by Walter Cronkite (CBS, Sundays) is bringing forth little weekly chunks of the future as it exists today.
On this week's program, for example, Co-Producers Burton Benjamin and Isaac Kleinerman, both nine-year veterans of CBS's distinguished series, The 20th Century, set out to make some documentary sense of the maze of recent discoveries in genetics. An explanation of man's increasing control over the mechanics of reproduction is backed up by films of parthenogenetic frogs swimming in a tank. They are identical to their mother, and so might they be, having been made in a laboratory without benefit of father.
When Geneticist James Bonner appears on-screen to speculate about a test-tube superman race between the nations of the world a century from now, the uneasy viewer may feel that he is in the tank with those frogs. A man will "not "brazenly go out and propagate himself," Bonner predicts coolly, but will contribute sperm cells to a central bank, his heirs to be manufactured after his death if a committee decides that he has been a desirable and useful figure in society. On this forecast, echoing the ancient complaint against Plato's "Guardians," English Professor Ritchie Calder comments:
"Who is going to determine all this? Who are the wise men?"
If 21st Century doesn't always startle its audience to this extent, it invariably manages to give it pause. In earlier programs, it photographed an operable mechanical grasshopper that man will use on the moon, and an esoteric airtight container that will extract water from moon rock by heating it to 300° C. Sometimes the producers are lucky enough to be on hand for a rare event, as in a soon-to-be-shown film of a kidney transplant at Cleveland Clinic.
Producers Benjamin and Kleinerman first envisioned the program as a limited project of perhaps six specials, but found after four months of research that they had material enough for a full series. Now scheduled for at least 16 segments, the program will explore oceanography, the megalopolis, transportation, housing, computers, demography, education and leisure.