The survival of human civilizations has depended on the ability of society to continuously discover and develop new sources of food. No animal, other than the rat, consumes as broad a variety of foods as the human. Humans surpass the rat because they have the ability to add further to their food resources by manipulation of the environment and modification of potential food sources.
The last half of the 20th century saw an almost logarithmic acceleration in the pace of modern biology and its appl…