Prescience of Genetic Engineering

As a matter of fact it was not until 1940 that Selkovski invented the purple alga Porpbyrococcus fixator which was to have so great an effect on the world's history. . . . Porpbyrococcus is an enormously efficient nitrogen-fixer and will grow in almost any climate where there are water and traces of potash and phosphates in the soil, obtaining its nitrogen from the air. It has about the effect in four days that a crop of vetches would have had in a year. . . . The enormous fall in food prices and the ruin of purely agricultural states was of course one of the chief causes of the disastrous events of 1943 and 1944. The food glut was also greatly accentuated when in 1942 the Q strain of Porphyrococcus escaped into the sea and multiplied with enormous rapidity. When certain of the plankton organisms developed ferments capable of digesting it, the increase of the fish population of the seas was so great as to make fish the universal food that it is now. ... It was of course as the result of its invasion by Porphyrococcus that the sea assumed the intense purple colour which seems so natural to us, but which so distressed the more aesthetically minded of our great grand-parents who witnessed the change. ... I need not detail the work of Ferguson and Rahmatullah who in 1957 produced the lichen {276} which has bound the drifting sand of the world's deserts, for it was merely a continuation of that of Selkovski, nor yet the story of how the agricultural countries dealt with their unemployment by huge socialistic windpower schemes. . . .

A science fiction vision.