The war of words and images: some of civilization's most powerful art has sprung from humanity's most anguishing crises, and the pending crisis of human genetic modification is no exception.

• Author: Halweil, Brian
• Position: The Risks of the Rush

Investment analysts are raving about a company on the verge of going public. This firm (whose name cannot yet be released) plans to help other companies improve the ability of their employees to work long hours, help employees better conform physically and mentally to their workstations, and even reduce the desire of employees to go home and spend time with their families. The firm draws its inspiration from Fredrick Taylor, a contemporary of Henry Ford, whose principles of "scientific management" helped justify the modern assembly line as a way to maximize the efficiency of the workforce.

The firm's humble slogan is "We think of things that Mother Nature never could." Interest in the company's services has intensified since the recent announcement of several other of the company's planned projects: engineering people who have irresistible cravings for certain food products, and people who are strongly attracted to the corridors of malls.

If you find this company's plans disturbing, you might draw some reassurance from the fact that the company does not yet exist, except in the minds of an anonymous collaborative of guerrilla artists who go by the name [R][TM] Ark. Several years ago, the group produced a 30-minute promotional Microsoft powerpoint presentation of their fictitious firm--complete with multi-color graphics of projected profits--as part of "Paradise Now," a collection of artists' renditions of the biotech future which first opened two years ago at Exit Art in SoHo, New York.

The [R][TM] Ark presentation left me wondering: are there any laws preventing such a company--once its product is technically viable--from going right into business? If this kind of engineering has already become routine to help farm animals conform to the harsh conditions of a feedlot (it has), why not help humans conform to their stressful 9-to-5 lives?

"Art can be seen as a social laboratory," says Eduardo Kac, a Brazilian-born artist whose work was shown in the exhibit. One installation, for example, suggested what a made-to-order baby company might look like. Another offered brochures for Gene Genies Worldwide, a company which, as the artists envisioned it, planned to harvest and collect the genes of the world's most creative individuals--the likes of physicist Stephen Hawking, architect I.M. Pei, author Michael Crichton. As I studied this piece while looking over the shoulders of an elderly couple, the husband turned to his wife and whispered in a...