Into the Cave
"We, like Leonardo, live in a time of profound transformation. The twenty-first-century biorenaissance is as far-reaching in science, medicine, and evolution as the fifteenth-century Renaissance was in art, architecture, and culture. Leonardo's was a time of flight into the artistic and scientific unknown through observation and experimentation, flight into new worlds accessible only by long voyages over monster-laden seas, flight often forbidden by spiritual and temporal authorities. Then, as now, such flights of imagination are resisted.
It is a resistance
born of the eternal dilemma of hope and fear, the same dilemma Leonardo
faced as a young man when, after wandering in Tuscany on a hillside
after a fierce storm, he came upon the mouth of a huge cavern. As he
stood in front of it, he was seized by the question of what to do: to
explore or to retreat."
-- From the Prologue of The Stem Cell Dilemma.
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| Leonardo da Vinci. Self-portrait in red chalk, circa 1512. Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy. Leonardo's anatomical drawings liberate a vital energy stored in the artist's compositions, an energy that continues to spur the human drive to discover. |
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