9.12 Technology

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in London in 1928, and mass production during World War II made it the first widely used antibiotic, a drug that kills bacteria. Infections that had once been deadly, such as pneumonia and infected wounds, became curable. Vaccines against polio, measles and other diseases spread after the 1950s, and a worldwide vaccination campaign eradicated smallpox, declared in 1980.

Surgeons learned to transplant organs: the first successful kidney transplant took place in 1954, and the first human heart transplant in 1967. In 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson in Cambridge, using X-ray images made by Rosalind Franklin, described the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genetic information. Together with better nutrition, housing and public health, these advances raised life expectancy across Europe, which contributed to the aging populations discussed in 9.14.

The birth control pill, introduced in the early 1960s, let women reliably decide when to have children. It contributed to falling birth rates and to women's expanding education and careers (9.8). The Catholic Church's encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) reaffirmed the Church's opposition to artificial contraception, but many Catholics in Western Europe used it anyway, a sign of the Church's declining influence over private life.

Abortion became one of the most divisive issues. Many countries legalized it in the 1960s and 1970s, among them Britain (1967), France (1975) and Italy (1978), while others kept strict bans for decades; Ireland changed its constitution to allow abortion only after a 2018 referendum, and Poland tightened its already strict law in the 2020s. Supporters of legal abortion argue that women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies and that bans drive women to unsafe procedures. Opponents argue that unborn human life deserves legal protection from the start. Most communist states allowed abortion, partly for practical reasons, though Ceaușescu's Romania banned it in 1966 to push up the birth rate.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) joins egg and sperm in a laboratory and then places the embryo in the mother's uterus. Louise Brown, the world's first baby conceived this way, was born in England in 1978 after work by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe. IVF has since helped millions of couples have children, but it raised questions about what to do with unused embryos and who should have access to the treatment.

Genetic engineering, changing an organism's DNA directly, raised even bigger questions. In 1996 scientists in Scotland cloned a mammal, Dolly the sheep, from an adult cell. The international Human Genome Project finished mapping human DNA in 2003. Many European countries restricted genetically modified crops and banned human reproductive cloning, while debating research on embryonic stem cells and genetic tests on embryos.

Bioethics is the study of the moral questions raised by medicine and biology. A notable feature of these debates is that they did not line up neatly. Religious groups often opposed abortion and embryo research, but so did some secular thinkers. Some feminists welcomed reproductive technologies as giving women more choice, while others worried about the commercial use of women's bodies. Environmentalists on the left joined religious conservatives in opposing genetically modified food. Debates over euthanasia, or assisted dying, followed the same pattern; the Netherlands and Belgium legalized it under strict conditions in 2002, while most other countries did not. Recognizing these cross-cutting alliances is a good way to show complexity.