Heheh... After read that thread last night, I stayed up and read "The Island of Dr. Moreau" in whole. The funny thing is this scene where Moreau explains how people reacted to his early experiments in London... pretty much forcing him away to this lone island. It always amazes me how stuff from two centuries ago (well, technically, as 1896 was the publication date) can still be so relevant. I wouldn't declare the end of "Big Science" just yet... Orwell implied the same thing 110 years ago, and Mary Shelly before that, yet we've all seen the wonders of science since then. As much as we oft like to think we're at the end of an era, or the dawning of a new age, truly very little changes in human behavior. Scientists on the cutting edge tend to get burned at stakes (or whatever the contemporary equivalent is for their era.) And every era likes to think that it is suddenly more sinful or worse than earlier generations. One of my favorite quotes, "The children of today are lazy, without respect for their elders, and lacking God" was supposedly found engraved on a Sumerian tablet.
