Presidents And Computer Whizzes Blaze Trails To True Grief

So, the year is fairly well along and you’re behind schedule already, with many of the important matters in your life somewhat confused.

Take heart. You are not alone.

Consider two very important, if not critical, issues facing our society in the immediate future - the moral dilemma of cloning and the mixup that experts fear will occur when 1999 changes to 2000.

Cloning is the creation of a twin - or clone - from the DNA of one parent only. The story gained heightened exposure last year when British scientists cloned a sheep.

Suddenly, cloning hit the print and airwaves as a cloudy moral issue - intervention with God’s will, man meddling with forces he can’t control, science run amok - as the possibility loomed that scientists may someday be able to produce a human baby from just a few bits of DNA.

Even President Clinton weighed in with the authority of his office, calling for an end to experiments that could produce such a dreaded result.

The matter of cloning, however, did not simply spring full blown into the nation’s consciousness. Ira Levin’s novel, “The Boys From Brazil,” dealt with fictional secret Nazi experiments that resulted in exact copies of Adolf Hitler - and it was published in 1977.

Cloning has been with us a long time and research involving it has been going on since at least the 1970s. Much of the theoretical work goes back farther.

You would have thought that somehow, as we groped our way from duplicating single cells in jars to duplicating an entire barnyard animal, someone would have noticed that the only logical direction for such research was toward the grim conclusion we are so hysterical about now.

The time to have done our moral debating about cloning, it seems to me, was 20 years ago, when the research and technology were in their earliest stages. Cutting the funding then in moral outrage would have accomplished its purpose. Now, it is much, much too late to put the genie back into the bottle.

If the thinkers who run our public policy can’t reason any better from cause to effect than that, why should we worry about our own lives not being everything we thought we were planning for?

The number shift after 1999 is another example of not just poor planning but of lack of simple imagination and follow-through.

Early computer programmers, trying to conserve precious program space, decided to allot only two spaces for year codes, instead of four, so that 1973 was simply 73, and so on. With Year 2000 staring us now squarely in the face, the false economy of saving those two spaces appears as a dreadful specter.

You see, many computers, including those used in government databases, hospitals and financial institutions, won’t be able to tell if 00 refers to 1900 or 2000. Some systems might think a newborn infant in 2000 is 100 years old or that your certificate of deposit is owed a century’s worth of interest.

The solution to this dilemma may cost many millions of dollars and you can be sure money will be spent more wildly as the clock ticks ever closer to Dec. 31, 1999.

Joel C. Williamson, director of information resources management for the Government Accounting Office, has written that “At 12:01 on New Year’s morning of the year 2000, many computer systems worldwide could malfunction or produce incorrect information simply because the date has changed.”

IRS tax systems, he says, could be unable to process returns. Payments to disabled veterans could be severely delayed. The Social Security Administration’s disability insurance could experience major disruptions. Federal systems that track student loans could produce erroneous information on loan status.

Military spokespeople have pointed out that faulty data processing would significantly impair the Army’s ability to order, manage, sell and account for commodities such as ammunition, communications, and electronics.

The cost to complete just the Army’s correction is estimated at more than $12 million - and funding was only approved last year.

Didn’t programmers, no matter how urgent their need to conserve code space, realize that, eventually, the familiar 19 would have to change to 20?

That this problem didn’t surface until the last few years of the century is a result of short-term, myopic thinking, which should do nothing so much as ease the pain of those of us who don’t look very far down our own roads.

Hey, if these messes are what the experts have come up with, the rest of us cannot be blamed for our own foibles and failings.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fred Glienna Contributing writer