Many people believe that science leaches meaning out of human actions, hopes, and dreams, leaving desolation and emptiness in their place. The pioneering molecular biologist Jacques Monod expressed this forlorn sentiment chillingly: Man must at last wake up out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings and his crimes.
