Synthesizing anything—that was a lot to ask for. But it wasn’t absurd. Two years before Feynman’s prediction, in 1957, the chemical company Monsanto had installed the “House of the Future,” made entirely from synthetics, at Tomorrowland in Disneyland. By that year, in the United States, synthetic rubber outsold natural rubber, plastic had displaced leather, and margarine was more common than butter. And Gregory Pincus had just begun his birth control experiments with synthetic hormones in Puerto Rico.
