The last time I studied biology, it was 1969. The war in Vietnam was raging, Nixon had just entered the White House, and the Washington Senators baseball club was doing unusually well. My high school textbook reported that the DNA molecule, which had been discovered just 16 years before, had exciting new possibilities in cell research.

When I edited this month’s cover stories, I was amazed at how much I don’t know about the life sciences and how much biology has advanced. Not only is human cloning a very real possibility, stem cells, rather than complex chemical drugs, could have enormous success in eradicating such diseases as Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

True, there is a debate about the ethics of how stem cells are developed and what could be the eventual result. But if history is a teacher, every major leap forward in science is bound to carry with it considerable philosophical reassessments of its potential impact. As always, the spirit and politics of the times tends to carry the day. Copernicus faced a lot of opposition with his ideas about the earth and the sun. Thoughtful people did question the morality of nuclear weapons when they were on the verge of being invented in the 1940s. But the politics of the day were caught up in one overweening goal: defeating the fascism of Nazi Germany and Japan. The development of the A-bomb became a race. At least the debate over stem cells isn’t happening in an atmosphere of such rampant urgency. That’s a good thing, if not a downright luxury.

In any event, we are presenting our reports on Virginia’s significant and new role in biotechnology in a somewhat modified format. Last year, we introduced our Click section, which concentrated on how the Internet was changing the way companies do business. Even though we consider Click an editorial and advertising success, we are broadening it to reflect technology other than just the Internet. There’s plenty of it in the Old Dominion, from aerospace to bioinformatics, especially in the fields of applied technology. While we have noted Northern Virginia’s boom in telecommunications and information technology areas, we know there’s more out there than just those fields. But we aren’t abandoning electronic commerce. We recognize that the impact of the Internet is just being felt, and that it will still make big changes in our economy. By expanding Click, however, we are admitting that when it comes to the Net, the bloom is off the rose. The Net needs more reporting and less cheerleading.

Nor should we become such technophiles that we refuse to recognize tech’s failings. Take Virginia Business. In last month’s Minding Your Business section, we printed a map listing the state’s new area codes. We thought we were making the right corrections to the right electronic file of a map showing them. Somehow, our computer system sent the wrong file to our printer, Cadmus Mack, so we ended up dropping the 540 area code and didn’t catch the mistake later.

Virginia is now in the forefront of biotech and stem cell research. We hope you find our reports useful.