Has Boyle’s Wish List been fully realized?

What Boyle actually meant by some of the items on his Wish List is not always clear, such as “Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing,” but here is an item-by-item accounting, assessing each in turn as having been achieved or not, with explanatory comments where appropriate.

The result: twenty items accomplished and four not yet. But all four not-yets are just variations on the same theme: making human beings physically more capable than nature created them. Now that we are on the brink of the era of genetic programming, it is reasonable to assume that these four will be achieved sometime in the near future, perhaps within a generation, thus completing a list that must have seemed to Boyle to be a wild dream, but most of whose items are so commonplace to us now that we don’t even think of them.

Photo: Portrait of The Honourable Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), Irish natural philosopher. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.