'I 've never seen a purple cow/I never hope to see one/But I can tell you anyhow/I'd rather see than be one," wrote the American humorist Gelett Burgess more than 100 years ago. Burgess is a man whose views we ought to pay more attention to. After all, he also supposedly invented the "blurb," by writing effusive jacket copy for a beautiful young lady named Miss Belinda Blurb, way back in 1907. How many people can claim to have wielded such varied and far-reaching cultural influence?
But it is for his quatrain about the purple cow that Burgess is best remembered today. Why? Because it articulates with unmatched succinctness one side of a perennial philosophical debate -- a debate that is only growing more heated as the age of biotechnology revs up.
Burgess put his finger on the nub of the matter. There's purpleness, and there's cowness, and the two do not, should not and, as far he was concerned, never would cohabit. Versions of this opinion have been around since the year zero, some harmful (like laws against so-called interracial unions) and some not (like preferring one's vegetables served in separate little dishes rather than all mixed up together in a stew).