Yeah, we went to the moon and then what happened? Genetic engineering has been around since the 70's but society has largely rejected its applications. And consider the Energy sector - when was the last nuclear power plant constructed in the United States?
GMOs are a more complex subject, but as for nuclear power I tend to think that the lack of progress has caused its failure to be adopted rather than the other way around.
Look at the nuke plants we're building. They are still overgrown 1950s submarine reactors that only make use if about 3% of the useful energy in fissile fuel. The rest is "waste," and reprocessing that waste is expensive and cumbersome. They're also still vulnerable to a whole host of nasty failure modes. The probability of those failure modes has been reduced through incremental improvement, but there has been no revolutionary progress.
An analogy: It's as if we invented the piston steam engine and that's it. No turbines, no internal combustion engines, no combined cycle plants, and certainly no fuel cells or thermovolaics or photovolaics or anything like that. That's the situation with nuclear power. We're still building big versions of the Chicago Pile.
There are better designs out there, the constantly touted Thorium reactors being one, but just lower grade Uranium burning plants are another common and unused modern design.
The 20th Century was the century of the computer, the 21st will be the century of the gene sequencer.
We are surrounded by a cornucopia of time tested solutions to problems and we now have the processing power to really start to understand them.
We can now sequence in days on hardware costing less than a family care things that used to take 3 billion dollars and take a decade, to say progress has stopped is asinine in the extreme.
One of my favorite current genetic engineering programs is to turn rice from a C_3 plant into a C_4 plant.
C_4 plants have a more complicated photosynthesis system allowing them to fix CO_2 more efficiently, and since C_4 seems to have evolved relatively recent they are still rare. Only about 5% of all plants are C_4, but they fixate 30% of carbon fixated by plants!
If we could engineer rice into a C_4 plant, we'd a) get faster growing rice with more yield and b) since rice is grown all over the world, we'd with one stroke get rid of a massive amount of carbon from the atmosphere. No-one has tried to do this before (it's a bit like ripping out a car's engine you know very little about and replacing it by a more sophisticated engine you know very little about), but they're hopeful to have 'prototype' C_4 rice plants by 2016. Edit: It's being funded by the Gates foundation and several governments so it's not a pipe dream.
It's one of the most exciting and 'grand' projects in plant biotech at the moment!
