Five days before astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot upon the Moon, the American president who sent him there dispatched his Vice President to go on an important mission of his own. Speaking to the American Medical Association Convention, Spiro Agnew reflected that although America was "capable of catapulting men to the Moon," the nation was also "in mortal danger of devouring its irreplaceable life-sustaining elements through simultaneous genius and foolishness."
Even as NASA under the Nixon administration had used the "blessings" of modern technology to forever change history, "the curse of modern society is man's inability to eliminate — or at least to neutralize — the adverse effects of his own creativity," Agnew said.
