REDESIGNING HUMANS

A visionary lays out a future in which humankind is enhanced beyond our wildest dreams . . .

. . . which for some may be nightmares. Stock (Director, Program of Medicine, Technology, and Society/UCLA School of Medicine) has taken the biotechnology bit in his teeth and run with it, conjuring a race of superhumans with 150-year life spans, divested of disease susceptibility genes and equipped with gene modules conferring intelligence, physical aptitude, or aesthetic talents. Like Fukuyama (see Our Posthuman Future, p. 235), he sees the seeds of the future sown in today’s technologies of in-vitro fertilization, pre-implantation embryo genetic screening, genomics, and cloning. Unlike Fukuyama, who urges regulation and outright banning of human cloning, Stock argues that you cannot stop “the inevitable.” Banning might even backfire, enabling the rich to move to permissive venues and creating a species divide between the enhanced and the unenhanced. In fairness, Stock is no Dr. Pangloss. Of course, germinal choice technology (GCT) is unsafe today, and of course, there needs to be oversight, he acknowledges; but we need to discuss not theology, playing God, spiritual corruption, or the sanctity of the gene pool (pithy quotes from James D. Watson here), but the need for testing these technologies, appraising their risks, monitoring and overseeing research, and minimizing clinical abuse. As for the technologies themselves, Stock does very well in explaining the complex state of the science, including the use of artificial human chromosomes that can be turned on or off. The scenarios he builds are also complex. (For example, how should society respond to a deaf couple that chooses to select a deaf embryo for birth?) But Stock ignores such issues as a future world potentially exploding with graybeards, or whether clusters of genes can be isolated that dependably confer this or that talent.

A breath of fresh air to fuel the debate now raging in Congress and the White House—with more surely to come.