Southern Illinois University Medical School rises out of the cornfields that surround the state capital of Springfield, three hours south of Chicago.  Prairie dogs, field mice, and other animals scurry around the rolling acres of the countryside.  In a lab in a nondescript building on the campus, a thin, balding, smiling man named Andrzej Bartke has been investigating the causes of human aging.  His goal is to learn to delay the onset of heart disease, cancer, frailty, and other problems that come with aging - to increase the human health span, as he calls it. 

Bartke holds two mice in his cupped hands.  One, a close cousin of the mice that scamper outside, is of a breed that live for two and a half years on average before succumbing to told age.  The other mouse has been genetically engineered to live longer. The oldest of its kind died just a week short of its fifth birthday, twice as long as a genetically normal mouse, as if a human had lived to the age of 200. The difference between the breeds is just a change to a single gene, a gene that exists in everything from yeast to mice to men and women.  In seeking to cure disease, Bartke and his colleagues have opened the possibility for something more – a lengthening of the human lifespan to superhuman levels. 

The same basic story has repeated itself dozens of times in the past decade.  Researchers looking for ways to heal the sick or injured or preserve the health of the elderly have stumbled on techniques that might enhance human abilities.  At Princeton University researchers looking for ways to stave off Alzheimer’s disease have created mice who can learn things more than twice as fast as their genetically normal peers.  Their research is pointing to techniques that could improve human learning as well. 

In a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers trying to find a cure for muscular dystrophy have produced mice that are super strong.  They can climb things and lift things that their normal siblings can’t.  At some point in their lives, each has been injected with extra copies of a gene for building muscle.  The same gene plays a role in human muscle building.    

At Duke University, scientists looking for ways to help amputees and paralytics have implanted a group of monkeys with electrodes in their brains.  The monkeys can move mechanical arms just by thinking about it, as if those robots were parts of their bodies. 

In Lisbon, Portugal, there’s a group of blind men and women who can now see.  In place of eyeglasses they wear cameras connected to electrodes implanted in the visual parts of their brains.  Some of them were blind for twenty years or more before the surgery.  The same research that gives them sight could beam images from one person’s mind into another. 

The scientists conducting these studies have a common goal – to heal sick and injured men and women.  Along the way, they’re discovering a common fact.  To heal our minds and bodies we must understand them.  And in understanding we gain the power to improve.  That power could give us better learning and memory, better muscles, longer lives, and much more.  By unraveling how our minds and bodies function, biotechnology could give us the power to sculpt any aspect of ourselves – how we think, how we feel, how we look, how we communicate with one another. 

Not everyone is convinced that this power to alter ourselves is a benefit to society.  There are those who oppose too much tinkering with the human mind and body.   These concerns have been voiced across the political spectrum.  In 2000, President George W. Bush created the President’s Council on Bioethics to advise him on issues of biotechnology.  To head the council, he appointed Leon Kass, a conservative University of Chicago professor with a twenty-five year history of opposing infertility treatments, cosmetic surgery, organ transplantation, and other technologies that, in his view, violate the natural order of things.   Under Kass’s direction, the council has released report after report condemning the use of new bioetechnologies to alter the human mind or body.

The council’s 2004 report, Beyond Therapy, argues that genetic and reproductive technologies undermine the value of life and disrupt the natural relationship between parents and children; That slowing human aging would stagnate society as the old cling stubbornly to power; That instant performance enhancers would reduce human drive and hard work; That technologies for sculpting the human mind would threaten our sense of identity; That enhancement techniques might widen the gap between rich and poor; That the safety of these techniques can not be assured; and that they could be used by the powerful to coerce or control the weak. 

Ultimately the council argues that we ought to revere our given, natural state, that to seek to improve on what we have is hubris, and that biotechnological alteration of our minds and bodies threatens our unique human dignity.

In his book Our Posthuman Future, bio-ethics council member Francis Fukuyama echoes this sentiment.  “There are good prudential reasons to defer to the natural order of things and not to think that human beings can easily improve on it.” 

Given these concerns, how should society react?  Fukuyama believes that “There are certain things that should be banned outright.  One of them is reproductive cloning… If we get used to cloning in the near term, it will be much harder to oppose germ-line [genetic] engineering for enhancement purposes in the future.”

In fact, Fukuyama would like to restrict more than just genetic technologies.  Elsewhere in his book he argues that the governments need to “draw red lines” around technologies in general, “to distinguish between therapy and enhancement, directing research toward the former while putting restrictions on the latter.”  

Along those lines liberal philosopher and bioethicists George Annas has called genetic engineering a “crime against humanity” and argued for a UN treaty prohibiting it.  William Kristol, publisher and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, sees things similarly.  “A ban on cloning would only be a first step down the road of responsibility and self-government – but it would be an important step.” 

Environmentalist Bill McKibben goes farther, calling for a halt on even the basic scientific research that might enhance human abilities.  In his book Enough, he writes “We need to do an unlikely thing: we need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good.  Good enough. [….] Enough intelligence.  Enough capability.  Enough.”

In short, a chorus of voices now argue that we should strive to preserve the status quo, that we should opt for stability over change, for the known over the unknown.  To do this, as Fukuyama says, “We should use the power of the state” to restrict access to technologies that might undermine our current notions of humanity, that might allow individuals to surpass the mental and physical limitations we now know. 

This book is based on a very different premise – that rather than fearing change, we ought to embrace it, that rather than prohibiting these technologies, society ought to focus on spreading the power to alter our own minds and bodies to as many people as possible; that rather than imposing a rigid view of what it means to be human on humanity, we ought to trust billions of individuals and families to make that decision for themselves.   In making that case, I’m going to show you four things. 

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