Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
improvement, the most common mood was one of despondency ap-
propriate to those who believe themselves to be fighting a rearguard
action.”
6
But current debates are not about preventing “race suicide” by
culling the unfit, and the mood of enthusiasts for human genetic engi-
neering is buoyant, not gloomy. These optimists celebrate the prospect
of radical improvement in human capabilities.
Today, some applaud the (ostensible) opportunity to transform human
nature, while others view the same prospect with horror. From disparate
political perspectives, a conservative member of the President's Council
on Bioethics Francis Fukuyama, the left-of-center ecologist Bill McK-
ibben, and the German philosopher and social critic Jürgen Habermas
have all recently identified this prospect as the most disturbing feature
of the new genetic technologies.
7
These critics are responding to exu-
berant predictions of a transformed humanity by biologists such as Lee
Silver and philosophers such as Gregory Stock, Gregory Pence, and Peter
Sloterdijk who believe we can and should remake ourselves.
8
Silver and
Sloterdijk, among others, even look with equanimity on a future in which
the genetically improved segment of humanity has split into a separate
species.
The hopes and the fears surrounding the potential of today's tech-
nologies to transform humanity, and the arguments both in favor of and
in opposition to their use, do have parallels in the past—but not where
we typically look. The biological transformation of humanity has been
celebrated by many thinkers; Morton notes that eugenics figured in most
utopian literature after 1870, although few of the authors went beyond
classical schemes for state involvement in choosing parents for the next
generation.
9
More ambitious, and closer in spirit to today's enthusiasts
for genetic engineering, were the scientific socialists of the 1920s and
1930s. Indeed, many current arguments in favor of remaking humanity
were expressed (with much greater wit) by the Marxist geneticist J. B. S.
Haldane. His 1923
Daedalus
, and the critiques it inspired, certainly have
more in common with the prophecies, ambitions, and concerns sur-
rounding human genetic engineering than with those implicated in
compulsory sterilization and other forms of negative eugenics.
Daedalus
introduces not just the Promethean imagery but virtually every theme—
including the prediction that reproduction in a laboratory will replace
motherhood, the futility of opposing the march of technology, the
