Enough: Staying Human in An Engineered Age.
In peoples' living memory I think there have been three of these. The first was the invention of nuclear weapons. The second was the environmental moment, especially the knowledge that our species was now large enough to heat the surface of the planet in dramatic ways. That was the subject of my first book, And now we move into this next technological moment, ushered in by genetic engineering, where working on a microscopic scale, we're able to make the most profound transformations.
And what alarms you so much about these transformations?
Well, first maybe I should say what doesn't alarm me. We're fifty years into the genetic age, and we're developing better treatments for disease and figuring out how to screen embryos against genetic defects and things like that. However, we're nearing a point where this technology may start to head in what I think are much more dubious directions. In the last 10 years, scientists have begun to do a lot of what they would call germline genetic engineering with animals, taking an embryo and going into its DNA and adding or subtracting sections of that DNA in order to produce particular outcomes. So we've made fat mice and smart mice and changed the behavior of all kinds of other animals, and now there are people who want to do it on human beings. All these traits of appearance, IQ, sociability, seem to be genetically influenced in large ways. In a world as divided as ours, this will rewrite those divisions in wealth and power into our very biology. There are also I think even deeper questions about what it would feel like to be the product of this kind of engineering. Your parents, in the words of the chief of gene structure at the National Cancer Institute, might soon be able to go into a clinic and choose the emotional make up of their child, on a spectrum ranging from Mother Teresa to a cutthroat captain of industry. They'd be able to do that probably by regulating those genes that control the output of different mood chemicals in the brain. And once they've done that to that embryo, every one of their cells for their entire life would be expressing that set of proteins, and indeed so would all the cells of their offspring and their offspring and their offspring.
You also write about the problem of genetically engineered humans becoming obsolete. In what sense?
Let's say you go into the clinic in a few years to get this sort of enhancement or genetic upgrade for your first child. Five years later you decide you want another child. By now, the upgrades are better, and there are more genes they know about. What's your first child - sort of Windows 95? The conversion of human beings into products means we will have all the attributes that go with products, including that kind of obsolescence.
And beyond this move to create perfect human beings is the idea of robotics, creating machines that can exceed what humans can do?
Yes, there are all sorts of people, including many of the people interested in genetics technologies, who also look forward to a not very distant future when they'll be able to merge carbon flesh and silicon in some way. Already scientists have been able to build fish with robot brains that can issue commands to the fish and make them swim, things like that.
So do you believe that to some extent we need to change our ideas about how much perfection we really need?