Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Children's Genes Book

Scientist Gregory Stock's Redesigning Humans was published simultaneously with Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future and while they both discuss aspects of the biotechnology revolution--including the ethics of stem cell research, human cloning and germ-line engineering--they take diametrically opposed views. Fukuyama argues that if we are to avoid some of the worst political consequences of the biotech revolution then sweeping national and international regulation is required. For Stock the very idea of sweeping regulation is misconceived. Our collective challenge, Stock argues, is not to figure out how to block these developments, but how best to realise their benefits while minimising our risks and safeguarding our rights and freedoms. The best way to do that is to inform ourselves about the technologies while realising that we are not in need of special ethical or political training to face up to the choices those technologies will eventually offer us. What's really interesting about this book is that Stock has managed to write something of a quest romance while discussing the nitty-gritty details of the technologies themselves. The tone of the book from the opening Marcus Garvey quotation--"God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be"--encourages us to think of the biotech revolution as a kind of New Frontier. But by keeping his discussion largely focused upon the technologies themselves, he steers the reader away from, on the one hand, the false hope that we are on the threshold of creating super-humans, or the unjustified fear that liberal democratic culture will be undone by the new developments.--Larry BrownRead More