Our biotech bodies, ourselves
"How we respond to these threats to enhancement today will lay the groundwork for dealing with the ones that emerge in the future," says enhancement activist James Hughes, a lecturer in health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama agrees that policies need to be shaped before these technologies fully ripen--although Fukuyama, member of the bioethics council and author of Our Posthuman Future, counts himself a bioconservative. "If you don't shake people up now, then you will get these gradual changes that are going to end up leading us to a place that we're not going to be comfortable with," he says.
Side effects. Why worry about human enhancement? After all, what's not to like about, say, doubling the average human life span? But the bioethics council wonders in its report whether we would achieve a "stretched rubber band" version of longevity in which our active, healthy years would be extended, but so would our years of decline and decay. "Having many long, productive years, with the knowledge of many more to come, would surely bring joy to many of us," says panel member William Hurlbut, a bioethicist at Stanford University. "But in the end, these techniques could also leave the individual somewhat unhinged from the life cycle. Do I want to live to be 100? Sure. But to 250 or some other dramatic extension? No."
Bioconservatives acknowledge, however, that human enhancement may be inevitable. Even Kass admits that the council's report focused on the problems of enhancement rather than its benefits because the advantages of longer lives and better brains are so obvious "they don't need articulating." It's easy to argue the "con" position, says UCLA's Stock, about issues like the use of embryonic stem cells as long as the benefits are merely theoretical. Once those benefits become tangible, though, "the debate will be over," says Stock. Indeed, the potential therapeutic value of stem-cell research has already prompted more than 200 House members and Nancy Reagan to urge Bush to alter his ban.
With the proliferation of plastic surgery, for example, or the use of Ritalin by achievement-crazed students hoping to score better on the SAT, enhancement seems to be the wave of the future. Even Bush's Department of Commerce appears to be buying into it. In a 2002 joint report with the National Science Foundation (coauthored by Bainbridge among others), the agency recommended a national research-and-development effort to enhance humanity in order to create a world where human brains communicate directly with machines, and scientists "control the genetics of humans" to make bodies "more durable, healthier . . . and more resistant to many kinds of stress, biological threats, and aging processes." If successful, the effort will "create a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life."
Or not. Science could render all this high-flying rhetoric just that. Stem-cell and protein therapies, after all, have yet to spawn any successful treatments for disease, much less provide the catalyst for launching a new stage of human evolution. In 2000, researchers used gene therapy to cure two French boys of an inherited immune-system disorder but in the process gave them leukemia. Who knows what other dangerous side effects these new therapies will bring? It is, as they say, too early to tell--but judging by the intensity of the debate, not any too early to fight.
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