Redesigning Humans by Gregory Stock, Houghton Mifflin, $24, ISBN 061806026X
Dare we risk stepping onto the slippery slope of genetically engineering our offspring? Too late, says Gregory Stock of the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles. In Redesigning Humans, Stock argues that not only are we already on that slope, but we’re zipping down a black run on our arses, skis flailing the air.
We may as well enjoy the ride. Stock revels in describing a future in which we create a new species of post-humans, endowed with desirable characteristics which parents order like optional extras on a car. The essential tool is germ-line choice technology, manipulating the genetic make-up of a person in the early embryo. Stock has no time for cyborgs and their ilk, and indeed much of the book’s first half is a dour demolition of the hype surrounding most of the techniques that are supposed to enhance our bodies or minds. We simply don’t know enough about human biology to put them to use.
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Stock uses our present state of ignorance as an argument against banning research on reproductive cloning and germ-line modification. Better to manage these inevitable developments in a “free market environment with real individual choice, modest oversight and robust mechanisms to learn quickly from mistakes”.
One word worries me. Given the inevitability of the era of germ-line engineering and the resulting social pressures on parents to enhance their children—of which the book has several examples—where is this “choice” that he sets out as his creed?
