Book Review: Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares
By John Galloway,
BioNews
| 03. 11. 2013
Perhaps fortuitously, I started to read
Maxwell Mehlman's
book at the same time as
Roy Porter's 'A Short History of Madness'. It was then difficult not to muse on what
Jonathan Swift might have made of 'transhumanising scientists'. His satirising of scientists 'infected with lunacy' in the eighteenth century provides a hard to avoid parallel with Mehlman's very much not satirical account of biologists of the twentieth century.
Every school child now knows that molecular genetics is set to transform the world as we know it. Although exactly who 'we' are, is not specified; nor are we always told whether the transformation will be for good or ill. We can be reasonably certain though that most of the world's existing population will be dead before genetics' claims for medicine have any effect on them.
Read more...
Related Articles
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Mesha Maren , Salon | 07.20.2024
By Alcott Wei, South China Morning Post | 07.13.2024
China has banned all clinical research involving germline genome editing under a newly released ethics guideline.
Germline gene engineering relates to altering the DNA in sperm, eggs or early embryos to introduce changes that can be inherited.
“Any clinical research...