However, nanoparticles could be precursors to microscopic machines that could potentially do a variety of tasks for a much longer period of time, ultimately replacing our blood. Regardless of how it is made, one obvious role for enhanced or “smart” blood would be to increase the amount of oxygen our hemoglobin can carry. “But the way to cure the problem in this case is to make the world more equal, rather than banning the technology.”. More recently, Annas says, “people thought the Human Genome Project would quickly lead to personalized medicine, but it hasn’t.”, Faggella, the futurist who founded TechEmergence, sees a dramatically different future and thinks the real push will be about, in essence, expanding our consciousness, both literally and figuratively. The novel is set in a future where, thanks to science, virtually no one knows violence or want. “What you might see instead are efforts to assure fair distribution of these benefits, so that can we mitigate any injustices or inequalities that might be caused by this.”. In my view, we should “So long as the improvement alleviates or prevents suffering, it is inherently good and … they tend to endorse it.”. “The things that have to do with human character and virtue and those things that make life meaningful will not change as a result of human enhancement, just like they haven’t changed as our society has changed,” says Ted Peters, a professor of systematic theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. “So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”. Indeed, they say, transhumanism could very well create an even wider gap between the haves and have-nots and lead to new kinds of exploitation or even slavery. Of course, while Adam and Eve gained a new awareness and self-understanding, their actions also led to their expulsion from paradise and entry into a much harder world full of pain, shame and toil. Only four of the embryos were successfully changed and all were ultimately destroyed. 1-22)/RD[0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5]/Type/Annot/AP<>>> endobj 109 0 obj <>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text]>>/Type/XObject/BBox[92.9329 127.961 558.317 159.844]/FormType 1>>stream Bottazzi cautions against extrapolating from animal studies to humans. Even minor enhancements, critics say, may end up doing more harm than good. 0000007686 00000 n In contrast with his brother Aldous, Julian Huxley was a scientific optimist who believed that new technologies would offer people amazing opportunities for self-improvement and growth, including the ability to direct our evolution as a species. Transhumanism is a philosophical movement, the proponents of which advocate and predict the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies able to greatly enhance longevity, mood and cognitive abilities.. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human … 0000001943 00000 n Even if scientists find the right genes and “turn them on,” there is no guarantee that people will actually be smarter. A device inside someone’s head could also more accurately target the electrical current to those parts of the brain most responsive to tDCS. The bluntest of these tools — legal prohibition — is already being used in the United States, where doctors and scientists are barred from editing human embryos. In the opening chapters of Genesis, the Hebrew Bible depicts a successful incident of human enhancement, when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because the Serpent told them it would make them “like God.”. H���A� D����_ P����[ �{��Ui�\_9������#pd%�f̐h�A�I3)�+EBH��%����� �J�և����d,� 0000004093 00000 n “There are things that I value and am proud of in my life, like my recent book,” he says. “But the dividing line for the church is the line between therapy and enhancement.”, Concerns about crossing that line already have been expressed by Catholic-affiliated organizations. 0000008078 00000 n Happiness is found in marriages, in families, in neighborhoods … None of these are promised by enhancement. “We will always have a body, even though that body will change.”. We are no longer living in a time when we can say we either want to enhance or we don’t. The ancient Greeks told of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, and Daedalus, the skilled craftsman, who made wings for himself and his son, Icarus. As a result, today’s iPhone has more than 250,000 times more data storage capacity than the guidance computer installed on the Apollo 11 spacecraft that took astronauts to the moon. In the Greek myth, Daedalus fashioned wax and feather wings so that he and son Icarus could fly. CRISPR is already dramatically expanding the realm of what is possible in the field of genetic engineering. “When you push in one direction, biology usually pushes back.”. However, some see the human body as a vessel not to be fixed, but rather, replaced. Although there is an abundance of material comforts in this fictional world, the things that people traditionally believe best define our humanity and make life worth living – love, close relationships, joy – have largely been eliminated. Both advocates for and opponents of human enhancement spin a number of possible scenarios. “The potential here is really very great,” says Anders Sandberg, a neuroscientist and fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. “This would allow us to do so many different things,” Sandberg adds. 0000013265 00000 n 6 Enhancement. “The risks here of creating greater inequalities seem to be obvious,” says Todd Daly, an associate professor of theology and ethics at Urbana Theological Seminary in Champaign, Ill. “And I’m not convinced that people who get these enhancements will want to make sure everyone else eventually gets them too, because people usually want to leverage the advantages they have.”, For some thinkers, concerns about inequality go much further than merely widening the existing gap between rich and poor. Similarly, Buddhists would largely accept and even embrace human enhancement because it could help them become better Buddhists, says Hughes, who is an advocate for transhumanism as well as a Buddhist and a former Buddhist monk. “Its most plausible use, and most likely use, is the technology of human enhancement,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post. Manipulating this genetic code – a process known as genetic engineering – could allow scientists to produce people with stronger muscles, harder bones and faster brains. Fauci says herd immunity possible by fall, ‘normality’ by end of 2021. An even more intriguing possibility involves making genetic changes at the embryonic stage, also known as germline editing. If we consider human vision, substantial advances started from the time spectacles were developed (possibly in the 13th century), continuing in the last few years, with researchers implanting artificial retinas to giv… Dr. Michael West, the lead scientist on the team that recently cloned the first human embryos, believes his mission in life is “to end suffering and death.” “For the sake of medicine,” he informs us, “we need to set our fears aside.”. It is estimated that about eight million tons of plastic debris are being washed into the oceans each year But thanks to recent scientific developments in areas such as biotechnology, information technology and nanotechnology, humanity may be on the cusp of an enhancement revolution. In the movies and comics, Captain America is a genetically-enhanced superhuman created to fight in America’s wars. endstream endobj 116 0 obj <> endobj 117 0 obj <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB]/ExtGState<>>> endobj 118 0 obj <> endobj 119 0 obj <> endobj 120 0 obj <>stream In the last few years, for instance, researchers have implanted artificial retinas to give blind patients partial sight. In Islam, according to Sherine Hamdy, an associate professor of anthropology at Brown University, human enhancement would be viewed with concern by some scholars and leaders and embraced by others. “In the last 200 years, technology has made us like gods … and yet people today are roughly as happy as they were before,” he says. Because human enhancement is still largely an issue for the future, it has not yet attracted a lot of attention in American religious communities. Hughes, Bostrom and others also dispute the idea put forth by Fukuyama and Brugger that enhancement could displace the sense of common humanity that has undergirded the democratic social contract for centuries. While gene editing itself is not new, CRISPR offers scientists a method that is much faster, cheaper and more accurate. In recent years, the prospect of advanced genetic engineering has become much more real, largely due to two developments. Many thinkers from different disciplines and faith traditions worry that radical changes will lead to people who are no longer either physically or psychologically human. Most scientists say that what is preventing them fromembarking on HGE is the risk that the process will itselfgenerate new mutations, which will be passed on to futuregenerations. Published in The Wallstreet Journal on December 5, 2001. The chip can send signals to a sleeve around the man’s arm, allowing him to pick up a glass of water, swipe a credit card and even play the video game Guitar Hero. “In the 1970s, we thought that by now there would be millions of people with artificial hearts,” he says. Indeed, on June 21, 2016, the U.S. government announced that it had approved the first human trials using CRISPR, in this case to strengthen the cancer-fighting properties of the immune systems of patients suffering from melanoma and other deadly cancers. And they will force churches and many other institutions (both religious and secular) to adjust to a new reality. However, some theologians, religious ethicists and religious leaders have started to think about the implications of human enhancement in light of their traditions’ teachings, offering a sense of how their churches or religions might respond to radical human enhancement if it became possible. Genetic engineering also offers promising possibilities, although there are possible obstacles as well. There is, for instance, no official teaching or statement on human enhancement or transhumanism that has come directly from any of the major churches or religious groups in the United States. He points to many confident predictions in the last 30 or 40 years that turned out to be unfounded. 0000008203 00000 n Such films explore the promise and pitfalls of exceeding natural human limits. About 31.1% of animals in science are used in basic research, while 11.9% are used for translational and applied research, which includes projects that test primary research findings for medical application. 0 No, It’s a Moral Monstrosity. It’s that simple.”, A good example, Vita-More says, is cognitive enhancement. Or it could be designed to continuously monitor a person’s arteries and keep them free of plaque, thus preventing a heart attack. 0000003905 00000 n was posed. But many futurists say enhancement technologies will likely be used to transform the whole body, not just one part of it. Medicine is at a turning point, on the cusp of major change as disruptive technologies such as gene, RNA, and cell therapies enable scientists to approach diseases in new ways. If, as some scientists predict, full brain-machine interface comes to pass, people may soon have chips implanted in their brains, giving them direct access to digital information. 0000005286 00000 n Three forms of human enhancement currently exist: reproductive, physical, and mental. But like Julian’s brother Aldous Huxley, those who oppose radical enhancement say the road to transcending humanity is paved with terrible risks and dangers, and that a society that embraces enhancement might lose much more in the bargain than it gains. Scientists already are developing and testing nanoparticles that could enter the bloodstream and deliver medicine to targeted areas. Instead of leaving a person’s physical well-being to the vagaries of nature, supporters of these technologies contend, science will allow us to take control of our species’ development, making ourselves and future generations stronger, smarter, healthier and happier. “CRISPR’s power and versatility have opened up new and wide-ranging possibilities across biology and medicine,” says Jennifer Doudna, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley and a co-inventor of CRISPR. startxref When combined with researchers’ growing understanding of the genetic links to various diseases, CRISPR could conceivably help eliminate a host of maladies in people before they are born. Indeed, like virtually any computer, these cells could receive “software updates” that would allow them to fight a variety of threats, such as a new infection or a specific kind of cancer.1. “One of the biggest advantages of this approach is that you would not have to worry about your body rejecting your new blood, because it will still come from you,” says Oxford University’s Sandberg. “It seems much more likely that there would be a continuum of differently modified or enhanced individuals, which would overlap with the continuum of as-yet-unenhanced humans,” Bostrom writes, adding that today there are very different types of people (very tall to very short, very intelligent to intellectually disabled, etc.) These changes, if they occur, will upend some social norms and possibly religious norms as well. 0000001798 00000 n Kurzweil – who has done more than anyone to popularize the idea that our conscious selves will soon be able to be “uploaded” – “>has been called everything from “freaky” to “a highly sophisticated crackpot.” But in addition to being one of the world’s most successful inventors, he has – if book sales and speaking engagements are any indication – built a sizable following for his ideas. “The enhancement project could allow people who have natural inequalities to be brought up to everyone else’s level,” he says. The science that underpins transhumanist hopes is impressive, but there is no guarantee that researchers will create the means to make super-smart or super-strong people. For example, over time, there have been biomedical interventions attempting to restore functions that are deficient, such as vision, hearing or mobility. Writing in Time magazine, Venter, who helped lead the first successful effort to sequence the human genome, warns that “we have little or no knowledge of how (with a few exceptions) changing the genetic code will effect development and the subtlety associated with the tremendous array of human traits.” Venter adds: “Genes and proteins rarely have a single function in the genome and we know of many cases in experimental animals where changing a ‘known function’ of a gene results in developmental surprises.”. These technologies are “intermingling and feeding on one another, and they are collectively creating a curve of change unlike anything we humans have ever seen,” journalist Joel Garreau writes in his book “Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What It Means to Be Human.”, The combination of information technology and nanotechnology offers the prospect of machines that are, to quote the title of Robert Bryce’s recent book on innovation, “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.” And as some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil argue, these developments will occur at an accelerated rate as technologies build on each other. In fact, he argues, you may even have an ethical responsibility to genetically modify your children. Scientists plan to drop the 14-day embryo rule, a key limit on stem cell research As technology for manipulating embryonic life accelerates, researchers want to get rid of their biggest stop … “It’s about 1,000 times cheaper [than existing methods],” says George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. We are already living in an age of enhancement. Many of the top-grossing films in recent years in the United States and around the world have centered on superheroes with extraordinary abilities, such as the X-Men, Captain America, Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man. xref What we all have an inescapable moral duty to do is to continue with scientific investigation of gene editing techniques to the point at which we can make a rational choice. It seems that each week or so, the headlines herald a new medical or scientific breakthrough. If the NHS moves ahead with its plans, it would be the first time people receive blood created in a lab. “I don’t believe in utopias and I don’t believe in perfection,” says Vita-More, adding that: “For me, enhancement is a very practical way to give us new options to make our lives better. In the future, Vita-More predicts, our bodies will be radically changed by biological and machine-based enhancements, but our fundamental sensorial life – that part of us that touches, hears and sees the world – will remain intact. 0000012600 00000 n That leads us to the last major area of human enhancement. 2004. Other scientists successfully linked a paralyzed man’s brain to a computer chip, which helped restore partial movement of previously non-responsive limbs. At onelevel, perfectionist and meliorist impulses have deep roots in Westernphilosophical and religious thinking, whi…
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