The End Of Human Nature

To the new wave of genetic scientists, Coleridges ancient mariner - who preached love and respect for the natural world - is more than just old. Hes obsolete. Why should you bother loving nature off-the-shelf if you have the power to make it better? Were headed toward an era when human beings will be as casually "enhanced" as chickens or marigolds, with higher IQs, better looks, longer lives.
Bill McKibben understands genetics - but he knows poetry, too. In his brave and luminous book, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Times/Holt, $25), McKibben plays the part of the mariner, forecasting a frightening catastrophe brought on by human obliviousness. Enough indicts germline technology, the so-called designer baby science that aims to let parents improve their offspring by pasting desirable genes into their kids DNA. Whats so bad about that? McKibben explains: By ordering up athletics-enhanced, music-enhanced, optimism-enhanced children, you are not merely urging them in some direction - all parents do that; you are wiring your own tastes into their genes, literally twisting their minds and bodies into the shape you have chosen. And this staggering arrogance is bound to be futile because the technology will get better over time. If you upgrade your child with 25 bonus IQ points, you can count on a 50-point boost becoming available by the time your children have kids of their own. Youve just made Junior obsolete. "The vision of ones child as a nearly useless copy of Windows 95 should make parents fight like hell to make sure we never get started down this path," McKibben writes. Weve been taught that scientists are smarter than other people. But by counting on them to act wisely on our behalf, McKibben argues, we will be complicit: coconspirators in a gigantic (and maybe irrevocable) crime against humanity.
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