Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future - Hardcover

Stock, Gregory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 061806026X ISBN 13: 9780618060269

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002

Synopsis

A thought-provoking examination into the implications of reproductive biology reveals that governments, religious groups, and others with ethical and moral concerns will be unable to prevent the technological advances that will lead to the ability to choose certain genes at the embryo stage, allowing parents to custom design their children.

About this title

Review:

Will the genetic research that gave us the Flavr Savr tomato also give us the power to customize our children? Medical thinker Gregory Stock believes that this is precisely what's happening and that we'd better get used to it fast. Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future explores gender selection, gene therapy, germinal choice, and many more options available now or in the near future, but lays aside the hysteria common to such discussions.

Stock sees the cloning controversy as a distraction from issues of real importance, such as balancing offspring trait selection against eugenics. Writing with the clarity and precision of a philosopher, Stock engages his readers with thought exercises and real-life examples. While not a brainless cheerleader for big science, he believes that we can, and certainly will, use any means necessary to give our children an edge, even if it means profound changes for our species. Redesigning Humans offers the hope that these changes need not be catastrophic if we pay attention now. --Rob Lightner

About the Author:

Gregory Stock, director of the Program of Medicine, Technology, and Society at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine, has also written, among other books, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism and the best-selling volume on ethical dilemmas, The Book of Questions.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 061806026X
• ISBN 13: 9780618060269
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288