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Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2002
REDESIGNING HUMANS: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. Houghton Mifflin (288 pp.) $24, ISBN 0-618-06026-X

A visionary lays out a future in which humankind is enhanced beyond our wildest dreams ... which for some may be nightmares. Stock (Director, Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society/UCLA School of Medicine) has taken the biotechnology bit in his teeth and run with it, conjuring a race of superhumans with 150-yer life spans, divested of disease susceptibility genes and equipped with gene modules conferring intelligence, physical aptitude, or aesthetic talents. Like Fukuyama (se Our Posthuman Fuiure, p. 235), he sees the seeds of the future sown in today's technologies of in-vitro fertilization, pre-implantation embryo genetic screening, genomics, and cloning. Unlike Fukuyama, who urges regulation and outright banning of human cloning, Stock argues that you cannot stop "the inevitable." Banning might even backfire, enabling the rich to move to permissive venues and creating a species divide between the enhanced and the unenhanced.

In fairness, Stock is no Dr. Pangloss. Of course, germinal choice technology (GCT) is unsafe today, and of course, there needs to be oversight, he acknowledges; but we need to discuss not theology, playing God, spiritual corruption, or the sancitity of the gene pool (pithy quotes from James Watson, here), but the need for testing these technologies, appraising their risks, monitoring and overseeing research, and minimizing clinical abuse. As for the technologies themselves, Stock does very well in explaining the complex state of the science, including the use of artificial human chromosomes that can be turned on or off. The scenarios he builds are also complex. (For example, how should society respond to a deaf couple that chooses to select a deaf embryo for birth?) But Stock ignores such issues as a future world potentially exploding with graybeards, or whether clusters of genes can be isolated that dependably confer this or that talent.

A breath of fresh air to fuel the debate now raging in Congress and the White House -- with more surely to come.

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Publisher's Weekly, March 11, 2002:

Rather than worry about the ethics of human cloning, Stock (Metaman; The Book of Questions), director of the UCLA School of Medicine's Program of Medicine, Technology, and Society, believes we should focus our attention on the idea that we'll soon be able to genetically manipulate embryos to develop desired traits -- a more immediate and enticing possibility for most parents than cloning. He gives a lucid overview of the new biotechnology that will allow scientists to delay aging and to insert genes that enhance physical and cognitive performance, combat disease or improve looks into embryos. Stock thoughtfully weighs the ethical dilemmas such advances present, arguing that the real threat is not the frivolous use of the technology but the fact that we don't know the long-term effects of these genetic changes. In any case, Stock insists, there's no turning back, and government bans, "will determine not whether the technologies will be available, but where, who profits from them, who shapes their development, and which parents have early access to them." Stock demonstrates that much of the current criticism of human genetic engineering sounds remarkably similar to what was being said about in vitro fertilization when it first appeared. He believes that we will come to accept laboratory conception of all offspring and the addition of artificial chromosomes stocked with designer genes as readily as we have come to accept in vitro fertilization. Along the way we are sure to have many ethical issues to confront, issues that Stock does an impressive job of outlining.

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New Scientist  http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp

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.

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?

Michael Cross

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Excerpt from Chapter 1

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