The end of human nature?

A book about human cloning and designer babies

Imagine a future where human embryos can be programmed to make children smarter, happier or simply brilliant and good looking.

Some researchers are already doing more than imagining having made some of the changes in animals.

Author Bill McKibben's new book gives a worrying account of genetic engineering in the future.

Bill McKibben was live on Breakfast

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His new book, Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Nature, looks at how the science of genetic engineering is progressing and calls for debate on the issue before it's too late.

The book suggests that we are on the verge of engineering ourselves out of existence.

Scientists are already planning the inevitable transformation of our species.

They are joined by other engineers, working in fields such as advanced robotics and nanotechnology, who foresee the not very distant day when people will merge with machines to create a 'post-human' world.

This book examines and explains such possibilities, and describes how we can avoid the worst consequences while still enjoying the fruits of the DNA revolution.

It confronts the most basic question that our technological society faces:

Will we ever be able to draw a line and say 'This far and no further'? He says: "if we aggressively pursue any or all of several new technologies now before us, we may alter our relationship not with the rest of nature but with ourselves.

"First human genetic engineering, and then advance forms of robotics and nanotechnology, will call into question, often explicitly, our understanding of what it means to be a human being."

Author Bill McKibben

James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, recently took this scenario one step further when commenting on future applications of germline engineering: "Who wants an ugly baby?"

When advocates extol a happy future populated by genetically engineered super-athletes, music prodigies and hyper-intelligent people, McKibben asks us to consider the experience from the perspective of the recipients of these "gifts."

There's therefore nothing personal to be had from achieving great things, it's all to do with your genes.

Parents, for instance, who tweak their babies' intelligence would almost certainly set off a "kind of biological arms race," available only to those who can afford such procedures. Those who can't will become part of a biological underclass.

Towards the end of the book he also explores those scientists whose quest is to cure everything and ultimately to solve the problem of mortality!

He urges us to reject these technologies and says while we are far from perfection, being human is quite simply enough.