How to save the environment? Not just from mankind, but ultimately from nature itself? Those are tough questions, but we have to start somewhere, and where better than with cute cats? And after we've cloned these cute critters, we have many more technologies to use to save nature.

Yes, technologies to save nature. It's the forward-looking technos, not the backward-looking greens, who will literally immortalize the environment.

Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 by Nadja Durbach

If, like me, you are young enough to have been immunised against diphtheria and polio in the mass public health campaigns of the postwar period, but old enough to have known victims of these childhood scourges, it may be hard to think of vaccination except within a narrative of progress. Almost paralysed with dread of the needles awaiting us, my sisters and I nonetheless understood ourselves to be lucky children, rescued by heroic doctors and a benevolent state from the implacable and unseen demons that had randomly crippled or killed so many of our parents' generation.

Today, this confident alliance of doctors, parents and public health officials is hard to find. Scary if unproven allegations of a link between infant vaccination and both bowel disorders and autism have helped fuel mass movements of parents critical of vaccination in both the US and UK. In Britain, uptake rates for the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine are falling, leaving scientists, doctors and public health officials scrambling to reassure parents not only of the safety of vaccines but, more challengingly, of their necessity in a Western world where �wild� cases of measles or rubella are now rare. The press, prone to approach medical matters either through the human interest story (�Did Leo Blair have the MMR?�) or as a �debate� between two equally plausible positions, has shown itself ill-suited to the task of reporting on scientific data, while on the web claims to expertise flourish unchecked. In cyberspace, organisations urging parents as rational human beings to inform themselves of the risks of vaccination before delivering up their children to the syringe jostle with harrowing pictures of infants struck down by vaccines and the delusional rantings of anti-semites and conspiracy theorists. (Check out www. christianparty. net, where Jonas Salk�s great work developing a polio vaccine is lambasted as a Jewish plot aimed at infecting �Christian children� with monkey-borne diseases.)

Thanks to laser surgery, Tiger Woods now has better-than-perfect vision. Is it fair play?

Nothing destroys a sporting reputation like steroids. In 1998, Mark McGwire was a baseball hero. Wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan, "If Popeye wants his arms back - he'll have to wait until October", he obliterated the record for the number of home runs in a season. Last month, McGwire was branded a cheat for using a legal, performance-enhancing steroid precursor, androstenedione, when he achieved the feat.

It may seem like a simple case of right and wrong. McGwire used a steroid precursor, albeit one that was legal in baseball, and he has been punished. But the line between right and wrong in sport is being increasingly blurred. It is now possible to enhance performance through surgery and, very soon, gene therapy. Accusations of double standards are in the air.

When McGwire achieved his record, he was also wearing contact lenses. Natural vision is 20/20, but McGwire's lenses improved his vision to 20/10, so he could see, at a distance of 20ft, what a person of normal vision could see at 10ft. Clearly, that could make a difference when you're trying to hit a fast ball. But the hearing, which criticised him for his artificially enhanced muscles, made no mention of his artificially enhanced eyesight.

Are you ready for the posthuman future? That is the frightening question posed by Wesley J. Smith in his new book, Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World. Smith, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture, has written another book that demands the attention of every thoughtful Christian.

We are living in an age of radical transformations in science, technology, and worldview. Standing at the center of the worldview now dominant in our society is an affirmation that human beings have the right, if not the responsibility, to "improve" themselves in every way. In a culture that celebrates youth, attractiveness, and achievement, the idea of personal improvement is now being stretched beyond what previous generations could have imagined.

"It is a natural human desire to manipulate our bodies to look better, feel better, and age better," Smith explains. "We not only wish to be free of disease, but also deeply desire to remain youthful in appearance and physical vigor."

With "Botox parties" and cosmetic surgery now becoming routine, many Americans simply assume that personal enhancement is a basic right. Now, some want to push beyond natural biological barriers in order to achieve even greater "enhancements" in the future. We now face the undeniable truth that at least some of our fellow citizens are ready to use genetic enhancements, cloning technologies, and germ line engineering to achieve what some now call a posthuman future.

Genetic modifications and germ line therapies differ from previous technologies of personal enhancement, Smith explains. Plastic surgery--even something as radical as what are called sex change procedures--affect only one individual's body. Nothing from those surgeries impacts the genetic inheritance passed down to subsequent generations.

All this changes when genetic modifications and germ line technologies enter the picture.

"What if a father could insert a gene to transform his daughter into the concert pianist he always wanted to be, or an atheist do likewise to ensure that his children would be genetically predisposed (if it proves possible) to shun religious belief?" Smith asks, adding, "And what if these modifications passed down the generations?"

Existing medical technologies would not yet allow these developments. Nevertheless, with the successful cloning of other mammals, the completion of the Human Genome Project, and the creation of transgenic human-animal hybrids, science fiction is likely soon to become science fact.

Smith warns that all this could lead to what some now call a posthuman race. Others are now pushing for what they call transhumanism, which Smith warns is now "organizing with the intensity of a religious revival."

Vatican officials on Thursday decried what they called a "religion of health" in affluent societies and held out Roman Catholic Pope John Paul's stoic suffering as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine must cure all.

"While millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires," said Rev. Maurizio Faggioni, a theologian and morality expert on the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life.

"I am committed to the notion that both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do. I am equally committed to making that age as close to our biologically probable maximum of approximately 120 years as modern biomedicine can achieve, and also to efforts at decreasing and compressing the years of morbidity and disabilities now attendant on extreme old age."
- Sherwin Nuland

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
- Isaac Asimov

Why striving to be more than human is human

"What ideas, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?" That question was posed to eight prominent policy intellectuals by the editors of Foreign Policy in its September/October issue (not yet available online). One of the eight savants consulted was Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, author of Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. His choice for the world's most dangerous idea? Transhumanism.

In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." Sounds ominous, no? But wait a minute, isn't human history (and prehistory) all about liberating more and more people from their biological constraints? After all, it's not as though most of us still live in our species' "natural state" as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.

Human liberation from our biological constraints began when an ancestor first sharpened a stick and used it to kill an animal for food. Further liberation from biological constraints followed with fire, the wheel, domesticating animals, agriculture, metallurgy, city building, textiles, information storage by means of writing, the internal combustion engine, electric power generation, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, and contraception. In a sense, the goal toward which humanity has been striving for millennia has been to liberate ourselves from more and more of our ancestors' biological constraints.

'If everything we did had to be absolutely safe, risk-free, proven to have no adverse outcomes for anyone or anything, we'd never get anywhere. Buildings wouldn't go up, planes wouldn't get off the ground, medical breakthrough would come to a standstill, science would be stifled…. Shall I go on?'

Professor Sir Colin Berry is not a big fan of the 'precautionary principle', the idea that scientists, medical researchers, technologists and just about everybody else these days should err on the side of caution lest they cause harm to human health or the environment. Berry is one of Britain's leading scientists; he has held some of the most prestigious posts in British medicine, including head of the Department of Morbid Anatomy at the Royal London Hospital from 1976 to 2002. Now he watches as his 'good profession' threatens to be undermined by what he says is an 'unscientific demand' to put precaution first.

One of the most common definitions of the precautionary principle is that put forward by Soren Holm and John Harris in their critique of it in Nature magazine in 1999: 'When an activity raises threats of serious or irreversible harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures that prevent the possibility of harm shall be taken even if the causal link between the activity and the possible harm has not been proven or the causal link is weak and the harm is unlikely to occur.' For Berry, this is one of the biggest problems with the precautionary principle - the notion that we could ever fully predict the outcome of an experiment or piece of research before it is complete, and that if we can't then we should play it safe. 'It doesn't allow for the unknown', he says. 'Or for taking a risk in order to do something potentially useful.'

The $3-billion measure puts California in the forefront of an ongoing national debate.

An initiative that would have state taxpayers underwrite $3 billion worth of research into using embryonic stem cells to develop cures for Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases qualified for the Nov. 2 ballot Thursday, propelling California to the forefront of a national battle at the intersection of science and morality.

Humanity is on its way out. Post-humanity--technologically enhanced and perhaps even immortal--is coming.

The stuff of science fiction is creed to transhumanists, a diverse group of technological optimists who advocate the transformation of Homo sapiens into a new species, one "better than human."

Transhumanists see our era of rapid technological advance as the transitional phase between our human past and post-human future. Cochlear implants, artificial joints, genetic engineering, mood-altering and memory-enhancing drugs--all are preludes to an era when people will routinely enhance their brains, improve their bodies and perhaps live forever.

Critics, however, think this could be the worst calamity to befall us, both as individuals and as a species. And they argue we should be taking steps to prevent it.

All this week at Next News, I've been writing and chatting about the topic of human enhancement, also the subject of an article in this week's issue of the magazine. Today, a few thoughts on extending the human life span and genetic engineering from William Hurlbut, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and a consulting professor in the Program in Human Biology at Stanford University.

Next News: So what's wrong with doubling–or more–the human life span?

Yesterday's E-chat with bioethicist George Annas about human enhancement and genetic engineering brought up the so-called precautionary principle, which is a "go slow" approach to dealing with new technologies. For a take on the "go fast" approach, here are bits of an E-mail chat I had with James Hughes, a health policy instructor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Hughes is also executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, which "advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities," according to the group's Web site. In addition, Hughes is author of the book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, which will be published by Basic Books in October.

Next News: What's your perspective on the precautionary principle as applied to genetic engineering and other medical technologies?

All this week in Next News, I am writing about the wisdom of human enhancement, an issue also tackled in the current issue related story of U.S. News & World Report. In my story, all of the anti-enhancement folks I quote tend to land on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But there are also liberals who are against some prospective forms of enhancement. Prof. George Annas, a bioethicist at Boston University, has repeatedly taken issue with the idea of germline engineering, which would involved tinkering with genes in eggs or sperm. The modified genes, according to the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit that encourages the use of certain human genetic technologies, would appear "not only in any children that resulted from such procedures, but in all succeeding generations ... and open the door to the alteration of the human species." I recently E-mailed Annas about his concerns with germline engineering and why he is pushing for an international treaty to ban inheritable modifications to the human genome. His brief responses:

Next News: What most worries you about this sort of genetic tinkering?