If you could choose your child's intelligence, athleticism, personality, and lifespan before they were born — would you?
And more importantly: should you?
That question — which once belonged exclusively to science fiction — is rapidly becoming a practical one. Genetic engineering and bioenhancement technologies are poised to make virtually every human capacity modifiable: physical dexterity, mental acuity, memory, focus, and more. And the parents of the near future will face choices that no generation in human history has ever had to make.
In this award-winning episode of Good Is In The Details — recognized with a Silver Davey Award in the General: Educational category — Gwendolyn Dolske and Rudy Salo sit down with Professor Michael Bess, Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, recipient of major fellowships from the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Fulbright program, and author of Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future (Beacon Press) described by Kirkus Reviews as "an extraordinarily thoughtful... insightful philosophical analysis" and named one of the most important books on biotechnology ethics of the past decade.
Professor Bess has spent decades thinking carefully about what these technologies will do to human identity, human equality, and the meaning of a human life. This conversation is the clearest, most accessible, and most philosophically rigorous introduction to those questions that we have produced.
What we explore in this episode:
- What genetic engineering actually is, and what the near-future technology of designer babies, epigenetic modification, and germline editing will genuinely make possible for parents in the coming decades
- Rejuvenation therapies potentially extending human lifespans to 160 years or more; cognitive enhancement that could double or triple IQ scores; bioelectronic devices for modulating brain processes — and what it means that these possibilities are crossing the threshold from science fiction to reality