In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [54]
Worse, we’ll be caught in a keep-up-with-the-Joneses competition whereby each new generation of babies will have to have all the latest enhancements—will have to be more intelligent, more beautiful, more disease-free, longer-lived, than the generation before. (Babies of the rich, it goes without saying, because there’s gold in them thar frills.) Thus each new generation will be sui generis—isolated, disconsolate, as out of date as last year’s car model before they’re even twenty-one, each of them stuck on a lily pad of enhancement a few hops behind the one that follows them. In addition to that, they’ll be cut off from history—from their own family tree—because who knows what family trees they’ll really be perpetuating? They’ll bear little relation to their so-called ancestors. The loneliness and the sense of disconnection could be extreme.
McKibben does not go on to explore the ultimate hell this situation could produce. Imagine the adolescent whining and sulking that will be visited upon the parents who have chosen their children’s features out of a catalogue and—inevitably—will have chosen wrong. “I didn’t ask to be born” will be replaced by resentments such as “I didn’t ask to have blue eyes” or “I didn’t ask to be a math whiz.” Burn that gene brochure! If your kid whines about not being enhanced enough, you can just say you couldn’t afford it. (The advocates of gene enhancement might respond by saying that since you’ll be able to choose your child’s temperament as well, naturally you’ll pick a type that will never do any adolescent whining or sulking. Pay no attention: these people will not be talking about flesh-and-blood children, but about Stepford Kids.)
Again, McKibben doesn’t go all the way down, into the dark realms of envy, cheating, payoffs, and megalomaniacal revenge. What’s to prevent your enemy from bribing your gene doctor so that your baby turns out like Hannibal the Cannibal?
But what about heritable diseases? you may reasonably ask. Why should any child get stuck with cerebral palsy, or autism, or schizophrenia, or Huntington’s chorea, or the many other maladies that genes are heir to? They shouldn’t if there’s a remedy, and there is. McKibben points out that these conditions can be eliminated without taking the final step. (After Enough was published and before this review was written, a Canadian team cracked the gene for autism. Help is on the way.) Once their genome has been analyzed, parents at risk could be notified of any defects, and could go the in vitro route, with fertilized eggs lacking the culpable gene chosen for implanting. This “somatic gene therapy” would not involve the addition of anyone else’s genes. Plastic surgery, hormones, vitamin pills, and somatic gene therapy are enough, says McKibben; gene splicing is too much.
Next, McKibben delves into nanotechnology, which is also well on the way. The applicable folk tale for nanotechnology is “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”—what if you get the process started, but the self-replicating nanobot escapes, and you can’t turn the darn thing off? We might create an assembler that makes food—dirt in one end, potatoes out the other—or something that destroys bioforms hostile to us. But what if such a nanobot goes on the rampage and attacks all bioforms? This is where Prince Charles’s apprehension about “grey goo” comes in. It’s a real fear, and one discussed by McKibben.
Cybernetics and artificial intelligence also get a look-in, as man-and-machine combinations are occupying some of our better-paid minds. Visions of microchips implanted in your brain dance in their heads—well, we already have pacemakers, so what’s the difference? Why shouldn’t we baptize artificial intelligence doodads because they can be made to resemble us so much that maybe they have whatever we think merits baptism? Call it a soul; why not? Maybe we can get enhanced smellability, X-ray vision, Spidey Sense,