More Than Human Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement

These questions were once the stuff of science fiction. Today, advances in biotechnology have shown that they're plausible, even likely to be accomplished in the near future. In labs around the world, researchers looking for ways to help the sick and injured have stumbled onto techniques that enhance healthy animals — making them stronger, faster, smarter, and longer-lived — in some cases, even connecting their minds to robots and computers across the Internet. Now science is on the verge of applying this knowledge to healthy men and women, allowing us to alter humanity in ways we'd previously only dreamed possible. The same research that could cure Alzheimer's is leading to drugs and genetic techniques that could boost human intelligence. The techniques being developed to stave off heart disease and cancer have the potential to slow or even reverse human aging. And brain implants that restore motion to the paralyzed and sight to the blind are already allowing a small set of patients to control robots and computers simply by thinking about it.

Not everyone welcomes this scientific progress. Cries of "against nature" arise from skeptics even as scientists break new ground at an astounding pace. Across the political spectrum, the debate roils: Should we embrace the power to alter our minds and bodies, or should we restrict it?

Distilling the most radical accomplishments being made in labs worldwide, including gene therapy, genetic engineering, stem cell research, life extension, brain-computer interfaces, and cloning, More Than Human offers an exciting tour of the impact biotechnology will have on our lives. Throughout this remarkable trip, author Ramez Naam shares an impassioned vision for the future with revealing insight into the ethical dilemmas posed by twenty-first-century science.

Encouraging us to celebrate rather than fear these innovations, Naam incisively separates fact from myth, arguing that these much-maligned technologies have the power to transform the human race for the better, so long as individuals and families are left free to decide how and if to use them.

If you've ever wondered about the boundaries of humanity, More Than Human offers a vision of a world where we use our knowledge to improve ourselves, unhindered by the fear of change.

• A man, blind for twenty years, can see when he puts on a pair of glasses connected to electrodes in his brain.
• Gene therapy allows a young woman born with "bubble boy" disease to live normally among her peers.
• Life-extension techniques promise to increase human life span by forty years or more.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but these are true phenomena that have recently become hot topics in mainstream media. But while technology is enhancing the lives of many, it has also created a host of controversial capabilities, ranging from cloning to genetic engineering.

Distilling the most cutting-edge achievements being made in labs around the world, More Than Human offers an exciting tour of the way technology is impacting our lives. Throughout this remarkable trip, Ramez Naam shares an impassioned vision for the future, with revealing insight into the ethical dilemmas posed by twenty-first-century science. Encouraging us to celebrate rather than fear these innovations, his powerful book separates fact from myth with elegant lucidity, arguing that these controversial technologies have the power to transform the human race for the better.

More Than Human offers much-needed wisdom in the raging debates between technophobes and technophiles, and everyone else seeking to understand the marvelous possibilities that arise when mind meets machine.

I’ve always been both a fascinated observer of science — the kind actually practiced in labs around the world, and an avid reader of science fiction. In 1999, a good friend of mine who I’d loaned a science fiction novel to commented that he expected that in 10 years we’d be walking around with electrodes in our heads, fully immersed a William Gibson-style cyberspace. I scoffed at the idea, knowing that the brain is an incredibly complex organ and doubting that researchers would get us anywhere near the level of understanding of the brain necessary for that sort of thing until 50 or 100 years from now.

Later that year, a team at Duke University published a paper in the journal Science — one of the top two scientific journals in the world — where they’d wired electrodes into the brain of a living rat and given it control over a robot arm. And in the same year, a researcher in Atlanta implanted electrodes in the brain of a man named Johnny Ray, a patient who’d been paralyzed from the neck down by a stroke, and gave him the power to control a computer just by thinking about it.

Suddenly everywhere I looked in the scientific literature — in genetics, in longevity, in the study of memory — I saw discoveries and progress that I’d thought were the stuff of science fiction. That’s when I decided to write this book — to help people see and understand the incredible rate at which science is giving us the ability to alter — and maybe improve on — our own minds and bodies.

What do you hope to achieve with your book?

There’s an aphorism that “we fear what we do not understand”. I think that’s often quite accurate, especially when it comes to new biological technologies. When Jenner first introduced the small pox vaccine, he was denounced as playing god and as dabbling in things too dangerous for mortal men. I see the same thing happening now with biotechnology. People have a great deal of fear around technologies like cloning or genetic engineering, let alone implanting wires in someone’s head.

About two years ago, that fear came to a head with a whole slew of books warning us about the peril’s of using biotechnology to alter our minds or bodies. Historian Francis Fukuyama put out Our Postmodern Future, Leon Kass wrote Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Human Dignity, and environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote Enough. All of those books took the stance that we ought to leave well enough alone. That we ought to be happy with our current lifespans, our bodies, our intellects. And that it was dangerous, or maybe downright immoral, to try to change those things too much.

That, to me, is an argument based on fear of technologies that people don’t really understand. So my greatest goal with More Than Human is to educate people on how these technologies work and what they can and can’t do. I think if people understand that, they’ll be a lot more comfortable, and in some cases eager for, what biotech can do for us.

Are you saying that these fears are misplaced? That there are no dangers of biotechnology?

Oh, there are certainly risks to using biotech to alter men and women. Every profound technology has its share of risks and side effects. Cars are great for getting around but they produce smog and traffic accidents. The internet is a fantastic communication medium but can be used to transmit child pornography. Antibiotics cure disease but also breed antibiotic resistance and contributed quite a bit to the population explosion of the last century.

Biotech enhancement will be no different. It’ll bring many goods and some ills. Society will have to wrestle with the problems these technologies cause and find solutions. But the alternative — to prohibit these technologies — just isn’t viable. Just as we saw in Prohibition or in the War on Drugs, if you make something people want illegal, you don’t stop them from getting it. You merely drive up costs, decrease safety, and push the activity into the criminal realm. And people do want to be smarter, healthier, longer lived, better looking, and so on.. You can see if in the tens of billions spent on sports supplements, on herbal products, and on plastic surgery. You can see it even more dramatically in how parents invest in their children — Montessori schools, music lessons, college tuition — people have this innate urge to do the best they can for themselves and their offspring.

One of the central points of More Than Human is that if you let those individuals and families make their own decisions — informed decisions — then there’s good reason to believe it’ll improve the lot of society. But if you try to prohibit these technologies, you end up creating more problems than you solve.

You’ve worked at Microsoft on some widely used pieces of software — Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, MSN Search. How do those relate to your book?

The common thread is this notion of enhancing and empowering people. Computers are tools that we’ve invented that increase our ability to store information, to learn, to communicate, and so on. In many ways I view the software I’ve worked on as very similar to the kinds of technologies covered in More Than Human. It’s just that my software runs outside of my body — for now.

Who are your favorite authors and why?

I love books that synthesize what seem to be very discrete ideas into a single theory or point of view. One of my all time favorite books is Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control , where he finds the parallels between weather, flocks of birds, ecologies, and all these other complex network systems. Another favorite is Robert Wright’s Non-Zero. There are quite a few other popular science authors I admire — Steven Johnson, philosopher Danniel Dennet, Matt Ridley, Stephen Pinker.

In the science fiction realm I like rich, complex stories with both a grand scope and plausible science. Dan Simmon’s Hyperion books are classics to me. I love anything by Greg Egan, Ian Banks, David Brin, or Greg Bear.