I've heard you say many times...

That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you.
If you really believe that,
You know you got
Nothing to win and nothing to lose.
-Bob Dylan

I promised a blog about Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age some weeks ago, but it never really materialized. I'm making the effort today.

The book boils down to an argument that in some areas technology has reached a point where it would be dangerous to push beyond, with those areas being genetic engineering and nanotechnology.

McKibben is accepting of a number of areas of genetic engineering, such as in somatic therapy (where genes are inserted by a retrovirus to a person's genetic code so that they will produce something they didn't previously, or fight something they couldn't before, or some such thing), but he strongly cautions against germline genetic engineering, in which an embryo is altered in a manor in which it will pass those modifications on to its offspring.

The concern is that people (in the extremely near future) with have the ability to engineer their children to have enhancements to any number of qualities, musicality, mathematical ability, or more or less, whatever their parents desire them to have.

I'm not sure I completely buy into McKibben's point of view though. One of the cornerstones of his objections is that it will create new classes of people. He poses questions such as how parents will be able to love their children equally when one has been engineered (or engineered with better technology) and the other has not. Do parent's of special needs children love them any less? He wonders about what the meaning of running a marathon would be if you were created in a test tube to be a long distance runner...

I'm not sure 'maintaining' a classless society (can we really call ours that?) is the strongest case against genetic engineering.

The middle section of the book, before a return to genetics, concerns nanotechnology, microscopic robots able to perform any number of tasks, often involving deconstructing atoms and rearranging them into something new and desired, spinning straw into gold, essentially. Besides the dangers of scientists getting in over their heads, their is a danger of nanobots (which often seem to be able to reproduce) being able to be created by rogues much the same way as computer viruses.

One of McKibben's weaker arguments was that nanobots could reduce the workload of people of the world, as a potato, shoes, or anything you wanted could be synthesized on the spot, and that people would suffer from not having meaningful work. It seems to be a bit of an out of touch comment from someone who draws their paycheck from a university on the grounds of being a thinker - I can't think of too many people who justify their existence by a 9 to 5, especially in our increasingly service oriented society.

There are some really crazy anecdotes, a vignette about an artist in New York who had a rabbit genetically engineered with DNA from luminous deep sea creatures to have fur that glowed...and from that standpoint I don't regret reading the book; however, the quality of the writing was a little lacking, and often he seemed to discredit ideas and scientists by quoting their often outlandish views on completely unrelated topics - for example, Rael, who some of you might remember as a former sports writer from France who claims to have been abducted by aliens and later vowed to produce the first cloned human, is often cited when discussing cloning.