Content area
Full Text
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age By Bill McKibben, Owl Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2003, 271 pages, paperback, $14.00
From the author of The End of Nature comes this thoughtful and provocative challenge to specific advances in science and their application in new technologies. In a previous book, Hope, Human and Wild, Bill McKibben argued strongly for the adoption of innovative and appropriate technologies in civic design in his chapter on Curitiba, Brazil, where efficient and creative administration resulted in an ideal city in the 1980s. Far from being a Luddite, the author insists on a careful assessment of new technologies to determine their human impacts.
In Enough, McKibben explores the human impacts of three current innovations achieved through science: transgenic crops and animals, robotics, and computer nanotechnology. In each case he describes the creativity that was needed to reach these advances and how they happened to come about at this point in history. He provides enough information for the reader to at least understand the fundamental science and workings of each technology, and then goes on to analyze how each has potential to both "improve" as well as dehumanize our species.
In the first chapter, the potentials and challenges of transgenic engineering are discussed in detail. There is a brief historical record of how the current technologies grew from discoveries of the structure of DNA in the 1950s and progressed through elaboration of maps of the human genome and those of other species. The author recognizes the benefits of potential gene modification to alleviate the detrimental impacts of specific genetic traits such as human growth hormone therapy to overcome extreme short stature or inserting genes to cure cystic fibrosis. But he clearly distinguishes between this type of somatic gene therapy as one more powerful tool for medicine and the more far-reaching changes possible through "germline genetic engineering" where...