Reviews for Redesigning Humans Pa

The average rating for Redesigning Humans Pa based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-13 00:00:00 Aron Frisch "God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be." - Marcus Garvey (1886-1940) (via, Redesigning Humans by Gregory Stock, Pg.1) "Imagine collapsing life's 3.5-billion-year history into a period of 35 years. On this scale, some 50 years remain until the sun flares into a "red giant" and fries our planet. Our first primate ancestors appeared one year ago, thirty-four years after life began. The first hominid arrived a month ago; Homo Sapiens, two days ago; writing, an hour ago; and the wizardry we have breathed into silicon is poised to transcend us in seconds or minutes." - Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans, Pg.31) "Almost no one imagined in 1985 that the mutation of a single gene in a worm - the classic research organism Caenorhabditis elegans - would more than double its lifespan. For now, we can only guess whether we will unravel and control the biology of human aging or will find the knot too intricate to untie. But we likely will know soon." - Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans, Pg.47) "Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn... This is the picture of the condition of man." - Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662 "A key aspect of human nature is our ability to manipulate the world. We plant, we build, we dam, we hunt, we mine, and increasingly we do so on a huge scale. For as long as we have been able to, we have altered ourselves as well. We not only wear clothing, we pierce our bodies, tattoo our skin, cut our hair, and surgically sculpt ourselves. We add or remove hair, straighten our teeth, fix our noses, enhance or reduce our breasts, get rid of fat. We use drugs to reduce pain, lose weight, change moods, stay awake. The idea that we will long forgo better and more powerful ways of modifying ourselves is a denial of what the past tells us about who we are. . We are now reaching the point at which we may be able to transform ourselves into something "other." To turn away from germline selection and modification without even exploring them would be to deny our essential nature and perhaps our destiny." - Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans, Pg.170) "We often look to space as the next frontier - our expansion out into the solar system and beyond. Ultimately this may happen, but the next frontier is not outer space but ourselves. Exploring human biology and facing the truths we uncover in the process will be the most gripping adventure in all our history, and it has already begun." - Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans, Pg.171) "Many of us revel in the giant and diverse human aggregations that are our modern cities; others simply cope with them." - Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans, Pg.196)

Review # 2 was written on 2011-05-30 00:00:00 Melissa Wyatt About engineering the human germ line, the author is clear: we can do it, we should do it, we will do it. I find some analysis of his convincing (albeit alarming to me), such as: profit-driven scientists will go to somewhere on earth and develop improved human products because people will pay for those, which makes it unstoppable and eventually breaking into countries that currently block such. So humans will divide into castes based on their different degrees of "improvements", or lack thereof, and the gaps will ever widen because better->richer->better->richer...? No matter what one likes, this is a thought-provoking book.