Q: Why did you write THE CASE AGAINST PERFECTION?

A: I initially became interested in the subject through my service on the President’s Council on Bioethics. One of the topics we dealt with was the question of enhancement and genetic engineering for enhancement, and I became fascinated by the topic there and began teaching a course that dealt with these issues and wrote what initially was an article in The Atlantic. Both got into this book. What intrigued me most about it was not the technology as such but the questions about the human goods, the fundamental human values and virtues that are raised by debates over biotechnology. What struck me as especially interesting was that our usual way of talking about ethics, bioethics, moral philosophy didn’t seem to capture fully what’s at stake in the debate over genetic engineering. We usually debate costs and benefits, autonomy and rights. But that moral vocabulary doesn’t really seem to capture what’s at stake in this whole question of genetic engineering and eugenics. That, I think, is really what intrigued me most: If not autonomy and rights and utility, then what? That was why it was a philosophical challenge.

Q: What is at stake? You say these questions are almost theological.

A: Yes. Really to grapple with the ethics of enhancement requires us, I think, to confront questions that have been crowded from view in the modern world, certainly within modern philosophy. It raises fundamental questions that really do verge on theological questions: What is the proper stance of human beings toward the given world? What is the proper stance toward nature? Are there certain limits to the project of human mastery and dominion? Those are questions in moral philosophy, but they are also questions of theology and of religion.

Q: Have the teachings of faith traditions addressed these issues—whether man should aim for perfection?

A: Yes, different religious traditions give different broad perspectives on this question. Some sanctify nature as inscribed with inherent meaning. Others see the moral importance of nature as flowing from the fact of God’s creation. And there are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come. On the one hand, human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings’ role with God’s. So the tension between these two impulses-—to participate in creation and yet not to overreach-—that, I think, is at the crux of some of the most interesting theological aspects of this debate.

Q: Where do you draw the line between trying to heal and trying to enhance?

A: I draw the line with health, with medical purposes. So I think it is one thing to try to restore normal human functioning—that would be health, that would be medicine, that would be curing or repairing. I think it’s something else to try to use biotechnology to enhance, to try to lift people above the norm, let’s say, of intelligence, or of height, or of musical ability, or to try to pick and choose the genetic traits of our children, to aim at designer children, to choose the sex of our children for purely non-medical reasons. These are really exercises in a kind of consumerist ethic that I think don’t have the same moral weight as medicine or health.

Q: But as a parent don’t you want the best for your children?

A: What I really want for my children is that they be loved and that they be happy and that they lead a good life. I suppose you could say that those goals could be captured in the idea of wanting the best for my children. But very often when we aim at the best, or what we may think is the best for our children, we aim really at lesser things, such as getting into a certain college. Never mind college, some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially. So I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I’m not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness.

Q: You have said maybe we should change the driven climate of the culture, and perhaps this quest for perfection really undermines the sacredness of the child-parent relationship.

A: I think part of being a parent, to love one’s child, is to accept them as they come—not to see them as instruments of our ambition or as creatures to be molded, as if they were themselves commodities. I think too often in our society parents, who may have good impulses, overreach and try to mold and shape and direct their child. That’s the phenomenon of hyper-parenting. I think people who want to use genetic technologies to gain a competitive edge for their children are engaging in a kind of overreaching that could really undermine our appreciation of children as gifts for which we should be grateful and, instead, to view them as products or instruments that are there to be molded and directed.

Q: You talk about gifts. Is that a religious argument?

A: Yes and no. It’s true that to speak of an ethic of giftedness, which is very much the ethic that I deploy in raising questions about designer children and genetic engineering—an appreciation of the giftedness of the child or the giftedness of life does have religious resonance, because a great many religious traditions emphasize the sense in which the good things in life are not all our own doing; they are gifts from God. So that is one source of an ethic of giftedness, a religious source—the idea of God as giver of gifts. But what I argue in the book is that that is one important source for the ethic of giftedness but not the only source. It’s possible to make sense of what’s morally at stake in an appreciation of the gift of life, or the gift of a child, without necessarily presupposing that there is a giver. What matters is that the gift—in this case, the child—not be wholly our own doing, our own product. So I think there is a religious source, but I want to make room for religious discourse in arguments about bioethics and also for an ethical appreciation of these ideals and values by those who may not come from a religious tradition.

One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don’t choose the kind of child that we have. In most of our lives, we are accustomed to aiming at mastery and control and dominion-—over nature, over our lives, over our jobs, over our careers, over the goods that we buy. But parenthood is a school for humility. We can’t choose the precise traits of our children, and that is morally important. It teaches us what William May, a theologian whom I greatly admire, calls “an openness to the unbidden.” I think this quality, as a trait of character, as a moral disposition—an openness to the unbidden—teaches us to rein in the impulse to mastery and control that we experience in so many other parts of our lives.

Q: What technologies really concern you, like non-medical sex selection? Say a family has five girls and wants a son. What would you ban or not ban and why?

A: My emphasis in the book is not on banning or regulating. I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large. I would include non-medical sex selection as one of those practices that I think is morally questionable and that can carry adverse social consequences. We see, in some parts of the world, that sex selection for boys—and it’s usually for boys—reflects sex discrimination against girls, and it leads to very large imbalances—in China, in Korea, in India—in the population between boys and girls, a vast disproportion of boys to girls, and it reflects really this discriminatory attitude toward girls. So that’s one social consequence. But another consequence is really to our culture, to our moral landscape. The norm of unconditional parental love, I think, depends on the fact that we don’t pick and choose the traits of our children in the way that we pick and choose the features of a car we might order, or a consumer good. If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.

Q: What would a “perfect” society look like if parents did pick the traits of their children?

A: By a perfect society you mean a dystopian society?

Q: Yes.

A: I think [there are] two kinds of risks. One has to do with the life of the children who would not only feel molded and made and packaged almost as commodities by their parents, but might feel the intense pressures that go with that, because if parents are aiming at choosing children who will be good athletes, or great musicians, or who will get into Ivy League schools, or who will be tall enough to make the basketball team, then there is a danger that the life of the child will bear the burden of that expectation; and the risk of disappointment and the cost of disappointment will be even higher than they are now, and even now they can be considerable. So that’s one, the effect on the child. The other effect that I worry about is the effect on the parent, that the moral teaching of humility and of the limits to our control that parenthood teaches-—that that will be lost and that we will begin to think of children more as consumer goods than as gifts that we can’t fully control and for which we aren’t fully responsible.

Q: You see troubling comparisons with the eugenics movement.

A: I do think there is a similarity between the dark history of eugenics and present attempts to pick and choose the genetic traits of children. There is one very important difference. Traditionally, eugenics was state-sponsored and coercive. They were collectivist, and so there was the dark history of forced sterilization. The majority of American states had laws by the 1930s that allowed for forced sterilization of socially undesirable categories of people, so-called feeble-minded, for example, and with Hitler culminating in genocide. So the real question is: If you remove the coercion and you make it an individual choice, is eugenics still objectionable? I would say that it is. What we have today is a kind of privatized or free-market eugenics. It’s not an attempt to try to improve entire societies or to increase humanity’s germ plasm, as the old eugenicists said. It’s an attempt, usually by affluent parents, to give their kids an edge in a highly competitive society. But it does carry the idea, which comes from the eugenic past, that it is for this generation to pick and choose the genetic traits of the next generation.

Q: And it’s only for those who can afford it.

A: In the privatized version, it’s only for those who can afford it. So a further objection now to eugenics is that it will only deepen the gap between rich and poor, and possibly inscribe that gap in our biology. That is also a troubling prospect.

Q: Should faith communities speak out? If it is just left up to the marketplace, will that determine who can afford the technology? Should there be more discussion, and should religious groups get involved?

A: Yes, I do think this is an issue that faith groups should become involved in, because it does raise questions about the proper stance of human beings toward the given world. It involves the tension between the aspiration to human mastery, control, and dominion over nature, over children, over future generations-—the tension between mastery and dominion, on the one hand, and reverence, or respect, or restraint, or humility, on the other. And most religious traditions speak to this deep human tension between mastery and restraint, between dominion and humility. I think that’s the kind of moral vocabulary we need to make sense of the challenge posed by new genetic technologies. Unless faith communities participate in public debate about these questions, that part of the moral vocabulary will not find full expression.

Q: What is morally owed to those who suffer from disease or disability if not healing or trying to make them more perfect, healthier? Is there a higher good than relief of suffering?

A: The relief of suffering is a great good. The curing of illness and disease—these are great human goods. This is the mission of medicine. I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can’t combat dread diseases—malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it. So my argument is not that we must never intervene in nature. My argument is that there is a moral difference between intervention for the sake of health, to cure or prevent disease, and intervention for the sake of achieving a competitive edge for our kids in a consumer society. I think morally those two ambitions have a very different status. One of the differences is that aiming at health, restoring health—that is a goal that is both morally important and limited, because it aims at the restoration of normal human functioning, which is an important part of human flourishing. But aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society—that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless. There is no end. In fact, one can imagine a kind of hormonal arms race or genetic arms race, whether it’s to do with height or IQ, conceivably, in the future. So it’s limitless, and that’s another of the features that sets it apart from medical intervention. It really puts biotechnology in the service not only of health but of consumerism, really, and the drive for better consumer goods than one’s neighbor has, or than one had last year. This is a kind of limitless spiral, and even from the standpoint of resources I think it would be a great tragedy to devote medical resources and genetic technological breakthroughs to purposes that are not to do with health or medicine, but instead are to do with satisfying the desires that are created by the consumer society.

Q: You mentioned the Presidents Bioethics Council, and stem cell research has been a huge subject there. What needs to be done about stem cell research? What are the moral arguments?

A: In my criticism of genetic engineering for enhancement I am more in line with what my colleagues on the council thought than in my views on embryonic stem cell research. I’m a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research. The most fundamental question is: What is the moral status of the early embryo or blastocyst, which is destroyed in the course of stem cell research? And so those who view the blastocyst, the very early unimplanted embryo-—we are not, of course, talking about a fetus, but an unimplanted embryo in a lab-—there are some who believe that blastocyst has a moral status equal to that of a baby or of a fully developed human being, and if they’re right about that then embryonic stem cell research should not be permitted. I don’t think they are right about it, but in the book I try to take seriously their arguments and to address them. I think it’s important, where moral arguments do inform political views, to welcome those religious arguments into the public sphere; not to exclude them and say no, no, no, that has no place; to welcome them but also to engage with those views, to test them, to argue with them, and in some cases to learn from them. So my argument about stem cell research in the book defends it, but only after taking seriously the religious objections that people raise based on the moral status of the embryo.

Q: Defend it based on what?

A: Mainly the way I try to go about engaging with the debate about the moral status of the embryo is to try to lay out what I take to be the strongest possible arguments in favor of regarding the blastocyst as morally equivalent to a baby and then seeing whether those arguments can be sustained, whether they are adequate arguments. So I think that it’s important not to—just as faith-based arguments should not be kept out of the public arena, neither should they be exempt from critical scrutiny and rigorous philosophical argument.

Q: What is your reasoning to support the view that embryonic stem cell research is moral?

A: The main way of arguing is to see whether those who object to embryonic stem cell research on the grounds that the blastocyst is morally equivalent to a person—whether they are prepared to pursue the full moral logic of that position. And if they were, then you would not only restrict, as President Bush has, federal funding of embryonic stem cell research; you would ban all embryonic stem cell research. Right now, the Bush position is that it shouldn’t enjoy federal funding, for the most part, but it should be permitted in the private sector. If it were truly infanticide, if destroying that embryo were really morally equivalent to infanticide, you wouldn’t say we should deny federal funding to this infanticide but we should allow it to continue in the private sector. Take the example of yanking organs from babies to save other people’s lives. You wouldn’t permit that. Not only that; you would not permit fertility clinics to create and discard excess embryos if you really regarded those excess embryos as siblings of the children who were implanted and created. You wouldn’t say, well, we’ll ban embryonic stem cell research or deny it federal funding, but we’ll let fertility clinics create and discard thousands upon thousands of frozen embryos. You wouldn’t permit it, and yet many of the people who want to restrict embryonic stem cell research are not raising their voices to shut down fertility clinics that create and discard excess embryos. So it’s a test of consistency, mainly. Now some are consistent and would shut down fertility clinics that create and discard excess embryos. There is a further test for them, which is: In natural pregnancy, more than half of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost. Should we regard that as an instance of infant mortality? And if so, why are we not mounting ambitious public health campaigns to try to save and rescue all of the fertilized eggs that are lost in natural pregnancy? We would need a public health campaign of massive proportions if there really were over a fifty percent rate of infant mortality. And what about the religious traditions that consider those lost embryos as infant deaths? Do they mandate the same burial rites for lost embryos as for babies who die just after birth, and if not, why not? So it’s a test. And this is not to parody the religious position; it’s to take it seriously and to explore its moral logic and to see whether that moral logic is carried out fully by those who profess to hold the position in the specific case of embryonic stem cell research, but not in all of these others.

Q: Does Jewish teaching about the importance of doing everything to save a life influence your thinking on this and other bioethical topics?

A: I have a broad but not an expert or scholarly background in the Jewish tradition. I’ve tried to learn what I can from childhood, but I am not an expert on Jewish teachings in this area. It is true that the Jewish tradition emphasizes the moral mandate to save life. It also has a different position from the Catholic Church on the moral status of the embryo. It has a more developmental view of when human life, in the sense of personhood, begins than does the Catholic Church. And so that may have influenced me, but I think I’ve also been influenced by arguing through these questions with colleagues on the President’s Council on Bioethics, with students, and with others, some from religious backgrounds, others not. I do think it is very important that the religious communities do try to bring their teachings and their insights to bear on the stem cell debate and on the debate about genetic engineering.

Q: What kind of research are you doing?

A: Here at Signum we are trying to do some things that are very interesting, in that the opening up of human biology and of biology and of life in general and understanding how it works at the most intimate of levels allows the possibility of going in and creating new kinds of therapeutics that are really designed, in some sense, but it also allows us to revisit the products of literally thousands of years of experimentation with herbal medicine, with various kinds of botanicals, and to understand the components of those and the agents therein that are really working and how they are affecting biology, because cells have been battling with one another since the beginning of life. And so all of the kinds of pharmaceutical developments, pharmaceutical possibilities that will affect major regulatory pathways in our bodies—most of them are out there. That’s why so many botanicals have been used as major drugs, if not as the origins or the starting points of additional, more advanced therapeutics. So we’re looking at Alzheimer’s. We have a new class of anti-inflammatories that can be used both in dermal and skin applications and potentially for a lot of diseases where inappropriate inflammation, either acute or chronic for long periods of time, are associated with particular diseases.

Q: What are you hoping some of the practical applications will be?

A: For instance, we’ve been looking at a key regulatory network that is called PB2A—protein phosphatase 2A—which removes phosphates from regulatory enzymes. There are many, many other enzymes that add phosphates, because those alter the activity of various regulatory enzymes. So this is kind of a master regulator. We have looked at botanicals that have active elements that affect that global regulation. An example of one of those is coffee. That has something in it that is affecting that strongly. Coffee has all sorts of epidemiology associated with health benefits. People who drink four or more cups of coffee a day—it doesn’t matter whether it is caffeinated or decaffeinated—have a reduction in Type 2 diabetes, or a reduced incidence of Type 2 diabetes, of about fifty percent. The same with Parkinson’s, although there it is more related to the caffeine. So if you can identify that compound, then you have the potential for a very strong preventive for Type 2 diabetes. There is a reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s. So coffee is actually a pretty good thing to be taking, and there are probably a number of therapeutics that are in both that and other botanicals that are in wide use, in fact such wide use that we don’t even think of them as herbals any more.

Q: What about genetic engineering?

A: Another aspect of [this is] basically opening up biology, of understanding our workings at a very intimate level, at a deep enough level so that we can imagine not just understanding but actually tweaking it in a variety of ways, altering it, adjusting it. It’s clear that the long course, the trajectory of human investigation of ourselves is partially driven by curiosity, but the real program has been to understand ourselves well enough, and life well enough, that we can begin to intervene in those processes. We’re at the point where that’s beginning to be possible. You can see that in the hype associated with the human genome project—that we’re going to have all sorts of interventions that are based on our genetics. Those have not really come to pass, but it doesn’t mean that that larger vision of the possibilities of those kinds of interventions is false. We get a little bit exuberant about these things in the early stages, because you don’t see all the problems that are going to arise, all the complexities. So people who project forward five or ten or fifteen years are often way too aggressive. But if you go forward 25 or 50 or 75 years, it’s amazing how conservative people’s projections are, because they don’t see the breakthroughs that transform the landscape. And so many of the ethical issues that are arising now—it’s not so much with the interventions that are possible today, but the interventions that are quite plausible tomorrow, that we could actually begin to intervene in the processes of life, to alter ourselves. We’ve certainly used technology in very powerful ways. We’ve taken technology, and we’ve altered the world around us. In New York City, people are walking through these valleys of concrete and stainless steel and glass. This is not the stomping ground of our Pleistocene ancestors. Now technology is becoming so potent and so precise that we’re beginning to turn it back on ourselves. The implications are obviously profound, and they will really bring into question what it means to be a human being and how we differ from other life and from non-life as well, where we’re beginning to breathe a level of complexity into inorganic matter, into sand—silicone dioxide, this inert substance at our feet. We are breathing a level of complexity that rivals life itself. Nothing is ever going to be the same. So, naturally, it evokes questions of morality, of purpose, of who we are, of what we will become, which are the most contentious of issues.

Q: A lot of people take a look at these things and jump ahead to what you call the sci-fi scenarios. How do you respond to people who leap to the worst-case scenario when they think about where this might lead?

A: I think that understanding where these possibilities will lead is very, very difficult, because we’re looking through this haze. We really can’t see where these things are going to go. We can make some strong statements in that the dynamic involved is very, very powerful. It’s not as though we have to seek out to do weird sorts of things. We’re engaged in funding tens of billions of dollars to try and understand biology so that we can develop new therapeutics, which everyone supports. Part of those understandings means that the bar is significantly lowered for doing other kinds of adjustments that many people would find more problematic. But I think the projections that we make that are often how we’re going to be afflicted by this knowledge demonstrate more about our own fears than they do about where we will actually go. The same thing on the other side, where we make fantastic predictions about the possibilities and all of the ills that will be removed from humanity and from society by this technological process. I think both of those are extreme, and they say a lot more about our hopes and fears than about where anything is going to go.

To me, it’s clear that this is a very robust development. I think that if you look at the risks and rewards involved, there are far more rewards involved than risks. I think that most of the issues—the real risks were things like “This is going to get out of hand and afflict us with plagues” and damages of that sort. I think that those are relatively unlikely. I think the real dangers of the technology are that we will use it in ways that are very negative. It’s not that somebody is going to try and do genetic screening on an embryo to try and enhance our lives, or to reduce disease. The things that are coming out of a sense of contributing, of adding to the quality of life, in one way or another—I don’t think that those are likely to be the things that are the most dangerous. The things that will be dangerous are to use these understandings to develop new diseases, to create terrorist weapons, things of that sort which, by and large, are not going to be constrained by regulation. So my feeling is that you have to have a certain amount of faith in our ability or the ability of future humans to make decisions about their lives that will be as sensible as the kinds of decisions that we are trying to make about our lives and about the immediate things that affect us. And for us to try and project forward into the distant future often—at least distant as far as the technologies that may be present—and try to control that in some way shows a real lack of respect for the ability of future humans—of our children, of their children—to make judgments that are in their interest, because the things that really are going to be problems are things that we don’t even begin to see now. I can virtually guarantee that. Anybody who looked at email and the Internet—who was worried about spam? No one. We just can’t see these sorts of things. And so, to me, it’s very spiritual to realize the immensity of the changes that are under way right now. They are so dramatic that if you were to push forward even a hundred years, it is mind-boggling, if technology continues to advance at the pace that it’s doing now or at an accelerated pace. And that seems quite likely. So where is this going to lead us? We don’t really know. To be engaged in this process which is changing the world around us, which is changing ourselves, which is life beginning to get control of its own processes and to act upon that information—to me, it’s awe-inspiring. It’s such a privilege to be alive at this instant in time and to be able to see these immense things, because in my view a million years from now—and I see this as a very robust development; I don’t see that we’re moving toward some sort of cliff—but that when future humans, whatever they are, whoever they are, look back on this moment, I think they’re going to look at it as this incredible instant in time when all of these things occurred, when we animated the inanimate, when we breathed life essentially into things that were previously inanimate, when we began to alter our own biology. The very foundation of what they are and who they are will have been established in this moment, in these hundred years. Here we are at this instant of departure, an evolutionary transition that is, in my view, as large as that when single-celled organisms started to come together to form multi-cellular organisms is happening right now. To me, it’s amazing to be able to watch it and to participate in it.

Q: When you use language like that it sounds almost religious. There is a God-like quality of breathing life into inanimate objects, no matter what religious tradition you’re talking about. Does that trouble you at all, human beings taking on that kind of power? What are some of the moral ramifications?

A: I look at it in a broader sense. I don’t put human beings outside of the processes of life and of nature. And so it’s inspiring that nature is achieving a level of complexity that can begin to reflect back upon itself and alter itself in conscious ways as well as in unconscious ways. Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It’s an emergent property. So we’re at this transition between unconsciousness and consciousness and awareness and these levels of activity. So, to me, I’m not troubled by it at all. I like to be able to see it, to be able to have this evocation of these possibilities. And I’m sensible enough to see that it’s not me that’s seeing this; it’s this larger cluster of human activity, almost a super-organism that is able to observe and see all of these things. These possibilities are not coming from individuals; they’re coming from the huge clusterings of activity, where we have computers and scientific research that’s happening in thousands of laboratories all over the world that are cohering together, and that we—through telecommunications, our ability to integrate all sorts of diverse activities that would otherwise be beyond our ken—we can see all of these things. It almost feels like it’s us doing it, but we’re just a part of this larger process. So, to me, it’s why should we be troubled by the nature of the universe, because it’s not exactly what—people will go, “If I were designing things, I’d do it a little differently.” Well, you know, we’re in the middle of a world that is incredibly beautiful, awe-inspiring, that has been constructed with all of these possibilities and these dynamics that are now emerging and we get to see, and that we would sit back and then critique that and say, “Well, I find that very troubling that this is the world that exists”—it’s a conceit to me and a lack of an understanding of an acceptance that we are a part of this; we’re not back away from it, observing in a God-like sense.

Q: Philosopher Michael Sandel talks about mastery and control of humanity and nature. He suggests that’s what we’re seeking, and it is inappropriate.

A: I think that the notion of mastery and control is an unrealistic projection of the possibilities that are emerging, because for all of the advances that we make, we’re still in the midst of all this stuff. There’s one problem after another. It’s like you’re on a treadmill. You’re solving this, you’re solving that. It creates new problems. To me, the idea that we—whoever “we” is—are going to achieve some level of mastery over the environment, which is now increasingly complex and increasingly containing ourselves, it’s almost like we as a group, but we don’t act consciously like an individual. It’s all sorts of interplays and competitions and different varying possibilities that are in competition with one another. Look at all the noise that is associated with even these emergent possibilities in biotechnology. There’s argument, there’s disputation. It’s a process that is moving forward. To me, it feels very different from what we think of as mastery.

Q: What moral principles should be brought to bear, moving forward? You are a proponent of moving ahead full tilt, but what ethical and moral principles should be considered?

A: Let me step back in terms of the process. First of all, I think it’s unrealistic, if you just step back and look at what’s going on—the idea that we actually have the ability to say yes or no, this is going to happen or is not going to happen, is just silliness. This is going to move forward very, very aggressively. You can just see it in all of the energies that are being devoted towards furthering this process, although not necessarily acknowledging the powers that are involved in what is emerging. So it’s not a question about should we allow this to proceed or not. That’s a silly question, because obviously it’s going to move forward. To me, it’s about trying to do things and to guide the process and make it one that is in as much of alignment as we can with our values and the things that we cherish. There are many different answers to those questions from different groups of people and different individuals. Allowing, as well, acknowledging that there is profound turbulence and change that is occurring today, and best preparing ourselves to adjust and handle that change and realizing that values will change, that people will change. There was a lot of complaint about video games and about technology: Is this going to diminish our humanity in some sense? Who’s complaining about this stuff? It’s generally not the kids. If I look back at my great-grandparents and how they would respond to the world today, they wouldn’t be very happy with it. It would be, “It’s great, the things you have, but people don’t know their neighbors, families don’t stay together, you travel all over, people’s conversations at dinner are interrupted by a phone call”—all these sorts of things that are unfamiliar to them. And yet for me I think what a wonderful time to be alive! I wouldn’t want to go back to some previous simpler era with all of the positives and also all of the negatives associated with it. I think that if we look forward, our great-grandchildren are going to look in the same way at this period—to acknowledging that central to our humanity [are] the possibilities of change and redefining ourselves. It’s an acceptance, in many ways, of the inherent shifts and the difficulties that we will be dealing with, and just trying to do it in ways that are very positive, that feed the possibilities and the opportunities for people to develop their most human qualities, to realize themselves. I have a great deal of respect for individuals and the choices that they make. When they make choices about their families I think, by and large, they’re trying to do the right things. They’re the ones that suffer the consequences. In my view, the most damaging evils that are perpetrated upon us are through some abstract notion about good, where we’re willing to sacrifice individuals in the present for some great vision of an improved or perfect future. So, to me, it’s to avoid those sorts of things and to have some humility about our ability to see and to understand a time that we really can’t see very clearly, to allow these sorts of things to occur. To me, what we need is information. To act with wisdom doesn’t require going off and getting together a group of elders and saying how can we best handle this technology, because it comes from a place of ignorance. No one really understands what’s happening. What we need to do is—wisdom comes from knowledge that usually comes at a cost. It’s purchased, so not trying to stifle people’s ability to experiment and to try and do what they think will enhance our selves, in one way or another. By “enhance ourselves” I mean enhance our lives, make positive contributions to who we are and to how we interact with one another, because I think we will basically select what we find of value and will reject things that aren’t of value. So it protects ourselves in many ways. I think that putting that kind of stuff in place is the safest way ultimately to proceed; not to try and draw lines and say we should not cross this line because it feels so unfamiliar, so strange, so odd.

Q: You feel there is a moral responsibility to push ahead?

A: To be brave. We have possibilities before us that previous generations have only dreamed of. I’ve really dreamed of the idea of being able to alter human lifespan, of being able to prevent disease in profound ways, to enhance various qualities that we have. Who knows what will be of value and what won’t be? But I certainly feel that it would be a conceit for me to say that I know what we should do and what is of benefit for humanity as a whole and for the human enterprise. How crazy is that? My vision—and I think about these things all the time—and I actually think that the world that emerges fifty or a hundred years from now will be a place that I probably personally would be quite uncomfortable with because it’s quite unfamiliar. I would love to see it, but I don’t think it would be necessarily a place that would resonate with me in a variety of ways. I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago. You see older individuals who seem out of touch with new developments and you say, “Oh that would never happen with me! I can stay in tune. I can keep in contact with this emerging edge of novelty.” It’s very, very difficult, because the things that we’re familiar with, that resonate with us, are things that are often displaced. The biggest changes occur when a generation dies and a new generation begins to be the dominant one. So it’s very odd. I don’t understand. If you take something that could be the most profound change that could occur, which would be substantial extension of the human lifespan—say we were to double human lifespan—you would think this would be radical in that it would change virtually every institution, it could change the way we relate to one another, it would seem to have very profound consequences. Yet, at the same time, it would be very conservative, because the tastes of those people would probably not alter. And so people would want to hold back changes that would otherwise have occurred when they died. So how do you decide how it all plays out? I don’t think you can; not in advance. So, to me, it’s let’s see where it goes. Make the best choices that we can for real problems that are here and now and ones that we can see in the near-term future. But beyond that, let’s be open to creating possibilities for others to make choices about. That’s the way I see it. To me, I find it sad that so many people, in the face of such wondrous things that are occurring, feel afflicted by a vision that we are destroying the world in some sense, which is, to me, almost criminal; that we take all of this bounty around us and that we hold it as an affliction, when anybody in a prior era would say, “What wondrous things!” We should be happy. We should be enjoying that there is all this bounty. Somebody can take an iPod and have all the world’s music at their beck and call in an instant. What an amazing thing! That we can talk with people across the globe, that we actually can be cured of many, many diseases—these are very wonderful things, and that’s why things don’t change that much, because we take it all for granted. Now with that as a baseline, we say, “But there’s still bad things in the world.” How horrible is that? To me, it’s amazing that we can even envision a place at this point where many, many of the age-old afflictions of humankind are potentially manageable. What a step that is! Of course, it doesn’t come quickly.

Q: Would it trouble you if some of the technology that’s used to help Alzheimer’s patients was also used to enhance the memory of a child, for example, by a parent who wants a child to do better in school?

A: No. If we could enhance our memories, to me that superficially seems desirable. It’s not clear that it would be of as much value as we want, or that it’s as necessary, since we have all sorts of electronic devices that are essentially memory-enhancers, but they’re adjuncts to ourselves rather than alterations of our own biologies. Is it troubling that we carry around devices that expand our memories dramatically? No, not for me. Any time there is a reduction in some disease process, in some affliction which we can all support, the possibility exists of other enhancements. There aren’t sharp lines, in my view, between enhancement and therapy. A perfect example of that is therapeutic enhancements where if you were to improve your immune system so that your immune system was twice as good as it had been for any previous human being; that’s an enhancement, but it’s also therapeutic in that it would protect you from a variety of diseases. I think there are all sorts of blurred lines in that realm. So I would look at individual applications. In the abstract, one might be able to say it seems like this would be desirable or undesirable, but probably you won’t really know until certain individuals try them. And what is desirable for one person might be considered to be undesirable for another. I tend to leave things up to individuals’ choices, to individuals’ making choices about themselves.

Q: Is there a point at which you think it goes beyond choice and things go too far?

A: Right now, with the sort of possibilities of altering, for example, the genetics of an embryo, we’re making choices in a position of being a guardian for a potential future life. There would be some things that probably most of us would agree would be not only great to do, but probably should be done—maybe protection against certain kinds of diseases. There are other things that we would say, “This is beyond the pale,” something that would diminish or damage that future life in ways that we understand. Then I think there will be a whole bunch of stuff that well-intentioned people would have significant differences of opinion about whether it is of benefit or not. I would say, for those things, who’s going to make those choices? I would tend to leave those choices to the individuals, or the guardians, who will be most affected by what happens—and will gain us knowledge about, in fact, whether they are of value or whether they are damaging. So I would tend not to give much weight to the arguments that people make about “This may be good for the individual, but for society as a whole it will be a negative,” because those arguments can be perverted in all sorts of ways. They’re almost impossible to argue against, and they really reflect about our rather opaque visions of the future. So the idea that this is going to change the relationships of individuals with one another, if an individual is allowed to enhance him or herself, then what are the third-degree-removed consequences of that? I think those are relatively meaningless.

Q: Michael Sandel, again, argues against altering the relationship between parent and child, where the child becomes almost a consumer product.

A: I think that those kinds of arguments about what the nature of the relationship between parent and child will be because of the use of technology are very difficult, and I think they tend to be quite false. When people talk about having children as becoming a manufacturing process almost, I don’t think they have a clue about what it is to have a child. You can talk about what one is doing in conception, but there’s a nine-month pregnancy that’s going on. It’s a messy process. Having a child that is growing up and that is forming under your wing—this is not a manufacturing process. Parents sometimes hope that it could be more predictable, but I just see that as very unlikely. Or sometimes arguments are made that if there were cloning, then the cloned individual would not see him or herself as being unique. They would not see themselves as an individual. That’s just empty conjecture, in my view. We certainly have the examples of clones—those are identical twins. Some of them are very tight relationships; some of them fight like cats and dogs. Individual personal relationships and the way we deal with the world are so various. I think to make those kinds of assumptions is silliness, in many ways. I don’t think that should be a major factor in setting policy, because if in fact those are negatives, then we’ll find out soon enough. And we should do so while only very few people are making such choices. The problem is that those are easy to conjure up, those kinds of scenarios, whereas the scenario of people [finding] this of value to their lives, in subtle ways, in diverse ways—who responds emotionally to that argument? I think biologically we are very equipped to respond to the technology gone wild, to great threats. That’s why all the Hollywood movies are about some technology that has escaped and almost destroys us and then we get them back in the box, or we get it back in the box, but not quite, for the sequel. So that’s something we really respond to, and for obvious reasons. It’s really good for our survival in environments where there are clear and immediate dangers. But in terms of putting credence into some abstract vision of what society will be and what our roles will be and what the values of that will be, what our values there will be, and how we’ll hold that, I think, are very, very false.

An example of the kinds of choices that we might make in the future, and that we can make in the present, are screening embryos to make choices about various kinds of traits—personality, temperament—or simply matters of gender, choosing a boy or a girl. So many of the arguments about—and there are many that oppose the idea of choosing the gender of a child. They usually point out the gender imbalances that exist in China, or possibly in India, where there aren’t even high technologies being employed there; it’s simply a matter of basically ultrasound and abortion. And they are very driven by the natures of those societies and the way they devalue boys and girls. It turns out that, in the developed world, of those who make gender selection there is a very slight preponderance of girl babies that are chosen. But they are almost equal. I ask myself who is being injured if a parent, for whatever reason, does not want to have a baby boy, or does not want to have a baby girl—and there are going to be a variety of reasons for that. Is it the child that is being damaged by being the gender of choice of that parent? I don’t think so. If that parent wants to have a baby girl instead of a baby boy, the girl isn’t being damaged. If anything is occurring, the child of the unwanted gender is going to be mistreated, in some way or other, or treated as of less value. So I don’t see that as a problem. If we allow that to occur, and we begin to see larger social problems such as occur in some countries, then we can deal with that. This isn’t something that is going to happen overnight. It takes many, many years for these changes to occur. So that’s an example of a very profound choice. What about temperament and personality? Who is being injured if parents have a predilection for certain types of personality and temperament, if they would be more comfortable or think they really would prefer to have a child who is a little more outgoing, or who is more introverted, or who is a little brighter, or whatever those traits are—who sleeps through the night, a very selfish choice. If there were any risk involved, very few parents would do those sorts of choices. And if there is no risk involved, which there really wouldn’t be for embryo screening, then I think that it’s very unlikely that there’s going to be anyone that’s really damaged by that, other than on a philosophical level, that we’d feel that parents are making choices about their children.

Q: So what if someone actually selected a baby that’s going to sleep through the night or be a little smarter?

A: In my view, the idea that someone—a prospective parent—would make some choice about the possible temperament and personality of their future offspring—which is natural that they would do—in a way that they can relate to more fully, that they think will resonate with more—I don’t see that anyone is going to be damaged by that. I think that a lot of choices, especially by parents who are making a choice about a first-time child, probably this will be one of the many falsities about their relationship with their child that they will see, because they’re going to love their child anyway. To me, I don’t see it as anything that is going to be damaging to anyone. And so I would allow people to proceed with those sorts of choices. And if one begins to have problems that emerge, I think it would be great to monitor the results of those sorts of choices that people made and what the consequences are—for the child, for the family—and we can begin to see whether there are problems. But how can you say that you would only allow those choices to be made for certain types of disabilities? Is a child with cystic fibrosis any less lovable? Is a child with trisomy [Down syndrome] any less lovable? So then we’re led into the uncomfortable position of saying we’re going to draw this line. If it’s about temperament and personality, we don’t want to go there. But as long as it’s just getting rid of a child with some infirmity, of some sort of potential health problem, then we’re comfortable with that. To me, I find that troubling, because then it really is saying that, at some level, prospective future humans are expendable. We’re making that as a societal statement. And at other levels, for other kinds of traits, they’re really not. So I just don’t see anything very damaging about that. I ask myself about all of these technologies.

To me, the question is if this were happening to me, how would I feel about it? When people talk about parents making choices about temperaments and personalities of their children, often people are thinking, “If my parents had been choosing, would I exist? Would I be one of the chosen?” This is a reasonable thing to question. But if one already existed, and you were told, “You know, your parents made a choice that they wanted to have somebody that was kind of outgoing like you are and kind of bright,” or whatever it is, “and how do you feel about that?,” you’re already kind of the winner of the lottery. Are you going to say, “No, I feel diminished, because my personality was, in some sense, the product of choice?” I don’t think so. If you look at children that are adopted and you ask them when their adoptive parents told them how they were chosen and they said, “Oh, we loved you more than any other child! We saw you and you had this about you or that about you, and we chose you actively because we wanted you”—that’s much preferable to “We just picked you at random. You were there and so we took you in.” So, to me, it’s not clear at all that that would be viewed as a diminution by a child. In any event, it’s easy to conflate knowledge about ourselves with choice, because the genetics revolution is making it so that we will soon know about ourselves at a very early age whatever genetics has to tell us about ourselves. So children are going to have to deal with this in the future. To me, it’s kind of natural that we would want to use this information in ways that we consider to be advantageous for our kids. We do it after they’re growing up. Parents have designs for their children that may be out of synch with who they really are.

I feel that life is really a gift, but not from anyone in particular. I think it’s amazing, but there’s a process involved. I feel very grateful for the opportunities I have, for who I am, for what I am. I’m not religious. I have a sense of the spirituality of the world and of the process by which the universe is unfolding, but I don’t believe in a deity that has any interest in my personally, or that was involved in the creation of this universe. And so to me it’s almost awe-inspiring that such a thing exists, rather than the easy answer: Oh, well, something created it as it is. Then who created that something? I see no evidence of such a deity externally, and I still feel a great sense of awe and wonder about who we are and about our place in the universe.