Presentation at Gender and Justice in the Gene Age, New York, NY

I'm going to focus on two questions:

1 - Who is advocating genetic enhancement of future children and generations / what do they mean?

2 - Why is it that some progressives and feminists don't share our concerns about this advocacy?

Many of you know that about five or six years ago - less than a decade after the introduction of PGD - a disturbing number of influential U.S. scientists, bioethicists, biotech entrepreneurs, and others began an active campaign to promote germline engineering and other forms of inheritable genetic modification, for the explicit purpose of 'enhancing' or 'improving' future children.

Some of them predict that, within a generation, "enhanced" babies will be born with increased resistance to diseases, optimized height and weight, and enhanced metabolic function and muscle mass. Farther off, but within the lifetimes of today's children, they foresee the ability to adjust personality, extend life expectancy, and increased intelligence.

These advocates are not marginal figures like the "cowboy cloners" who maneuvered so much media attention with claims of having produced - or being about to produce - a cloned child. I'm going to come back to the fringe characters in a minute. Here I'm talking about respected people working at prestigious universities and research centers in the U.S., writing in professional journals and regularly quoted in the largest-circulation newspapers and weekly news magazines.

Some of them at times speak in grandiose terms of `seizing control of human evolution´ or of the need to engineer super-intelligent people because - in the words of the former editor of Science magazine, Daniel Koshland - "we have created a society that is so technologically complex that we must now create people who are smart enough to manage it."

But for the most part, these advocates focus on more personal and intimate spheres, describing a future in which parents pre-select the characteristics of their children in order to "give them the best start in life." Often they openly acknowledge that such genetic enhancement services would be available only to the wealthy, and that they are sure to exacerbate inequality and perhaps to create unprecedented forms of inequality. But they do not find in any of these possibilities reason to forego eugenic engineering. In Children of Choice, for example, legal scholar and bioethicist John Robertson writes that genetic enhancements for the affluent are "simply another instance in which wealth gives advantages."

The most infamous of these proponents of consumer eugenics is the Princeton biologist Lee Silver, who predicts the emergence of genetic castes, and eventually of new human species that he calls the "GenRich" and the "Naturals."

It's important to underline that Silver writes not to register alarm or concern. Here and elsewhere, his tone alternates between frank advocacy of a new market-based eugenics and disengaged acceptance of its inevitability.

And his writing is drenched with a vulgar neoliberalism: "There is no doubt about it," he writes, "whether we like it or not, the global marketplace will reign supreme."

"[I]f the cost of reprogenetic technology follows the downward path taken by other advanced technologies like computers and electronics, it could become affordable to the majority of members of the middle class in Western societies... And the already wide gap between wealthy and poor nations could widen further and further with each generation until all common heritage is gone. A severed humanity could very well be the ultimate legacy of unfettered global capitalism."

Some people, including some in this room, believe that scenarios like these will long-perhaps forever-remain beyond technical reach. We can hope so. We can hope that notwithstanding the flesh-and-blood accomplishments of today's genetic scientists-transgenic rabbits that glow in the dark; transgenic goats that lactate spider silk-designer-baby procedures will always have too many bugs or too little value added.

But even if that's the case, I think it behooves us to ask why the Silvers and Koshlands and James Watsons have not been taken even mildly to task, either by their scientific colleagues or by liberal and progressive intellectuals who might be expected to muster a bit of angst over such crass eugenic visions. It's important to ask what the effects of such visions are on our political and moral and cultural sensibilities.

I'm afraid that minimizing the appeal and seductiveness of this techno-fascination is something that we do at our peril. I want to move from these mainstream scientists and bioethicists to the kind of cultural message that's being purveyed in a somewhat fringier circle-though I think it's important to note that one of the challenges we face is precisely that the mainstream and the margins are blurring into each other on these issues.

About six weeks ago, Diane Beeson, Marsha Saxton and I accepted an invitation from a graduate student at UC Berkeley, a very sweet young gay man who calls himself a transhumanist, to speak at a conference that he was organizing on campus. Our panel was the feminist critics of new technologies of human redesign; the panel before ours was the feminist transhumanists. Three women, all articulate, smart, upbeat about the technologically transformed future they advocate.

One of the speakers was a woman named Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, which was founded by Eric Drexler to promote both biotechnology and nanotechnology, which Abby mentioned yesterday. Christine showed us technical diagrams of super-smart nanobots that will scour our bloodstreams looking for pathogens or plaque, and promised that nanotechnology will soon allow us not only to cure all kinds of diseases and live many decades longer, but also to transform our own bodies in radical ways.

During the question-and-answer period, one man hesitantly asked whether there might not be a problem with these technologies-whether they might represent a misallocation of priorities, whether we might not be better off focusing our resources on challenging oppressions and injustices based on racial discrimination, gender inequality, and class stratification.

Christine replied that biotech and nanotech in fact are going to banish these pesky problems. In 50 years or so, she said, each of us will be able to take personal control of our body conformation and morph our bodies into any racial or sexual configuration. So that's that. But, she continued, class is a bigger problem: the rich and the poor will always be with us. On the other hand, she said, we shouldn't worry too much about this-instead, we should celebrate diversity-after all, some people like skiing and some like tennis.

The sorts of techno-utopian and techno-eugenic visions I've been describing carry with them some deep ideological messages. They those of us who still harbor dreams of global social justice and solidarity to get over it. They tell us that science, once (and sometimes still) the instrument of enlightenment and emancipation, may bequeath us instead a world in which class divisions harden into genetic castes, and that there's not a damn thing we can do about it. They advise us to look to techno-fixes and techno-utopias instead of to rearrangements of political power and social stratification.

These ideological messages have resonance because they are in synch with large cultural and economic forces that are particularly strong in the United States-with the continuing onslaught of corporate and consumer values and of technological triumphalism. In the context of these larger forces, the story of an "enhanced" humanity panders to some of the least attractive tendencies of our time: techno-scientific curiosity unbounded by care for social consequence, the "quest for perfection" that Botox and the television show "Extreme Makeover" bespeak, the obsession with normality that we see in disability selection, hopes for our children wrought into consumerism, deep denial of our own mortality, and techno-utopianism as a substitute for hopeful social visions.

When we began the work that led to the Center for Genetics and Society, we thought that feminists and progressives would easily share our sense of urgent dismay about the advocacy of genetic "enhancement" and consumer eugenics, and easily identify it with the assumptions that I've referred to. That has not always been the case. Why? In part because few of us are immune to those assumptions. But also because of three specific situations:

1. the very real and imminent threat to abortion rights in the U.S., and the extreme polarization that characterizes abortion politics, so that if anti-abortion forces oppose cloning, feminists almost automatically support it

2. the strength of the libertarian impulse that pervades the U.S. and extends to progressive circles, and the accompanying suspicion of any sort of government regulation

3. A sentiment that can be termed "biomedical exceptionalism." By that I mean a blind spot in the application of critical political analysis to anything that can be construed as a medical technology. When the discussion is about technologies in the realms of energy, pesticides, large dams, the precautionary principle is at least mentioned, social consequences are at least considered. But call it medical, and it gets a free ride. Many of the techno-boosters recognize this very clearly: thus the suffering babies in the articles about research cloning; thus the promises by the Biotechnology Industry Organization that embryonic stem cells would treat diseases affecting 128 million Americans. James Watson says,

Nonetheless I'm optimistic.