Of baseball and enhancement bondage
By Pete Shanks,
San Francisco Chronicle
| 09. 26. 2005
Baseball fans around the nation have been conducting their own straw poll about human enhancement, and they don't like it. Rafael Palmeiro has practically been driven out of the game, Mark McGwire is now seen as more cartoon than hero, and Jason Giambi is treated with widespread derision.
Then there is Barry Bonds.
Bonds is -- as usual -- a lightning rod for everyone's feelings, a walking paradox who illustrates without even trying just how complex these issues are. He told reporters before his first game in Washington, D.C., that there are more serious issues than steroids, but all that did was increase the hype about his appearance. And he lived up to it.
Bonds getting booed is not unusual in a road game. But in Washington, he was booed by fans who were on their feet as he homered to the upper deck -- clapping at the same time they were jeering. Whether they were right or wrong about Bonds (who denies ever knowingly taking illegal substances), there couldn't be a more dramatic illustration of the conflicts we feel...
Related Articles
Not the species, certainly, but the Institute of that name, which was founded by transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2005 as a research group at Oxford University. According to a recently posted Final Report, its goal was “to pursue the big questions in a transdisciplinary way” by pulling together “researchers from disciplines such as philosophy, computer science, mathematics, and economics.” This evolved before long into the study and promotion of “effective altruism” and “longtermism” as...
By Yelena Biberman and Jonathan D. Moreno, Bioethics Forum | 04.16.2024
A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.
Now for the...
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...