Book Review: Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares

Perhaps fortuitously, I started to read Maxwell Mehlman's book at the same time as Roy Porter's 'A Short History of Madness'. It was then difficult not to muse on what Jonathan Swift might have made of 'transhumanising scientists'. His satirising of scientists 'infected with lunacy' in the eighteenth century provides a hard to avoid parallel with Mehlman's very much not satirical account of biologists of the twentieth century.

Every school child now knows that molecular genetics is set to transform the world as we know it. Although exactly who 'we' are, is not specified; nor are we always told whether the transformation will be for good or ill. We can be reasonably certain though that most of the world's existing population will be dead before genetics' claims for medicine have any effect on them.

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