The Modified Man
By Carl T. Hall,
California
| 07. 03. 2008
[Quotes CGS's Richard Hayes]
Nobody's perfect. Not even Tim McNeill. A three-time All-American gymnast and team co-captain at Berkeley, in April McNeill won two NCAA individual championships competing at Stanford's Maples Pavilion. He keeps up a 3.5 grade point average despite a rigorous training schedule. He's even managed to maintain a yearlong relationship with a nonathlete (a high-achieving sociology major). His latest titles, on both pommel horse and parallel bars, bring his career total to five-more
than any other Cal athlete. At the Stanford meet he was "just lights-out better than his competition," says Ryan Cobb, head athletic trainer. This spring, the 22-year-old earned himself a spot on the U.S. Senior National Team, giving him a shot at the biggest prize of all this summer: a ticket to Beijing and a chance for Olympic gold.
"This is what I love to do," he says. "I love going to practice and competing. If I could do this the rest my life, I would."
If only he could.
Like some high-performance two-seater sports car in human form, McNeill's 5-foot-6, 135-pound body seems ideally suited for its...
Related Articles
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Aaron Ginn, The Washington Post | 09.12.2025
Earlier this year, I had dinner in D.C. with Jensen Huang, the president and chief executive of Nvidia. At one point, he said something that struck me: “Why is everyone here so negative?”
He wasn’t referring to the economy...
