Technosplit: The Bifurcation of Humanity
By Jeremy Lent,
Alternet
| 05. 17. 2017
Will social inequality soon be programmed into our DNA?
The chasm between rich and poor in the world has become so extreme it is frequently difficult to grasp. The eight richest men in the world now own as much as the entire bottom half of the world’s population. The wealthy OECD countries, representing less than 20% of the global population, consume 86% of the world’s goods and services, while the poorest 20% consume only 1.3%. These numbers translate into the shameful reality that a billion people go hungry every day and another billion remain chronically malnourished.
Nevertheless, you won’t hear much talk about these numbers in techno-optimist circles that breathlessly discuss the tantalizing possibilities of human enhancement. When futurists blithely envision the possibilities for human enhancement, they ignore the fact that billions of people are barely surviving. and will have no realistic chance of gaining access to these advances. In fact, spend enough time on these topics and you’re liable to forget that the majority of human beings are struggling to make ends meet and barely able to think about... see more
Related Articles
In the last six years, scientific groups have organized two multi-day International Summits, both with published summaries, and at least four major reports that discuss whether heritable human genome editing should be allowed, and if so when and under what circumstances. The general trend in these quarters has clearly been supportive of developing the technology, with two important caveats: safety and public acceptance. A casual observer, such as a busy politician who might have to vote on the subject, might...
By Gina Maranto
| 06.04.2021
CRISPR People is an amalgam: one part historical reconstruction, one part legal inquiry, one part ethical examination, it delves into the disquieting events of late 2018 when word emerged that He Jiankui, a Chinese biophysicist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, had staged a clinical experiment in which women were implanted with embryos genetically altered using the DNA editing technique known as CRISPR. Two reporters broke the story, the first in MIT Technology Review and the...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 05.26.2021
For decades, scientists have been prohibited from keeping human embryos alive in their labs for more than 14 days. The prohibition was aimed at avoiding a thicket of ethical issues that would be raised by doing experiments on living human...
By Stuart A. Newman and M.L. Tina Stevens, The New York Review | 05.23.2021
In her recent review of four books on the prospects of applying CRISPR and related gene modification technologies to the improvement of human biology [“Editing Humanity’s Future,” NYR...
