BUILDING BETTER HUMANS: An interesting article from the Washington Post:

“You have to make a distinction between the science and the technological applications,” says Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and director of the Human Biotechnology Governance Project. “It’s probably true that in terms of the basic science, it’s pretty hard to stop that. It’s not one guy in a laboratory somewhere. But not everything that is scientifically possible will actually be technologically implemented and used on a large scale. In the case of human cloning, there’s an abstract possibility that people will want to do that, but the number of people who are going to want to take the risk is going to be awfully small.”

Taboos will play an important role, Fukuyama says. “We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation. If companies were allowed to use clinical trials in Third World countries, paying a lot of poor people to take risks that you wouldn’t take in a developed country, we could speed up technology quickly. But because of the Holocaust — ”

Fukuyama thinks the school of hard knocks will slow down a lot of attempts. “People may in the abstract say that they’re willing to take that risk. But the moment you have a deformed baby born as a result of someone trying to do some genetic modification, I think there will be a really big backlash against it.”

The article mentions Moore’s Law, but Fukuyama quickly encounters Godwin’s Law . . . And, of course, Fukuyama, like many bioconservatives, is much more worried about biotechnological improvements that work as advertised than about those that fail. In fact, Fukuyama, and Leon Kass, are deeply troubled that these visions will come true:

Ray Kurzweil, an artificial-intelligence pioneer and winner of the National Medal of Technology, shrugs at the controversy over the use of stem cells from human embryos: “All the political energy that has gone into this issue — it is not even slowing down the most narrow approach.” It is simply being pursued outside the United States — in China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Scandinavia and Great Britain, where scientists will probably achieve success first, he notes.

In the next couple of decades, Kurzweil predicts, life expectancy will rise to at least 120 years. Most diseases will be prevented or reversed. Drugs will be individually tailored to a person’s DNA. Robots smaller than blood cells — nanobots, as they are called — will be routinely injected by the millions into people’s bloodstreams. They will be used primarily as diagnostic scouts and patrols, so if anything goes wrong in a person’s body, it can be caught extremely early.

As James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, famously put it: “No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?”

Why, indeed?

UPDATE: Reader Aram Hagopian emails:

Here is my prediction- you will (~ next 5 yrs) will renounce your conservative position and become a anti- religion liberal. You will claim that the conservative movement is controlled by religious fanatics. You will cite the Schiavo case (I have no dog in this fight ) , gay marriage ban, and some event the future which reinforces your inner fear of Christians. Seeing the rise of Muslimism only adds to your fears and mistrusts. I think this started with your grandfather (or father ) who felt that all preachers were meal-grubbing charlatans. Starting with this distorted view ( I am amazed how an intellectual like yourself would by into this mindless bias) you seem to have your fears reinforced by some experience or persons. You are one of the best bloggers and I hope( I dare not say pray) my prediction will turn out to be false.

I think that Hagopian has me confused with Andrew Sullivan. On the other hand, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a conservative, and only simple-minded wartime litmus tests make me out to be so.