[Paleopsych] More Than Human by Ramez Naam

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More Than Human by Ramez Naam
http://www.morethanhuman.org/

                               More Than Human
               Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
        "one of those rare books that is both a delightful read and an
                             important statement"
                               - Steven Johnson

    More Than Human is about our growing power to alter our minds, bodies,
    and lifespans through technology - the power to redefine our species -
    a power we can choose to fear, or to embrace.

    In 1990, a professor at the University of Colorado discovered that
    changing a single gene doubles the lifespan of tiny nematode worms.

    In 1999, researchers searching for a cure for Alzheimer's disease
    genetically engineered a strain of mice that can learn things five
    times as quickly as their normal kin - super-intelligent mice.

    In 2002, scientists looking for ways to help paralyzed patients
    implanted electrodes into the brain of an owl monkey and trained it to
    move a robot arm 600 miles away just by thinking about it.

    Over the last decade researchers looking for ways to help the sick and
    injured have stumbled onto techniques that enhance healthy animals -
    making them stronger, faster, smarter, longer-lived, even connecting
    their minds to robots and computers.  Now science is on the verge of
    applying this knowledge to healthy men and women.  The same research
    that could cure Alzheimer's is leading to drugs and genetic techniques
    that could boost human intelligence.  The techniques being developed
    to stave off heart disease and cancer have the potential to halt or
    even reverse human aging.

    More Than Human takes the reader into the labs where this is happening
    to understand the science of human enhancement.  It also steps back to
    look at the big picture.  How will these technologies affect society?
    What will they do to the economy, to politics, and to human identity?
    What social policies should we enact to regulate, restrict, or
    encourage the use of these technologies?

    Ultimately More Than Human concludes that we should embrace, rather
    than fear, the power to alter ourselves - that in the hands of
    millions of individuals and families, it stands to benefit society
    more than to harm it.
      _________________________________________________________________

                          Praise for More Than Human

    "Ramez Naam provides a reliable and informed cook's tour of the world
    we might choose if we decide that we should fast-forward evolution. I
    disagree with virtually all his enthusiasms, but I think he has made
    his case cogently and well."
         --Bill McKibben, author Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered
    Age
    "More Than Human is excellent--passionate yet balanced, clearly
    written and rich with fascinating details. A wonderful overview of a
    topic that will dominate the twenty-first century."
        --Greg Bear, author of Dead Lines and Darwin's Children
    "Sixty years ago, human beings gave digital computers the ability to
    modify their own coded instructions--sparking a revolution that has
    now given us the ability to modify our own coded instructions,
    promising revolutions even more extreme. Whether for, against, or
    undecided about genetic modification of human beings, you should read
    this book--a bold, compelling look at what lies ahead."
        --George Dyson, author of Darwin Among the Machines
    "More Than Human is one of those rare books that is both a delightful
    read and an important statement. You'll relish the fascinating stories
    of physical and mental enhancement that Naam has assembled here, but
    you'll also come away with a new sense of wonder at the human drive
    for pushing at the boundaries of what it means to be human. No one
    interested in the future intersections of science, technology, and
    medicine can afford to miss this book."
        --Steven Johnson, author of Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the
    Neuroscience of Everyday Life
    "Ramez Naam's look at the coming of human enhancement is a major
    contribution; he shows convincingly that the conceptual wall between
    therapy and enhancement is fast crumbling."
        --Gregory Stock, author of Redesigning Humans
      _________________________________________________________________

Publisher's Weekly says:

    Imagine a person severely disabled by a stroke who, with electrodes
    implanted in his brain, can type on a computer just by thinking about
    the letters.  Or a man, blind for 20 years, driving a car around a
    parking lot via a camera hard-wired into his brain.  Plots for science
    fiction? No, it's already happened, according to future technologies
    expert Naam.

    In an excellent and comprehensive survey, Naam investigates a wide
    swath of cutting-edge techniques that in a few years may be as common
    as plastic surgery.  Genetic therapy for weight control isn't that far
    off--it's already being done with animals. Countless people who are
    blind, deaf or paralyzed will acquire the abilities that most people
    take for granted through advances in computer technology and
    understanding how the nervous system functions.  Naam says the armed
    services are already investing millions of dollars in this research;
    they envision super-pilots and super-soldiers who will be able to
    control their planes and tanks more quickly via thought.

    Some of the author's prognostications, with their Nietzschean
    overtones of people being "more than human" may frighten readers, but
    Naam is persuasive that many of these advances are going to happen no
    matter what, and that despite the potential for abuses, they offer
    hope for our well-being and the survival of the species.
      _________________________________________________________________

Kirkus Reviews says:

    Wired minds, designer bodies, doubled life spans, a child for every
    happy couple: an optimistic portrayal of the brave new future of
    scientifically improved life. The subtitle is apt, as Naam (a computer
    engineer at Microsoft) makes no attempt to mask his enthusiasm for the
    drugs, therapies, products, and procedures of cutting-edge biotech.
    This is not a sage analysis of the immediate feasibility or likelihood
    of specific changes. Nor does the author claim experience in a
    biological field or medical training. His book, instead, is a logical
    and structured explanation of bioengineering projects underway: gene
    therapy to cure disease, enhance athletic performance, and lengthen
    life span; brain implants to allow the paralyzed to move, the mute to
    speak, the blind to see, and the deaf to hear; brain-computer
    interfaces to mimic telepathy ("Just as we can e-mail our words . . .
    we'll be able to broadcast the inner states of our minds"). There's
    little chance that all of these will ever become mainstream, but some
    certainly will, and that fact alone is both exciting and frightening.

    Naam doesn't shy away from trumpeting controversial propositions such
    as human cloning or genetic selection of embryos, and he audaciously
    sets out game plan and shining new playing field, though he still does
    address some of the bumps in any road that will lead to universal
    acceptance.

    He shows a knack for plain and clear explanations of highly complex
    and technical concepts without condescension or pedantry. He goes
    beyond the simple gee whiz and even takes time to address the
    economics of research (development is expensive, implementation
    thereafter often cheap). Along the way, he refers to political trends
    that suggest eventual acceptance of initially controversial practices
    and ideas, and he investigates large-scale implications of many of the
    biotechnologies, as, for example, the impact upon world population of
    life extension techniques. An intriguing presentation by an unabashed
    advocate of the technological tricking and co-opting of mother nature.
      _________________________________________________________________

LA Times writes:

    Scientific and medical advances in the last 150 years have doubled
    average life spans in advanced countries; made historical curiosities
    of fearsome epidemic diseases; eliminated childhood scourges; turned
    fatal adult diseases into chronic illnesses to be "managed"; and
    changed the way we think about aging. But if you think these changes
    have pushed at our sense of what it means to be human, just wait for
    what will happen in the next 20 years.
    Gene therapy could eliminate genetically based diseases; designer
    drugs could combat neurological or brain disease, improve intelligence
    or sculpt personality. A variety of therapies could affect life at its
    beginning and end, allowing parents to modify the genes that shape an
    unborn child's mind and physique, or elders to dramatically slow the
    aging process. Brain implants already let us use thought to control
    prostheses and robotic devices. In a few years, they could evolve into
    machine-mediated brain-to-brain connection -- Internet-enabled
    telepathy and mind reading.
    Authors as different as Bill McKibben in "Enough" and Francis Fukuyama
    in "Our Posthuman Future" argue that technologies could so
    dramatically alter our bodies, or challenge our capacity for
    self-determination and free will, that we should be wise enough to
    refuse -- even ban -- them.
    Stop worrying, Ramez Naam says in "More Than Human." He argues that
    efforts to ban such enhancements are either folly or futile for
    several reasons. Prohibition wouldn't destroy the markets for
    life-extending therapies or genetic redesign of human embryos, he
    says; it would just drive them abroad or underground. Banning
    technologies and therapies also constrains the freedoms of individuals
    and markets. The Declaration of Independence declared that "Life,
    liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are inalienable rights: Denying
    someone access to cortical implants hits the trifecta.
    Further, Naam argues, "scientists cannot draw a clear line between
    healing and enhancing." Banning the latter would inevitably cripple
    the former. Finally and most provocatively, "far from being unnatural,
    the drive to alter and improve on ourselves is a fundamental part of
    who we humans are." This turns the argument of bioethicists like Leon
    Kass (head of the President's Council on Bioethics, which has been
    famously conservative in its recommendations) upside down. Our limits
    don't define us, Naam says; our desire to overcome them does.
    "More Than Human" is a terrific survey of current work and future
    possibilities in gene therapy, neurotechnology and other fields. Naam
    doesn't shy away from technical detail, but his enthusiasm keeps the
    science from becoming intimidating. But he's less successful in making
    the case for "embracing the promise of biological enhancement." Yes,
    people are greedy, regulations are often ineffective and the war on
    drugs has not gone well. But none of these facts is likely to change
    the minds of people who oppose gene therapy on moral or theological
    grounds. Many religions see the body as a prison, not a temple, and
    illness and death as part of life's natural course. Indeed, the
    Pontifical Academy of Life recently decried the Western world's
    "health-fiend madness," arguing that it takes money away from simpler
    but more potent public health measures -- and denies us the hard-won
    wisdom that suffering can bring.
    But in today's borderless high-tech world, if gene therapies and
    neural implants are banned in the U.S., they'll probably be available
    somewhere else. Medical tourism is already a growth industry in parts
    of Latin America and Asia that have low labor costs, attractive
    locations and good facilities. One can only imagine the money a small
    tropical nation could make restoring youth to the elderly. Rather than
    focus on banning them, we'd be better off making sure these therapies
    are not available only to the super-rich and figuring out how their
    availability could affect the future.
    Those efforts might be helped by realizing that "More Than Human"
    describes two different technologies. Life-extending therapies,
    despite their likely popularity, probably wouldn't dramatically change
    our sense of what it means to be human. In contrast, neurotechnologies
    that allow a prosthetic device to feel like a part of our bodies, or
    let us directly share thoughts and senses with others, would scramble
    our basic notions of body and mind, self and other, individual and
    community.
    I tend to agree with Naam that the desire to prolong life, acquire new
    physical powers and extend the mind does not risk making us less
    human. There's more to life than trying to recapture lost youth, but
    no one who defends the humanity of the weak, the disabled and the very
    old should deny the humanity of those who seek to re-engineer their
    bodies or minds. "More Than Human" maps some of this future, but it
    probably won't help you decide whether you want to really go there.

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References

   10. http://www.morethanhuman.org/blog
   11. http://www.morethanhuman.org/events
   12. http://www.morethanhuman.org/contact