Published by Henry Holt
Copyright 2003

"Right now, all around the world, ten thousand scientists are assembling ten thousand different pieces of the human genetic puzzle. Most of this work leads in exciting directions-toward new and better cancer drugs, a vaccine for AIDS-but such research may also lead to something much darker: to attempts at genetically engineering human beings in the womb, designing our children to make them smarter, prettier, "better." We've already done such work with a long list of other mammals, and scientists right up to James Watson, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, now urge us to try the same trick with our kids, arguing that it is both inevitable and desirable. "Going for perfection," Watson calls it. But in fact such genetic tampering threatens to destroy the very things that give meaning to human life….

"The engineers promise to complete the process of liberation, to free us or, rather, our offspring from the limitations of our DNA, just as their predecessors freed us from the confines of the medieval worldview, or the local village, or the family. They can, they promise confidently, remove the ties that bind us-the genes that allow us to fall into ill health, or that keep us from being more intelligent, or more muscular, or more handsome, or happier. It seems as if, with their splicing and snipping, they want only to remove one more of the stones that weigh us down; that without it we will bound even higher, be more truly liberated.

"In fact, though, whatever you think of the last five hundred years, this is one liberation too many. We are snipping the very last weight holding us to the ground, and when it's gone we will float silently away into the vacuum of meaninglessness.

"What will you have done to your newborn when you have installed into the nucleus of every one of her billions of cells a purchased code that will pump out proteins designed to change her? You will have robbed her of the last possible chance of understanding her life. Say she finds herself, at the age of sixteen, unaccountably happy. Is it her being happy-finding, perhaps, the boy she will first love-or is it the corporate product inserted within her when she was a small nest of cells, an artificial chromosome now causing her body to produce more serotonin? Don't think she won't wonder: at sixteen a sensitive soul questions everything. But perhaps you've "increased her intelligence"-and perhaps that's why she is questioning so hard. She won't even be sure whether the questions are hers…

"When taken by people who are not in obvious medical need, drugs such as Prozac may smooth out identity, stunt emotional growth; at the very least, as many have noted, they raise the question of how you tell who you really are. But Prozac and its soma sisters remain, for the moment, pills. They are designed to help people through bad patches. You can refuse to take them, you can stop taking them; they are not you in the sense that they would be if municipal officials loaded them into the water supply. And certainly not in the way they would be you if your optimistic father had determined he wanted double-grande optimism in his son and so worked the extra serotonin into your very wiring, syringed it in as an ineradicable tattoo….

"If you genetically alter your child and the programming works, then you will have turned your child into an automaton to one degree or another; and if it only sort of works, you will have seeded the ground for a harvest of neurosis and self-doubt we can barely begin to imagine. If "Who am I?" is the quintessential modern question you will have guaranteed that your children will never be able to fashion a workable answer."

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