Making up humans

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It’s mid-2000 and the dog days of the second and last Clinton Administration. Bill Clinton announces the ‘first survey of the entire human genome,’ which he describes as ‘the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind … an epic[sic.]-making triumph of science and reason.’ It will ‘revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases … making life better for all citizens of the world, never just a privileged few.’ Clinton imagines a time when ‘our children’s children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars,’ insisting that ‘biotechnology companies are absolutely essential to this endeavor’ because they can ‘bring to market the life-enhancing applications’ of genomic research. Genetic data must not be deployed ‘to stigmatize or discriminate against any individual or group.’ Finally, Clinton is pleased to announce that genetic research shows ‘all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9% the same’ (Clinton, 2000).

Two decades on, we are still waiting for the transformations he announced. Yet it is clear that this is already an extraordinary moment, albeit anticipatory and aspirational. Scholars, governments, and corporations are devoting vast resources to phenomics, bio-engineering, artificial intelligence, genetics, pharmaceuticals, and neuroscience, with abundant explorations, experiments, inspirations, investments, promises, and products. Plant, animal, robotic, and human existence is undergoing immense technological transformation.

And this is one of those ages of true believers. Not in communism; nor in fascism; not even in poor old liberalism. It is an age of sociobiology, evolutionary sociology, and their kind. AstraZeneca has gone so far as to announce that ‘Death is optional’ (quoted in “Billion”, 2007, p. 69); founder of PayPal Peter Thiel proposes that ‘Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem’ (Sample, 2022). More, the idea of deliberately constructing and re-constructing people is a dream not just of eternal life, but of a perfect one; of transcendence in the here and now.

There’s a line in Joe Jackson’s song “Nineteen Forever” where the singer imagines himself to be endlessly ‘young and free from fear.’ It’s akin to what DH Lawrence identified as ‘the true myth of America. … She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth’ (1953, p. 64). The grand promise of the United States is that what its people were born as need not define them ever more. The Latin@ writer James Truslow Adams coined the signal term ‘the American Dream’ in 1931. Adams argued that since the 17^th century, voluntary immigrants had been attracted not only by ‘[t]he economic motive,’ but by ‘the hope of a better and freer life, a life in which a man might think as he would and develop as he willed’ (1941, p. 31). That sense of will is about rejuvenation, about a conquest of the self and of territory. It is an obsession of the men who dominate the principal virtual platforms today, who devote vast resources to what they hope will bring immortality for them and those they cherish.

The notion of eternal youth may be an artifact of the Global North’s post-War consumption boom, cultivation of teenage markets, and the narcissism of cybertarians, but the dream of endless life has a longer heritage, dating at least to Mesopotamia’s imagined ‘philosopher’s stone.’ In addition to its alchemical and cloning qualities, the stone could supposedly grant the gift of eternity. Solidity in its material existence as a building block of life, but changeability was incarnate in its expression of desire, as an elixir. The life of the stone was revived when it provided the title to the first Harry Potter adventure (Rowling, 1997), though ‘sorcerer’ displaced ‘philosopher’ for US readers, protecting the analytic cabal that runs Yanqui philosophy from interpellation.

Biotechnology offers the prospect of absolute control/development of people through drugs that destroy or augment memory, block or enhance fertility, create hypermusculature, and defy resistance to bacteria; and micro-machines that give sight and hearing to the disabled—or take them away. Instead of illness cured, one type of wellness substitutes for another.

This era of enhancement technologies differs from others because consumer purchases displace political activism and participatory public policy as a means of improvement. Newsweek predicts ‘made-to-order, off-the-shelf personalities … a shift from reactive to preventative and more personalized medicine’ (quoted in DeGrandpre, 2006, p. 57). For the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) two decades ago, this was part of a ‘transition to a more biobased economy,’ to which there must be no ‘inappropriate barriers,’ only ‘opportunities’ (2004, p. 3).

But for Jürgen Habermas, there is a sinister aspect. Elements of chance and choice that characterized the meeting of genes, society, and individuality in the past are being superseded as ‘the depth of the organic substrate’ becomes susceptible to pre-natal intervention and recoding (2003, pp. 12–13, 23, 76). Even the OECD has come to see that matters might be a wee bit more complicated in terms of ethics and public opinion than its instinctive economism would allow (Garden & Winickoff, 2018).

For all too often, the new dream of reinvention collapses into a nightmare. Numerous social, cultural, legal, psychological, economic, and political questions are emerging alongside developments in bioethics, genetic engineering and editing, brain chips, neuroscience, and medical enhancement. Issues of state regulation, democratic participation, religion, gender, disability, sexuality, reproduction, competition, and race are being raised by politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, activists, scientists, social scientists, health professionals, journalists, and humanists.

Clinton’s remarks quoted earlier, about the shared nature of humanity disclosed by the human genome project and bolstered by universal solidarity, show no awareness that almost all the relevant research had been based on one, white body, rather than a pan-genome (Steinmark, 2023). A raft of later studies that bother to look into peoples from around the world shows the vast variation that animates health and illness alike (Levy-Sakin et al., 2019). But a quarter of a century after Clinton’s Messianic tones, the frame of reference remains minuscule. Few miracles are to hand.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2023.2210921