Christian Worldview Concepts

Desperately Seeking Perfection: Transhuman's Utopian Dreams

Transhumanism and the Future of Medicine

Throughout history, humans have sought ways to control the unpredictable or undesirable circumstances of life, especially those that contribute to difficult or shorter lifespans. Despite the wide variety of difficulties that life can bring, we humans generally enjoy being here on Earth. We tend to like life and desire that it continues. The search for the proverbial Fountain of Youth is more than a metaphor for Transhumanists. Their aim is to take the tools of biotechnology much further than simply responding to disease. In so doing, they also intend to produce a new medical ethic, one that leaves the old ones in the dust of history.

What is it that they intend to leave behind? In human medicine we have generally followed the principle of primum non nocere (above all, do no harm). This guiding principle has served us well in the two millennia that the Hippocratic Oath has guided physicians. During that span of time the medical profession held that human beings were patients to be cared for and respected, but that there were natural biological limits beyond which physicians not only could not but should not go. Doctors were not to intentionally harm their patients, even in the interest of furthering medical knowledge. The individual patient was to be the principal concern of the physician. However, this ancient principle appears to be at odds with some of the ambitious aims of Transhumanism.

The emergence of an increasingly sophisticated scientific knowledge and the development of more and more ways to intervene in the disease processes that kill us produced a remarkable "can do" mindset both among scientists and in much of the general population. This technological "Tower of Babel" (Genesis 11) under girds the widespread belief that, given adequate funding and deploying the smartest people, we humans might nearly become unbounded in eradicating sickness, disease and even death. In fact, it is this conclusion that drives Transhumanists.

Unsatisfied with the current status of human existence, Transhumanists conclude that we need not settle for whatever nature provides; that humans need not accept the limitations imposed by the mindless and purposeless forces of nature. People can be made smarter, prettier, healthier, stronger, more talented and more athletic if we are willing to break with "outmoded" ideas about human beings.⁸ Transhumanists believe we can secure the blessings of immortality, not by adhering to the precepts and provisions of a divine Creator but by purely secular scientific and technological means.

According to Transhumanists, in the quest for immortality, we have reached a point where scientific inquiry and technological innovation not only allow us many more options but these new technologies create obligations to use them for eugenics purposes.⁹ We no longer must stand helplessly by while nature "red in tooth and claw" has its way with us. We now possess the knowledge to go well beyond what nature imposes. through knowledge already acquired from the Human Genome Project and the subsequent discoveries of stem cells, nuclear somatic transfer (cloning) and breakthroughs in neurology and nanotechnology.¹⁰ Transhumanists believe humanity stands at the door of the next real frontier — the post-human.

Some may consider this purely science fiction, but it was not that long ago that cloning was also considered science fiction, a biological threshold that has already been crossed. Even a cursory review of medical history will reflect a steady stream of technologies that were once considered fanciful dreams, e.g., organ transplants, artificial organs and limbs, genetically engineered animals and medicines.

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⁸ Wesley Smith, "True Enough: Bill McKibben's useful assault on the unfettered biogenetic project" Weekly Standard (Vol. 8, No. 38, June 9, 2003)
⁹ Eugenics is a term coined by Sir Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) and taken from a Greek root word meaning "good in birth" or "good in heredity." Galton intended the term to refer to efforts to improve humankind through the control of human procreation.
¹⁰ Nano is Greek for dwarf, and nanoscience deals with the study of molecular and atomic particles, a world that is measured in nanometers (billionths of a meter or 10^-9 ). Nanotechnology research is primarily focused on molecular manufacturing — the creation of tools, materials, and machines that will eventually enable us "to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the laws of physics." A leading nanotech scientist describes past efforts at molecular level manufacturing as attempts to assemble LEGO pieces while wearing boxing gloves. Nanotechnology, he believes, will enable us to take off the gloves and build extraordinary things.