Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution was published (2002), to considerable journalistic attention, by Francis Fukuyama, professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, recent appointee to the US President's Council on Bioethics, and author of the scholarly best-seller, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama's book seems to have been in press when Pierre Baldi published The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (2001). Baldi lacks Fukuyama's best-seller aura, but has impressive academic credentials. His full academic title is significant, if only because it concatenates words that would not have made up an intelligible sequence in earlier academic configurations. Baldi is Professor of Information and Computer Science and of Biological Chemistry in the College of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, where he is Director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics.
Both Fukuyama and Baldi see the future dominated by biotechnology. Each emphasizes different technologies and foresees a different future, and while their respective visions hardly exhaust the possibilities, they provide a representative contrast. I will present their differences in three sections. First, what's possible in the coming 'posthuman future'; second, what the distinct benefits and dangers of this future may be; and third, what ethics are appropriate to guide humanity into this future.
Although Fukuyama, or his editor, chose to place 'posthuman' in his title, he says even less about what this term means than Baldi does. Fukuyama's vision of posthumanity is characterized by threat. In a chapter titled 'A Tale of Two Dystopias' (those presented by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell), Fukuyama writes: 'the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a "posthuman" stage of history' (2002:7)..................
