The New Human

Are you old enough to remember when computer screens came only in black and white? Do you own the kind of truck that guys at the hardware store always try to buy from you--a truck so old it not only sports just an AM radio but has no software in it at all? Can you remember when music players were composed of several fairly heavy boxes covered with laminated walnut and had to be wrestled up onto a high shelf? Are you old enough to remember the smell of mimeograph machine fluid?

If so, you have lived through the extraordinary changes of the last few decades of the 20th century. But this will be nothing compared with the changes through which your second-grade daughter is living. Imagine her a decade and a half from now, home for the holidays. You were so proud of her when she not only put herself through Ohio State but graduated summa cum laude. Now she has taken on her most formidable challenge yet: competing with her generation's elite in her new law school. "What are your classmates like?" you ask.

"They're all really, really smart," she says. She thinks of the stars in her contracts class. How does she explain to you what these people are like? Her classmates have amazing thinking abilities. They're not just faster and more creative than anybody your daughter has ever met but faster and more creative than anybody she has ever imagined. They have photographic memories and total recall. They devour books in minutes. They talk casually about living a very long time, perhaps being immortal. They're always discussing their next lives. One fellow mentions how, after he makes his pile as a lawyer, he plans to be a glassblower, after which he wants to become a nanosurgeon. One of her new friends fell while jogging, opening a gash on her knee. Your daughter freaked, ready to take her to the hospital. But her friend stared at the wound, focusing her mind on it. Within minutes the bleeding stopped. This same friend has also been vaccinated against physical suffering. She never feels acute pain for long.

Your daughter's new friends are polite to her when she can't keep up with their conversations, as if she were handicapped. They can't help but condescend, however, when she protests that imbedded technology is not natural for humans. That's what they call her--Natural. In fact, that's what they call all those who could augment themselves but choose not to, the way vegetarians choose to abstain from meat. They call themselves Enhanced. What about people who have neither the education nor the money to even consider keeping up with enhancement technology? Those they dismiss as simply the Rest. They just keep falling further behind.

Your daughter and her classmates take it as a matter of course that the law they are studying is changing to match the new realities. It will be upgraded, the Enhanced believe, just as they have new physical and mental upgrades installed when they go home.

This scenario is not a prediction. I have no crystal ball, alas. But it is grounded in hard facts. These technologies are being developed today in labs, hospitals and universities worldwide--much of it funded by the U.S. military. It is a faithful rendition of what life will be like in our lifetime--on our watch--if some of that engineering turns out to work.

We are at a turning point in history. For all previous millennia, we aimed our technologies outward, toward controlling our environment. Starting with fire and clothes, we looked for ways to ward off the elements. With the development of agriculture we controlled our food supply. In cities we sought safety. Telephones and airplanes collapsed distance. Antibiotics kept microbes at bay. Now, however, we are aiming our technologies inward. We have started to alter our mind, our memories, our metabolism, our personality, our progeny and perhaps our soul. The shift is so profound that serious people call it radical evolution. Says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Public Health, "The next frontier is our own selves."

This isn't fiction. You can see it taking shape in the headlines. In 2003 President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill funding research at the molecular level that could lead to medical robots traveling the human bloodstream to fight cancer or fat cells.

At the University of Pennsylvania male mouse cells are being transformed into egg cells. If this science works in humans--as research at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. suggests--it would open the way for two men to make a baby, with each contributing 50 percent of his genetic material. It would redefine parenthood.

Similar work has questioned the biological relevance of males. For decades the (continued on page 124)New Human(continued from page 54) only mouse cells scientists could not grow from embryonic stem cells were sperm and eggs. That changed with the creation of the Penn eggs, as well as follicular cells that help young egg cells mature. Making sperm from stem cells is more complicated than making eggs, but if it can be done, then lesbian couples could create a baby with no help at all from the opposite sex, because they can gestate the baby themselves.

In 2005 technology debuted that may offer women unprecedented flexibility in the timing of motherhood. While women are young and fertile, pieces of their ovaries can be surgically removed and frozen. This enables them to have full careers without fretting about the biological clock. Decades later they can have the fragments transplanted back into their bodies, holding out the promise that they could bear children in their 60s, 70s or 80s. Evidence that the technology works came with the birth of a daughter, Sienna, to Ann Dauer of Canton, Ohio last September. Dauer was only 33 but had previously undergone the equivalent of menopause as a result of chemotherapy for Hodgkin's lymphoma. Implanting slices of her thawed ovarian tissue restarted her menstrual cycle and reversed her sterility. She then conceived naturally.

Matthew Nagle, in 2004, became the first human to send e-mail using only his thoughts. This 26-year-old former high school football star had his spinal cord severed in a stabbing incident, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. Scientists with a Foxborough, Massachusetts firm called Cyberkinetics implanted a computer chip the size of a baby aspirin on the surface of Nagle's motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement. Extending from the chip were 100 superfine sensor wires that read individual neurons as they fired. This device was hooked up to a titanium jack coming out of the right side of his skull, which in turn was connected to a computer that read the patterns Nagle's firing neurons made when he concentrated on moving an object. Not only could he control a computer cursor with his mind, he could control a robotic hand. When he thought about moving his hand, the artificial thumb and forefinger opened and closed. Researchers hope this technology will allow the wheelchair-bound to walk. The military hopes it will allow pilots to fly jets with their synapses.

If ongoing human clinical trials continue successfully, memory-enhancement drugs should be on the market within three to five years. They promise to banish baby boomers' senior moments. But memory is also at the core of education. Think what such enhancers could do to language learning alone. They could also allow parents to buy improvements of 200 points or more to their kids' SAT scores. Memory enhancement could prove to be a greater marketing blockbuster than Viagra. Keep a close eye on clinical trials conducted by such companies as Cortex Pharmaceuticals, Helicon Therapeutics, Memory Pharmaceuticals and Saegis Pharmaceuticals.

Such advances in our strictly biological human qualities don't include the capabilities of the clever machines with which we increasingly merge in order to project our powers over vast distances. In the last week of the first Gulf war, five Iraqi soldiers waved white flags at a U.S. Pioneer unmanned air vehicle--the first time in history somebody tried to surrender to a robot. When another unmanned air vehicle, a U.S. Predator, successfully fired a Hellfire missile at an Al Qaeda leader's SUV in Yemen in 2002, it became arguably the first robot to incinerate a human being.

You'll see a lot more headlines like these in the next few years. Four intertwining processes--call them the GRIN technologies, for genetic, robotic, information and nano processes--are advancing at exponential rates, regularly doubling and redoubling in power. By that arithmetic, the amount of change we have experienced in the past 20 years will be compressed into the next eight; the amount of change in the past 50 years will be accomplished in the next 14.

Many of the GRIN breakthroughs come from corporations that are household names, such as Intel and Genentech. Sober mainstream government institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are funding others. Enhanced people already walk among us.

The sports world provides many examples. "The current doping agony," says John Hoberman, a University of Texas authority on performance drugs, "is a kind of very confused referendum on the future of human enhancement." The mix of extreme pharmacology and sport did not begin or end with East Germany. Competitive bodybuilding is already divided into tested shows (drug-free) and untested shows (anything goes). Should Barry Bonds go around for the rest of his life with an asterisk on his forehead because the steroid scandal suggests he was not the same kind of human as those whose baseball records he broke?

That's merely the beginning. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania who created genetically modified "mighty mice" have been deluged with calls from athletes and coaches who crave this technology. These mice are shockingly large and muscular. They have haunches like a steer's and a neck wider than their head. Labs around the world have come up with a variety of ways to increase muscle mass in mice by as much as 60 percent--permanently, with no exercise, no apparent side effects and no obvious way to test for such "gene doping." H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of Penn's department of physiology, injects into the muscles of his mice a virus spliced with the gene that boosts insulin-like growth factor I, which promotes cell growth. The technology isn't all that complicated. "Oh yeah, it's easy," Sweeney said recently. "Anyone who can clone a gene and work with cells could do it. It's not a mystery. You could change the endurance of the muscle or modulate the speed--all the performance characteristics. All the biology is there. If someone said, 'Here's $10 million; I want you to do everything you can think of in terms of sports,' you could get pretty imaginative."

Licensed therapeutic use of genetic modification in humans to address muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy may be 10 years down the road. As to when illicit gene doping will break out--assuming it hasn't already--the only question most scientists have is whether we'll see this Sputnik moment in the 2008 Olympics or the 2012.

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The transformation of what it means to be human is happening right now, not in the distant future. This is why it is critical for us all to engage in the debate. In the halls of elite technological institutions you hear three scenarios for the future of human nature: Heaven, Hell and Prevail. According to the Heaven scenario, we will soon vanquish pain, suffering, disease, stupidity, ignorance, ugliness and even death. Constant advances will conquer many of the evils that have plagued mankind since the first ape came out of the trees. At an increasingly rapid rate, headlines will feature miracles even more jaw-dropping than what stem cells offer. Looking back at today's world 20 years from now, we will be astounded at how far we've come. Our newfound capabilities will redefine what it means to be human.

That's one possibility. In the Hell scenario, however, the powers unleashed by this curve of exponential innovation fall into the hands of psychopaths or bumblers who--intentionally or unintentionally--unleash supreme evil in the next 25 years. Our existence as a species will become threatened. And that's the optimistic version. In the pessimistic version of the Hell scenario, all life on earth is wiped out.

The Prevail scenario, meanwhile, is not some middle ground between Heaven and Hell. It is in an entirely different territory. It sees Heaven and Hell as technodeterminist--that is, scenarios described by people who think technology will inevitably determine our history. The Prevail scenario, by contrast, bets on human cussedness. It is a hunch that human nature will continue to feature a capacity to surprise. Think of the British "nation of shopkeepers" that prevailed over Napoleon when few believed it possible. The measure of success in the Prevail scenario is not how many transistors talk to each other. In the midst of an engineered evolution that we humans direct, the triumph of the Prevail scenario would be measured by the richness, depth and variety of the most important connections, the ones among unpredictably clever humans like ourselves. For none of us is as smart as all of us.

All three of these scenarios are credible. Each must be taken seriously.

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You can most clearly see the challenge we face wherever you find the keenest competition. That's why it's no surprise that the group most aggressively pursuing human enhancement is DARPA, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Few organizations in the world have a record of looking as far into the future as DARPA. It has been known to think 20 to 40 years ahead and invest its research dollars accordingly. President Eisenhower created DARPA after the shock of Sputnik in 1957. According to its strategic plan, the agency's purpose is to "accelerate the future into being."

DARPA invests 90 percent of its yearly $3 billion official budget outside the government, mainly funding university and industry researchers. By the time a technology is far enough along to attract venture capitalists, DARPA is usually long gone. Its program manager--it has about 140, mostly M.D.s and Ph.D.s--seek problems they call DARPAesque or DARPA-hard. Those are challenges verging on the impossible. "We try not to violate any of the laws of physics," says Steve Wax, an agency official. "Or at least not knowingly," adds Michael Goldblatt, his former boss. "Or at least not more than one per program."

DARPA has indeed helped fund the creation of the computer mouse, the computer-graphics industry, very-large-scale integrated circuits, computers that recognize human speech and translate languages, the computer workstation and head-mounted displays. It was a key player in the creation of the global positioning satellite system, the cell phone, night-vision sensors, weather satellites, spy satellites and the Saturn V rocket, which took men to the moon. It has also helped create advanced fuel cells and telesurgery. All the military's airplanes, missiles, ships and vehicles, including the materials, processes and armor that went into them--especially everything with the word stealth as part of its name--have DARPA inside.

Today DARPA is in the business of creating enhanced soldiers. "Soldiers having no physical, physiological or cognitive limitations will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future," Goldblatt once told a gathering of prospective researchers. Until recently he was head of the Defense Sciences Office, the DARPA branch most focused on human biology. "Imagine if soldiers could communicate by thought alone," he went on. "And contemplate a world in which learning is as easy as eating, and the replacement of damaged body parts is as convenient as a fast-food drive-through. As impossible as these visions sound, we are talking about science action, not science fiction."

DARPA first popped up on my radar when I wrote a series of stories on human enhancement for The Washington Post. The articles reported how all the powers of 1930s and 1940s comic-book superheroes were either in existence or under development in the laboratory--technologies that shut off the human trigger to sleep, "cures" for aging and much more. Browsing the agency's website (darpa.mil), I could see DARPA was funding a wealth of human-enhancement projects. Yet the brass ignored my requests for interviews, along with everybody else's. It took almost a year of persistence before Goldblatt agreed to have lunch with me, and several months more after that before he agreed to give me unprecedented access. I spent nearly a year with the program managers and principal investigators who pursue the creation of better soldiers--guys like Joe Bielitzki. "We want every war fighter to look like Lance Armstrong," he says, "with strength and endurance that don't quit. The Energizer Bunny in fatigues kind of does it: keeps going and going."

A proud son of St. Sylvester's parish on Chicago's Near Northwest Side, Bielitzki has the broad shoulders of someone who does triathlons--endurance events that combine swimming, bicycling and running for people who think marathons are for sissies. Though in his 50s, he still competes. He managed the agency's Peak Soldier Performance program until he recently rotated out of DARPA after the typical four-year tour for program managers.

Bielitzki jokes that the phrase "metabolically dominant soldier" makes it sound as if he was trying to create Spider-Man. Not exactly, he explains, but the aim was high: to crank up every soldier's metabolism to the level of an Olympic endurance athlete.

Changing muscle cells offers a promising solution, DARPA's researchers believe. One avenue of inquiry focuses on cells' mitochondria--inner parts that convert nutrients into chemical energy to power the cell. When you exercise enough to cause your muscles to demand more energy than their cells were previously set to produce, the nucleus in each cell sends out signaling molecules to the mitochondria that tell them to produce more energy and to create more mitochondria. DARPA's hope is to produce a pill that provides more of these signaling molecules than the nucleus normally puts out. The result would be more strength, achieved faster than by exercise alone. The military hopes to take individuals now formidably trained to perform 80 pull-ups before exhaustion and render them capable of 300 through processes both safe and reversible, in case soldiers don't want to spend the rest of their life in Arnold Schwarzenegger's body. Will such work have an effect on civilian life? "Probably," Bielitzki answers. "My measure of success is that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we do."

Alan Rudolph, another ex--program manager, focused on boosting combat performance by fusing humans and machines. An owner of patents in biological self-assembly, biomaterials, tissue engineering and neuroscience, Rudolph has a Ph.D. in cell biology along with an MBA and likes to describe himself as a combat zoologist. When he ran DARPA's Human Assisted Neural Devices program, he jockeyed dozens of principal investigators who were focused on increasing "the number of interconnects between living systems and the nonliving world."

The DARPA-hard challenge is to wire brains directly to machines, bypassing control panels and displays.

For example, at the University of California at Berkeley, DARPA-funded researchers have prototype exoskeletons that enable people to carry 180 pounds as if it were only four pounds. Think of an exoskeleton as a wearable robot suit. It works by sensing in which direction a wearer is moving her muscles--stooping, running, whatever--and echoing them with small, powerful motors so that the lifting stress is borne by the suit rather than her bones and joints. It's a small miracle of increasingly sophisticated sensors, embedded computer intelligence, lighter and stronger materials, rapid computer-aided design and more efficient storage and use of electrical power. Homayoon "Hami" Kazerooni, the principal investigator on the project, expects to see it in civilian use within two years wherever heavy lifting is required--from delivery services like UPS to warehouse operations to automobile manufacturing. He can even imagine it replacing crutches for people with broken bones.

But that's not the breakthrough.

"Suppose," Rudolph says, "the exoskeleton is responding not to your muscle movements but directly to your brain. We've got our team of 70 crazed academics charging this dream." He can easily envision chips like the one in Matthew Nagle's head evolving to allow mental control of machines as complicated as an F22 jet fighter, which is a tough aircraft to fly with a joystick. The question is how you would experience melding with such a plane via the human central nervous system. How would you take everything the machine can sense--from airspeed to g-forces to upcoming terrain to radar images of enemy aircraft--and port it back directly into your skull? "The same chip will close the loop and allow you to experience whatever--visual, mechanical, force dynamics--as other sensory input," he says. In other words, you should be able to pipe any sense from any sensor anywhere directly into your brain. "Can I alter what you see so that you see what my camera sees?" he asks. For example, "I want to see over the hill, so I send a micro air vehicle or a robot over. Now I'm experiencing the visual image from the robot. I see what it sees." A camera on your helmet aimed behind you could allow you to feel as if you have eyes in the back of your head. And there's no reason such inputs have to be confined to the visible spectrum. If you want to see in the dark with infrared or ultraviolet or whatever else a machine can sense, then patch them right into your visual cortex.

Closing the loop--allowing the human brain to receive signals directly, not just send them--opens the door to telepathy. At Vanderbilt University, neuroscientist Jon Kaas has used DARPA funds to imbed chips in marmosets, small New World monkeys, in an effort to get them to communicate brain to brain. "Marmosets have distinctive calls associated with fear and threat, food and familial identification," Rudolph explains. Kaas's plan is to have two marmosets wired together but out of earshot of each other. When one monkey makes a call, researchers will monitor the second one to see if it responds as though it has heard. Then they will look for the second marmoset to issue a response and will check that it has been received and understood by the first monkey. "Then the question is, well, what if the monkey says, 'Fuck you'--you know what I mean? We're going to face a number of issues and challenges with this," says Rudolph.

What you don't get at DARPA is much introspection. The program managers may see the technological steps it would take to achieve, say, telepathy, but they don't talk much about what a world full of telepaths might be like. When I point out that technology has a history of biting back--delivering unintended consequences--and ask whether this worries the agency, Goldblatt says, "Yes, of course. It's our job. We even have a bioethicist on staff. But you can't let fear of the future inhibit exploring the future."

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The genetic, robotic and nano technologies are now accelerating as quickly as information technology has for the past four decades. The rapid developments in all these fields are intertwined. In 1965 Gordon Moore, then director of Fairchild's Research and Development Laboratories (and, later, co-founder of Intel), noted in an article for the 35thanniversary issue of Electronics magazine that the complexity of minimum-cost semiconductor components had been doubling every year since the first prototype microchip was produced six years before. He predicted this doubling would continue every year for the next 10 years. Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, came to christen this claim Moore's law. Over time Moore's law has been modified. As the core faith of the entire global computer industry, it has come to be stated this way: The power of information technology will double every 18 months, for as far into the future as we can imagine--even after two-dimensional silicon is replaced by something else.

Sure enough, in 2002 the 27th doubling occurred right on schedule, with a one-billion-transistor chip. We are now approaching the 30th doubling. A doubling is an amazing thing. It means the next step is as great as all the previous steps put together. Thirty consecutive doublings of anything man-made (an increase of well over 500 million times), especially in so short a period, is unprecedented in human history.

This is exponential change. It's a curve that goes straight up.

Today the practical effects of exponential technological change surround us. IBM in 2004 fired up a machine called Blue Gene/L. It is expected ultimately to be 1,000 times as powerful as Deep Blue, the machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. "If this computer unlocks the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an important milestone in the future of medicine and health care," said Paul Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research, when the project was announced.

In 1985 the human genome was thought to be a code that would take until 2010 or 2020 to crack and only then at astonishing cost. The feat was accomplished in 2001 at a fraction of the estimated price because technology, as the curve suggests, rapidly yielded computers far more powerful and plentiful than those of 1985. It was no more surprising than was the cascade of cloned mice, cats, rabbits, pigs, horses and cows that followed the first cloned sheep. Who hasn't braced himself for the first renegade human clone?

The next challenge is minutely modeling proteins, which control all cellular processes in the body. They fold into highly complex three-dimensional shapes that determine their function. Even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into an agent of disease. Like the machines that conquered the human genome, only more spectacular, Blue Gene/L is intended to investigate this process. Thus, breakthroughs in computers today create breakthroughs in biology. Thanks to protein analysis, Horn explained, "one day you'll be able to walk into a doctor's office and have a computer analyze a tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails you and then instantly prescribe the treatment best suited to your specific illness and individual genetic makeup."

What's remarkable, then, is not merely computer speed but our ability to use it to open new vistas in entirely different fields--in this case, the ability to change how our bodies work at the most basic level. This is possible because, at a thousand trillion operations a second, this computer may have something approaching the raw processing power of the human brain.

Nathan Myhrvold, former technology chief of Microsoft, points out that it cost about $3 billion to sequence the first human genome. You'll soon be able to get your own done for $10, he expects.

If an implant in a paralyzed man's head can read his thoughts, if genes can be manipulated into better versions of themselves and if the exponential curve suggests that the volume of change of the past 50 years will be compressed into the next 14, then the line between what's engineered and what's inborn will begin to blur. Questions about the future of human nature arise.

As we assume control of our own evolution, the inventory of projects to work on will lengthen, according to Gregory Pence of the University of Alabama's philosophy department. He starts with pain, infirmity, mental illness, overpopulation, involuntary death, stupidity, cowardice, biological cravings no longer good for us (such as those for burgers and fries), diseases that kill children and progressive diseases such as Alzheimer's. What we could use, Pence says, is more memory, better immune systems, cells that do not age, stronger skeletons with more muscle mass, more talent in the visual and performing arts as well as a better sense of humor, an increased ability to process vast amounts of information quickly, an increased ability to do advanced math and speak many languages, an absence of genetic disease and a greater sense of wonder and curiosity. All these we can soon achieve with the GRIN technologies, Pence believes.

Nor is that the end of it. The ambition of Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey of Britain's University of Cambridge is even more striking than his looks. His russet beard falls to his sternum. His mustache--as long as a hand--would have been the envy of Salvador Dalí. His research area is strategies for engineering negligible senescence, or SENS. In other words, he seeks to cure aging. The well-named De Grey thinks--as do some researchers at the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health--that the first person who will gracefully live to the age of 150 is already alive today. He thinks scientists will soon triple the remaining life span of late-middle-age mice. The day this announcement is made, he believes, the news will hit people like a brick as they realize that their cells could be next. In response to the looming prospect of exceedingly long life--as long as 5,000 years--he speculates that people will start abandoning risky jobs such as police officer or soldier. He thinks people will start putting more of a premium on health than wealth. Twirling the ends of his mustache back behind his ears, he says slyly, "So many women, so much time."

Can we screw this up? Can we, by our well-meaning attempts to reduce suffering and increase opportunity, reduce human character? Without a doubt. Just ask bioconservative Leon Kass, the chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics and a leading proponent of the Hell scenario. He even makes the case for why we should continue to experience anguish, decrepitude and death. "A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or an untroubled soul," he writes, "but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of time's limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline and die--and know it."

Advocates of the Heaven scenario reject such limitations. "We humans lack the capacity to form a realistic, intuitive understanding of what it would be like to be posthuman," says Nick Bostrom of Oxford University. "Chimpanzees can't imagine the ambitions we humans have, our philosophies, the complexities of our society or the depth of the relationships we can have with one another." Similarly Bostrom believes our present modes of being are but a slice of what is permitted by the laws of physics and biology.

The hard question, then, is this: What if Kass is right to worry and our evolution continues anyway, as seems likely, at our own direction? Right now the argument is usually conducted rather fruitlessly between the advocates of the Hell and Heaven scenarios. One side sees the dangers and wants everything stopped. The other side sees the promise and serves as cheerleaders. They talk past each other.

For the Prevail scenario to prevail--for us to be the masters of change and not its pawns--we have to recognize the dangers as we accept that transformation is coming and figure out how to make our solutions accelerate at the same pace as our challenges. Figuring out how to expedite the response of our culture and values could help us learn what these tests of our humanity tell us about human nature.

For example:

• At the turn of this century a little boy was born in Germany. His doctors immediately noticed he had unusually large muscles bulging from his tiny arms and legs. By the time he was four and a half it was clear he was extraordinarily strong. Most children that age can lift about one pound with each arm; he could hold a seven-pound dumbbell aloft with each outstretched hand. He is the first human confirmed to have a genetic variation that builds such impressive muscles. If the effect can be duplicated, it could treat or cure muscle-wasting diseases. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals is testing a drug designed to do just that as a treatment for the most common form of muscular dystrophy. But what happens when such a drug moves from the sick with an urgent need to the rest of us, who work out only sporadically and with mixed results? Will abdominal six-packs be just a pill away? What happens when brain-enhancement procedures are developed to fight Alzheimer's? Will they also be embraced by the ambitious?

• In the early 21st century gay marriage, an issue once far on the fringes of public discussion, has moved swiftly to the center ring. We have begun a societal conversation about human nature, signaled by the decision of the Vatican to weigh in on this debate. Suppose two people of the same sex want state recognition of their committed union. Is that just another wrinkle in evolution? Or is it an abomination? Is gay marriage just the first of many significant future legal and political controversies about what constitutes genuinely human behavior? If bonds between people of the same gender are beyond the pale, how will we feel when people start having relationships with digital companions?

• What happens when your kid comes home crying after failing once again to compete against bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, more talented, cuter, better-behaved kids whose rich parents have given them big tweaks? What will be your gut reaction to those kids' ability to succeed in ways your kid can't? Do you say, "Don't worry, dear. We love you just the way you are, and besides, just because other parents are willing to take risks with their children's bodies and minds doesn't mean we have to"? Do you remortgage the house to try to catch up? Or do you try to get the tweaked kids exiled from your school?

• What about living a very long and robust life? I talk about this with a neighbor celebrating her 62nd birthday. She doesn't see "retirement age" as a time to start winding down. She sees it as the opening of brand-new chapters. I tease her that she has 40 exciting years to go. "Yes, I know," she replies, looking me straight in the eye. "You can do anything you want in all that time. Anything at all. That's why I threw out my husband."

The question is whether GRIN technologies will alter the basic human condition. Can we imagine them changing the way we shape truth, beauty, love or happiness? Can we imagine altering the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth? Or the virtues of faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance and prudence?

As James Watson, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, said, "No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?"

The very idea of aspiring to such godlike powers is blasphemous to some. "Genetic engineering," writes Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, is "the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But the promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will."

He could be right. Nonetheless, Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that "in just 20 years the boundary between fantasy and reality will be rent asunder. Just five years from now that boundary will be breached in ways as unimaginable to most people today as daily use of the World Wide Web was a few decades ago."

"We want every war fighter to look like Lance Armstrong, with strength and endurance that don't quit," says Bielitzki. "The Energizer Bunny in fatigues."