ABSTRACT
The same month I began research for this book (November 2004), the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority granted individuals with a family history of cancer the right to strategically select embryos free of these genes for fertilization.1 As expected, this action promptly reinvigorated public debates over genetic engineering and the possible mass production of “designer babies”; critics of the decision have claimed that such selection not only is an unethical encroachment of technoscientifi c practice on the “natural” process of human reproduction, but that it also anticipates a future where unaltered humans are outpaced by their genetically enhanced counterparts and where “gene races” develop between countries (and corporations) to create and control technologies for producing “better” humans.2 During the same month in the U.S., members of the National Academy of Sciences were working against a February deadline for their recommendation report on the legal and ethical status of transspecies chimeras, hybrid creatures created by implanting animal (including human) stem cells at the fetal stage into the member of a di erent species.3
