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"We are plenty good enough": Bill McKibben on brash plans to tinker with our genes.

Article Excerpt
When Bill McKibben looks into the future, he sees a world where people may live forever, where parents could choose to have a child with the smarts of a Nobel Prize-winner, the body of an Olympic athlete, and the looks of a supermodel, that he doesn't like it one bit.

In his recent book, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, the best-selling environmental author suggests that we are on the cusp of changing--perhaps irrevocably--what it means to be human. With our genetic material recently mapped, new applications of this knowledge are constantly being developed. But while some advances seem beneficial and benign, such as infertility treatments, better prenatal tests, and customized pharmaceuticals, others, McKibben argues, are too dangerous to pursue.

A mild, soft-spoken man, McKibben draws a firm line between somatic gene therapy--inserting healthy genes into a sick person's cells to help them heal--and so-called germline, or inheritable, genetic modification. The latter is the technique that could produce "designer babies" by changing an embryo's genes to make a child smarter, prettier, or stronger--traits that would then pass on to offspring.

In Enough, McKibben makes a passionate case that inheritable alteration would rob future generations of the chance to determine...

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