* In 2018 rogue scientists in China created the first genetically modified babies.
* The normalization of GM humans would alter the nature and trajectory of the human species forever.
* For several decades “transhumanist” scientists and scholars have been actively promoting this normalization.
* Responsible world leaders must now move quickly to establish international accords prohibiting the creation of GM humans.
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The prospect of genetically altering the human species was proposed by eugenicists in the 1930s, was given impetus when the DNA code was deciphered in the 1950s and was further advanced by the creation of transgenic organisms in the 1970s. Since 2000 the rapid development of genomic, stem cell, cloning and CRISPR technologies, along with the explosive growth of the biotechnology-industrial complex and pro-eugenics advocacy, has brought heritable human genetic modification to the threshold of practicability. In 2018 rouge scientists in China created the first genetically-modified babies.
Along with our great diversity humans share a common human nature. When we look into the eyes of another person we know something about that person - indeed far more than we realize - no matter how dissimilar we might otherwise be. Manipulating and modifying the foundations of human nature would change all this. If human minds start modifying the basic structures of the human mind - that is, if the agent of change becomes the object of change - there will no longer be a "there" there. We will have destabilized both the biological and the social foundations of the human world.
Development of human genetic modification technology has been accompanied by the emergence of a new and legitimizing socio-political ideology. It differs from left, liberal and social democratic ideologies in its rejection of egalitarian values and of social well-being as a public purpose, from conservative ideologies in its antipathy towards religion and traditional social values, and from Green ideologies in its enthusiastic advocacy of a technologically reconfigured post-natural world. It embraces commitments to science and technology as autonomous endeavors properly exempt from social oversight, to the priority of market outcomes, and to a political philosophy grounded in evolutionary psychology and social Darwinism. It celebrates the enhancement of human capabilities, attributes and lifespans through genetic modification, and accepts as inevitable the emergence of human genetic castes and eventually of human speciation. In a remarkably short period of time it has become the default vision of the human future held by a large and influential sector of the scientific and technological community and their colleagues in industry, finance, academia, government, media and the arts.
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For more see the Working Paper Expanded Outline Sections II and III, Discussion Notes 21-24, 34-38, 47, 50-51 and 114, and Attachments F.1-F.6 (esp. F.2). See also Background Materials Section II.E (esp. II.E.2).