We're almost able to build better human beings. But are we ready?

The surge of innovation that has given the world everything from iPods to talking cars is now turning inward, to our own minds and bodies.

Some changes in what it means to be human:

-Matthew Nagel whose spinal cord was severed has a jack coming out of the right side of his skull. Sensors in his brain can read his neurons as they fire. These are connected via computer to a robotic hand. When he thinks about moving his hand, the artificial thumb and forefinger open and close.

-At the Defense Sciences Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, one program seeks to allow soldiers to stop bleeding by focusing their thoughts on the wound. Another program is investigating ways to allow veterans to regrow blown-off arms and legs, like salamanders.

Traditionally, human technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment, resulting in, for example, clothing, agriculture, cities and airplanes. Now, however, we have started aiming our technologies inward. We are transforming our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities and our progeny. The National Science Foundation in Arlington, consider such modification of what it means to be human to be a radical evolution -- one that we direct ourselves. They expect it to be in full flower in the next 10 to 20 years.

"The next frontier," says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, "is our own selves."

Steroids are merely a primitive form of human enhancement, however. H. Lee Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the recent Athens Olympics may have been the last without genetically enhanced athletes. His researchers have created super-muscled "Schwarzenegger rats." They live longer and recover more quickly from injuries than do their unenhanced comrades. Sweeney sees it as only a matter of time before such technology seeps into the sports world.

Human enhancement isn’t limited to sport. In 2003, President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill to fund 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 embryo cells are being transformed into egg cells. If this science works in humans, it could open the way for two gay males to make a baby. In 2004, a new technology allowed women to have portions of their ovaries, frozen when they are young and fertile, reimplanted when they’re in their seventies or eighties, potentially allowing them to bear children then.

The genetic, robotic and nano-technologies creating such dramatic change are accelerating as quickly as has information technology for the past four decades. The rapid development of all these fields is intertwined. The global computer industry believes that information technology will double every 18 months. A doubling is an amazing thing. It means the next step is as great as all the previous steps put together.

Optimists say that culture and values can control the impact of these advances. Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and director of the Human Biotechnology Governance Project says, "It's probably true that in terms of the basic science, it's pretty hard to stop that. It's not one guy in a laboratory somewhere."

But not everything that is scientifically possible will actually be technologically implemented and used on a large scale. In the case of human cloning, there's an abstract possibility that people will want to do that, but the number of people who are going to want to take the risk is going to be awfully small."

Taboos will play an important role, Fukuyama says. "We could really speed up the whole process of drug improvement if we did not have all the rules on human experimentation.

If an implant in a paralyzed man's head can read his thoughts, if genes can be manipulated into better versions of themselves, the line between the engineered and the born begins to blur.

The idea of aspiring to such godlike powers is blasphemous to some. "Genetic engineering," writes Michael J. 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."

Excerpt from www.washingtonpost.com, 5/16/05