Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights (HETHR) Conference reports

Although I was unable to attend the Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights (HETHR) conference over Memorial Day at Stanford , it sounded like a fascinating discussion -- and I've been reading the reviews, including William Saletan's critique on Slate, but the article that caught my attention was Dale Carrico's response to William Saletan, entitled, "Thanks for the Back-Handed Compliments". There is one quote that stands out in mind: "...the real policy difficulties are matters of ensuring that everybody has access to good consensus scientific information about emerging medicine, and that the risks, costs, and benefits of these developments are all fairly shared among all the stakeholders to that development. Thrusting aside all the sometimes silly neologisms, the futurisms, posthumanisms, and technophiliasms, there is something deeply and intimately human about the traffic between biology and cultural/technological practice that produce the fragile and lovely personages that house our hopes and fears and memories."

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