The Superhuman Condition

Medical science is characterized far more by incremental advances than transformational discoveries. Nevertheless, few areas of research have been hastened more by the technological advances of the past decade than medicine. Thanks largely to the increasing affordability of computing power, data processing, and sophisticated software; the rapid advance of genetic engineering and biopharmaceutics; and new technologies that provide deeper understandings of the human brain, the “precision-medicine” promise of the 2000s is finally here. This raises the question of how far we are willing to go in “playing god.”