Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist and geopolitical expert, novelist, entrepreneur, media commentator, and Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council. His new book is Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity.From the transcript of Metzl's interview with Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: So the basic message of the book seems to me to be the genetic revolution is coming much faster than we think, and we are going to be able to make human beings?--Marshal Zeringue
METZL: Well, certainly the genetic revolution is coming much faster than we think. And it's going to change a lot of things. The first thing it's going to transform is our health care. Then it's going to change the way we make babies. Then it's going to change the nature of the babies we make. And over time, it's going to alter our -- even our evolutionary trajectory as a species. And it's a huge deal. It's coming soon, and we're not ready.
ZAKARIA: So the health care, I think, people understand, that we're now going to be able to look inside our genes to figure out what are the things that cause illnesses, perhaps fix them.
METZL: Yeah.
ZAKARIA: But the making babies part is the one that I think is most -- seems most revolutionary. Yuval Harari talks about how you -- you now might have the ability for the first time ever to really change what it means to be a human being and make, you know, much bigger, stronger, smarter human beings. Is that right?
METZL: Yeah, well, biology is at play. Our species has evolved by what we call the Darwinian principles of random mutation and natural selection for almost 4 billion years. And now, for the first time ever, and forever starting from now, we are going to have the ability to alter our biology in increasingly significant ways.
And it's going to happen in stages, all using technologies that already exist.
So the first stage is going to be using IVF and embryo selection -- and our knowledge of what -- to read the genomes of different people, to be able to select from among -- let's say it's 15 embryos in average IVF -- then we're...[read on]