BEYOND HUMAN?
Science and the changing face of humanity
By John Bryant
Lion. 253 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 0 745 953 960
In 1984 John Stott wrote his classic book Issues facing Christians today. Those issues, pluralism, environmental, north-south divide, feminism, abortion, homosexuality, etc. are still with us. But relatively unforeseen then were the incredible advances in biomedical sciences which were unthinkable in a former generation.
We are said to be living in ‘the age of genetics’ and that knowing about our genetic makeup will tell us ‘who we are’. The announcement of the first draft of a human genome sequence in 2000 was heralded by Bill Clinton suggesting that because of the new genetic knowledge people could look forward to living to an age of 100 years or more! Others claimed that we were now in the era of genet-ically-based personalised medicine.
