There are reasons why you shouldn’t put question marks in the titles of books. James and I decided that we needed one in Better Humans? because we realised we didn’t know whether we thought human enhancment was ‘better’.
If you’re smarter, as Raj Persaud points out in his piece for the book, you’re not necessarily happier. And as I know from all the work I’ve done on disability over the years, having one idea about what’s ‘better’ physically is very dangerous.
But when it comes to people citing the book, question marks tend to just get left out, so our nuanced decision to be undecided (or fudge it, you might say) is getting lost as word spreads of the book.
OpenDemocracy have published our interview with Aubrey de Grey (we’ve just had a request to translate it into Romanian!) and the Observer ran an extract yesterday from Steven Rose’s piece about the potential downsides of the new resources available for brain science.
The full book is also now available online for free. The launch event in London is on Wednesday and it will be talked about more at the Oxford Global Science Forum in March.
