Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age

"Gene splicing depends on cloning, but is not the same. It involves inserting selected genes-of those other than the parents- into an egg, which is then implanted in the usual way (or will be until the bottled babies of Brave New World make their appearance, and we can do away with the womb altogether). If we become genetically enhanced in this way-enhanced by our parents before we’re born-the joy and mystery will go out of life, because we won’t have to strive for mastery. Our achievements won’t be "ours" but will have been programmed into us; we’ll never know whether we are really feeling "our" emotions or whether they-like the false memories embedded in the replicants in the film Blade Runner-are of the shelf. We won’t be our unique selves, we’ll just be the sum total of the market whims. We truly will be "meat machines" that some scientists already term us. Right now about all our parents can pick for us are our names, but what if they could pick everything about us?
      Worse we’ll be caught in a keep-up-with-the-Joneses competition whereby each new generation of babies will have to have the latest enhancements-will have to be more intelligent, more beautiful, more disease-free, longer-lived, than the generation before. Thus each new generation will be sui generis-isolated, disconsolate, as out of date as last year’s car model before they’re even twenty-one, each of them stuck on a lily pad of enhancement a few hops behind the one that follows them. In addition to that, they’ll be cut off from history-from their own family tree. They’ll bear little resemblance to their ancestors. The loneliness and sense of disconnection could be extreme.”

-Margaret Atwood