Growing up watching Science Fiction movies has often helped me a lot to work on projects that often have been considered by a number of people as belonging to that genre. According to a report I read recently on an international magazine, In the next fifty years, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and cognitive science will allow human beings to transcend the limitations of the human body. Healthy lifespans will extend well beyond a century. Our senses and cognition will be enhanced. We will have greater control over our emotions and memory. Our bodies and brains will be surrounded by and merged with computer power. We will use these technologies to redesign ourselves and our children in ways that push the boundaries of "humanness."

This prospect is indeed interesting for a number of reasons. As time goes by ,a noticeable change in attitude to technology can easily be felt. The most fascinating thing is that this adaptation is happening over a very short lifespan ( less than a decade) . This does indeed lead a number of questions that at the moment are considered to be very important.  Whilst medicine has been known to be very difficult to endorse new theories and concepts , in recent years we saw this changing and adapting itself very fast . We saw the creation of CT Scans and MRI scanning equipment that contributed to the life expectancy significantly ( when considering that a human in the middleages had a life expectancy of about 20-25 years) . However the focus of “Human Enhancement” does take a different approach to the topic as it looks at technology or pharmaceuticals are adopted  as  part of a human body at a very young age, in order to replace “Therapies”

Mood and Personality Enhancement

In the book titled “Listening To Prozac”, the psychiatrist Peter Kramer describes how some of his patients who had completed a course of Prozac to relieve their depression wished to resume taking it. This was not because their depression had returned: medically speaking, they were no longer mentally ill. Rather, whilst taking Prozac, the patients had felt “better than well”. Prozac, as well as relieving their medical condition, had—in their view—improved various aspects of their personality which had never been classed as part of their illness: shy patients had become more outgoing and assertive, compulsive patients had become more relaxed and easy-going, and those with low self-esteem had become more confident. Is there anything wrong with prescribing a drug like Prozac for someone who is not suffering from any medically-recognized condition, but who simply wants to improve their mood or personality?

One difficulty complicating this area of enhancement is that in many cases it is not clear what would count as “personality enhancement” . We might think that those who are so shy that their choices in life are severely limited by the fact that they find simple social interactions highly distressing, or those who are so aggressive that they regularly come into violent conflict with others, ought to be offered personality- enhancing drugs if, on balance, these might improve their lives. However, traits like shyness and aggression are manifested in people to varying degrees, with correspondingly various effects on the way the person in question lives their life. The extent to which an intervention that, say, enabled someone who feels mild unease in unfamiliar social situations to become the life and soul of the party is an improvement or the reverse is difficult to assess, since there is no obvious sense in which a shy person is “better” than a confident one, or vice versa. This difficulty is compounded by the possibility that what the subject views—qua subject—as an improvement may not coincide with what those who interact with him judge to be an improvement: the sort of intervention described above may make the subject feel more confident and comfortable in certain situations, but others may find the resulting person less pleasant to interact with. (Alcohol can have the effect of making shy people more confident, yet most sober people interact with other sober people in preference to people in possession of Dutch courage.) Also complicating assessments about what counts as an improvement is the distinction between improvements in some particular dimension (happiness, confidence, and so on) and improvements in life generally. It is, other things equal, preferable to experience states like happiness, satisfaction, and love than states like sadness, frustration, and grief; yet experiencing undesirable states can improve our understanding of ourselves and others, and give our personalities a richness and depth that they might lack were we only ever to experience “positive” emotions.

The rapid change and keenness in adopting technologies and genetically modified pharmaceuticals understandably worries many people. Now a loose coalition of groups has emerged to ban and disband the efforts done in “human enhancement” from genetic therapies and psychopharmaceuticals to prosthetic organs and nanomedical robotics. This coalition is going from strength to strength , securing influential names in the neurosciences and  biologists … We just have to wait and see if Evolution is going to prevail!.

Adrian Attard Trevisan is a doctoral researcher for the Institute for Health Research at University of Bedfordshire and Head of Research & Technology  at Sense of Nature LTd . His background as a Medical Neurophysiologist has resulted in the creation of a system called “Brain Music System” which enables patients with Neurological Conditions to live a better life. More information on www.brainmusic.net