OUR GRANDCHILDREN REDESIGNED

A panoramic overview of advanced biotechnologies that can endlessly boost human physical and mental capabilities and the drastic human and social change these "superhuman" traits would trigger.

Award winning historian Michael Bess takes us into the near future of our increasingly bioengineered society. As breakthroughs in biological and genetic science make it easier to live longer, be healthier, and become smarter, we might not be ready for the future that lies ahead. The rapidity of new developments raises tough ethical questions about where to draw the line on human bioenhancement. Using his years of experience studying the societal impacts of scientific and technological change, Bess surveys fast-coming advancements in biotechnology and their potential effects on social inequality, economic division, and what it means to be human.

Michael Bess is Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he has been teaching since 1989. He is the author of three previous books, the most recent of which are Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006) and The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (U. of Chicago Press, 2003), which won the George Perkins Marsh Prize of the American Society for Environmental History. He has received major fellowships from the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Fulbright program. At Vanderbilt he teaches courses on the social and cultural impacts of scientific and technological change, for which he has received three teaching awards. He lives in Nashville.