My research interest in human enhancement began as an undergraduate, studying the science of sport, where it became apparent that elite athletes were outlyers in evolution towards enhancement. Not only did some of them break the rules of their community to pursue victory, they were also accompanied by an entire world of experts whose job was to help them transcend human limits.
This work very quickly grew into a broader focus on the ethics and cultural study of human enhancement. At the turn of the century, the human genome project and the growing shift in language within research and medicine to think of aging as a disease rather than just something that people encounter as they grow old, focused my work on the range of ways that humanity could be made more resilient and more biologically adapable by way of human enhancements.
Over the years, I have written about various kinds of enhancement, from memory deletion to genetic modification and I’ve published in journals of law, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology and science. After completing my PhD on Bioethics & Sport in 2002, I undertook a Master degree in Medical Law, which really brought home how crucial it is for these discussions to borrow from different disciplinary insights.
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