{"id":20262,"date":"2015-12-27T05:31:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-27T13:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/should-we-create-superhumans-qa-with-author-james-rollins"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:17:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:17:10","slug":"should-we-create-superhumans-qa-with-author-james-rollins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/should-we-create-superhumans-qa-with-author-james-rollins","title":{"rendered":"Should We Create Superhumans? Q&amp;A with Author James Rollins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/should-we-create-superhumans-qa-with-author-james-rollins.jpeg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Rollins, who has a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine, took some time to talk about genetic engineering, the future of humanity and the ethical limits of science.<\/p>\n<p>(This Q&amp;A has been edited for length and clarity.) <\/p>\n<p><strong>Live Science:<\/strong> <strong>A quote from \u201cThe Bone Labyrinth\u201d reads, \u201cResearch today has become more about seeing if something <em>can<\/em> be done versus judging if it <em>should<\/em>. It\u2019s knowledge for the sake of knowledge, regardless of the impact on the world.\u201d Is that you<\/strong> <strong>speaking? Is that what you personally believe?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>James Rollins:<\/strong> Yes, I believe that. I think sometimes, the reach of science is faster than its capacity to grasp. Genetic engineering is changing the world so fast right now. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livescience.com\/53015-when-is-gene-editing-dangerous.html\">CRISPR-Cas9 technique<\/a> can allow us to pluck a single DNA unit out and replace it with great precision. And one of the people I interviewed in the research for this book told me that we now have the ability to do <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geneticsandsociety.org\/article.php?id=8711\">germline editing<\/a>, where anyone with a basic biology degree and familiarity with embryos can alter an embryo pretty easily. And that\u2019s something that\u2019s relatively new. It\u2019s just in the last five to 10 years that that\u2019s been developed.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.livescience.com\/53133-james-rollins-the-bone-labyrinth-interview.html\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rollins, who has a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine, took some time to talk about genetic engineering, the future of humanity and the ethical limits of science. (This Q&amp;A has been edited for length and clarity.) Live Science: A quote from \u201cThe Bone Labyrinth\u201d reads, \u201cResearch today has become more about seeing if something can be [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,38,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-engineering","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20262"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68958,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20262\/revisions\/68958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}