Way back in 1989, when author Bill McKibben's futuristic novel "The End of Nature" was published one might have been excused dismissing his portrayal of a world shuddering through the consequences of ecological collapse and the subsequent emergence of a technologial police state as the result of an overly dramatic imagination.

Unfortunately, the daily unfolding of the front page of USA Today reads, more and more, like dispatches from McKibben's earlier work.

In his just-published book, "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age", McKibben has focused his keen eye on the rapidly morphing juggernaut of high-tech bio-engineering. His thesis is that the euphoric cheerleading of the genetic engineers and nano-techies come wrapped in profound questions on the very nature of what it means to be human and may well set the course of all life on a grimly irreversible path with dark consequences for all.

McKibben chronicles the growing list of techno-scientific "wonders" - glow-in-the-dark bunnies, Dolly the manufactured sheep and a rhesus monkey sporting jellyfish genes woven into his DNA. Though this book was just published, McKibben is already outpaced by new "wonders". A recent newspaper article detailed how an egg of an aborted fetus were successfully fertilized, now making it possible for a child (whose gender has been selected) to be created from a mother who was never born!

If all this feels more than a little creepy, there's good reason.

McKibben details the dreams of many genetic researchers to create a nightmarish "posthuman" world where every generation will come equipped with a new and improved menu of genetic options to a point where future "posthumans" may have as little in common with today's "off the rack" human as we now have with a chimp.

If we become little more than the sum of a genetic shopping list, what, he asks, will happen to the meaning of what it is to be human.

Indeed, how then to define self?

Good questions.

While McKibben is highly suspicious of the direction we are headed, he is no Luddite blindly opposed to all such research. Obviously technology and progress in genetic research have brought about many wonders. The mapping of the human genome will eventually provide effective treatments for many genetic diseases and perhaps, even, spinal cord injuries. McKibben acknowledges the genetic genie is out of the test tube and strutting about the neighborhood.

The challenge, he argues, is to wisely decide just how far we are to go with tinkering in God's toolbox - hence, the titile "Enough".

While such genetic gurus as DNA pioneer James Watson himself foresee a brave new posthuman world as an evolutionary inevitability, McKibben recalls how humans have controlled unbridled infatuation with technology in the past. Despite some anxious moments, world leaders have been fairly successful at containing the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons technology. Those genies did not disappear once discovered, but they were - and thus far remain - corralled.

After initial mis-steps, progress has been made in controlling pesticides like DDT, or ozone-gobbling chloroflourocarbons.

It is possible, McKibben observes, to say, "Enough."

Given the profound implications of what is occurring in genetic labs around the world and the exponential pace of discovery, the time for such open discussion is now. McKibben's latest book is a valuable - and very readable - contribution to that dialogue. -M.L. Taylor

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