Preparing the paper for my inaugural lecture, I think about genetic enhancement and the prospect of a post-human future, and wonder what it would feel like to be a homo sapiens in relation to an enhanced individual; the one looking up, the other down. The relevance of sad lessons learned from the racist Nazi eugenics is readily apparent. The Jews were just a beginning; Slavic peoples were the next target. I find it hard to understand, where from such arrogance? I recall the first time I came to Berlin, to a conference organized by the German and French governments, when the UN was discussing the prohibition of cloning. We were put up in a grand hotel on Friedrichstrasse in an area of massive office buildings from Communist times. The day I arrived, I unpacked and went out for a walk to catch my bearings, and around the corner I came upon the Unter den Linden, where a green political outdoors happening was taking place. It was a gathering of the oddest sorts of people who would likely be seen as misfits or rejects of any gene-designer label, starkly opposed to the aesthetic image of the strapping Aryan (and perhaps it is no chance that they were attending a left-wing event). Now I find myself scanning the faces in the mensa, trying to identify an ideal or standard of beauty, which I cannot find.
