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Deliberately exceeding typical human capacity — cognitive, physical, sensory — and the therapy line that keeps refusing to stay put.
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The philosophical and policy debate over whether biomedical means may legitimately be used to push human capacities beyond species-typical function.
The practice of modifying one's own biology outside institutional medicine, ranging from subdermal implants to do-it-yourself gene transfer and open-source medical devices.
The disability-rights critique of selection and enhancement, centred on the expressivist objection, the social model, and the difference between curing and accommodating.
The proposal to shorten the amount of sleep a person needs without incurring the costs of sleep deprivation, based on rare short-sleep gene variants and wake-promoting drugs.
The argument that competitive pressure makes enhancement effectively compulsory, so that individually rational adoption leaves everyone worse off.
The regulation of performance enhancement in competition, the only domain that draws an operational line between therapy and enhancement and litigates it case by case.
The non-therapeutic use of gene transfer or gene regulation to improve athletic performance, prohibited in sport since the early 2000s with no publicly confirmed case.
The proposal to raise human cognitive ability by selecting or editing genetic variants, constrained by the extreme polygenicity of the trait and by pleiotropy.
Deliberate exposure to heat or cold, from sauna bathing to cold-water immersion, as a health practice built on a hormetic mechanism whose effect on human lifespan is unmeasured.
The deliberate use of biomedical or technical means to extend human capacities beyond what is needed to restore or maintain ordinary health.
The project of raising human problem-solving capacity by improving the tools, notations and organisations that thinking runs on rather than by altering the brain.
The proposal to improve human moral motivation by biomedical means, argued for as a response to technologies that outpace evolved moral psychology.
The claimed right to modify one's own body and mind as one chooses, and the correlative right to refuse modification imposed by others.
Blockade of the growth factor myostatin to increase skeletal muscle mass, an effect reproduced across species that has repeatedly failed to translate into functional benefit in humans.
Techniques that alter neural excitability through the intact skull or peripheral nerves — magnetic, electrical, and ultrasonic — without surgery or implanted hardware.
Substances taken to improve cognition in healthy people, a category whose best-evidenced members produce small effects and whose best-selling members produce none.
The proposal to engineer humans to suit other worlds rather than engineering those worlds to suit humans, and the ethical problems of designing offspring for an environment.
Wearable powered frames that apply force in parallel with the wearer's own limbs, used for gait rehabilitation, industrial load support, and proposed strength augmentation.
The administration of serotonergic psychedelics or MDMA alongside psychological support for psychiatric conditions, in trials that cannot be reliably blinded.
A movement and a method for learning about oneself through personal measurement, built on n-of-1 self-experiment and named by two Wired editors in 2007.
Devices and biological modifications that route information the body cannot normally detect into a channel the brain can learn to read.