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Who gets access, who decides, and what happens to institutions built on the assumption that people age and die on schedule.
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The problem of who can obtain expensive biomedical interventions, and whether biotechnology will convert economic inequality into biological inequality.
The 1975 meeting at which molecular biologists lifted their own moratorium on recombinant DNA work by agreeing a system of physical and biological containment.
The position that biotechnological modification of human beings should face a strong presumption against it, grounded in dignity, precaution, or the value of the given.
The philosophical and policy debate over whether biomedical means may legitimately be used to push human capacities beyond species-typical function.
Five regions claimed to have unusually high concentrations of centenarians, and the lifestyle explanations built on that claim.
The hypothesis that chronic illness can be postponed into a shorter interval before death, so that added years of life are healthy ones.
The sale of clinical laboratory panels directly to asymptomatic consumers as preventive medicine, where accurate assays meet a screening logic that guidelines reject.
A popular term for children whose traits are chosen before birth, covering a real but narrow practice of embryo selection and a largely hypothetical practice of embryo editing.
Vitamins, minerals, botanicals, and other compounds sold without pre-market approval, whose large randomized trials have repeatedly failed to show benefit in well-nourished adults.
Nick Bostrom's proposal to influence the order in which technologies arrive, hastening protective ones and delaying dangerous ones, rather than trying to halt progress.
The persistence of a person in digital form after death, ranging from chatbot reconstructions built from their data to the hypothetical emulation of their brain.
The disability-rights critique of selection and enhancement, centred on the expressivist objection, the social model, and the difference between curing and accommodating.
Life-science research that produces knowledge or tools with legitimate purposes but foreseeable potential for catastrophic misuse, and the oversight regimes built around it.
The development of a mammalian embryo or fetus outside a body, either for part of gestation or for all of it, and the ethical arguments the prospect generates.
An online techno-optimist movement holding that technological acceleration is a moral imperative and that precautionary restraint on AI causes more harm than it prevents.
Outbreaks caused by a pathogen deliberately modified, synthesised, or released rather than one that emerged from nature, and the biosecurity programme built around preventing them.
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 category of risks that would end humanity or permanently destroy its potential, and the research programme built around identifying and reducing them.
The study of humanity's possible long-run trajectories, conventionally grouped into extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthuman transformation.
Genetic elements engineered to bias their own inheritance above the Mendelian half, allowing an introduced trait to spread through a wild population.
Differential treatment of people on the basis of genetic information, and the uneven legal regime that restricts it in employment and health cover but rarely elsewhere.
Drugs that mimic the gut hormone GLP-1 to lower blood glucose and food intake, producing large weight loss that persists only while treatment continues.
The patchwork of national law, professional norms, funding rules, and international soft law that determines what may be done to a human genome and by whom.
The scenario in which self-replicating nanomachines consume the biosphere, an idea introduced by Eric Drexler in 1986 and later disowned by him.
The 2018 announcement that twin girls had been born from CRISPR-edited embryos in Shenzhen, and the scientific condemnation and criminal prosecution that followed.
Modification of human embryos, eggs, or sperm so that the genetic change is inherited by the resulting child and by all of their descendants.
The routine clinical procedure in which eggs are fertilised outside the body and an embryo is transferred to a uterus, and the platform every other embryo technology is built on.
Australian bioethicist who formulated procreative beneficence and, with Ingmar Persson, the argument for moral bioenhancement; the leading academic advocate of human enhancement.
American physician and bioethicist who chaired the President's Council on Bioethics and made the strongest philosophical case that mortality gives human life its meaning.
The question of what can be inferred about a person's mental states from neural and physiological recordings, and what protection that information should receive.
Hypothetical organisms built from mirror-image biological molecules, which a large group of scientists argued in 2024 could evade immunity and predation and should not be created.
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.
A proposed set of human rights covering mental privacy, cognitive liberty, and mental integrity, drafted in response to brain-recording and brain-stimulation technology.
Swedish philosopher who defined existential risk as a field, wrote Superintelligence, and formulated the simulation argument and the vulnerable world hypothesis.
Unintended DNA changes caused by genome editors, either at sites resembling the target or at the target itself, and the assays used to find them.
The persistent gap between the number of people who need a transplant and the number of usable donated organs, which drives most work on engineered and animal-derived replacements.
The objection that extending human lifespan would cause unsustainable population growth, and the demographic modelling that finds the effect smaller than assumed.
The question of what makes a person at one time the same person as at another, and what — if anything — must be preserved for that person to survive.
The ranking of IVF embryos by polygenic risk scores computed from their inferred genotypes, sold commercially since 2019 and rejected as unvalidated by professional genetics bodies.
A hypothetical being whose central capacities exceed the human maximum, and, in a separate scholarly tradition, a critique of the humanist subject itself.
The regulatory doctrine that scientific uncertainty about a serious or irreversible harm is not by itself a reason to permit the activity that might cause it.
Julian Savulescu's principle that prospective parents have moral reason to select, among the children they could have, the one expected to live the best life.
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.
How the law and ethics of assisted dying interact with radical life extension, and whether an indefinitely extendable life could still be voluntarily ended.
The argument that slowing biological aging would produce economic gains larger than curing any individual disease, and the disputes over how that value is calculated.