23 November 2011: 6-8 pm: E.P Abraham Lecture Theatre, Green Templeton College, Oxford. Humans have always sought to enhance themselves and their performance. Examples include education, the drinking of coffee, and the choice of reproductive partners whose genes are perceived to be desirable. But now, and increasingly, technology allows for enhancement of a kind and […]

It was, of course, vanity which took me to Greenland. One of the great problems about travelling a lot, and advertising the fact in print, is that each trip has to be harder than the last. If it’s not, they’ll say that you’ve lost your nerve or slumped terminally in the suburbs, and your pride […]

With a shout and a prayer and a curse, we leapt at dawn from a boat into the water of the Dardanelles and started to swim from Europe to Asia. It had all started in London over the umpteenth bottle of Bulgarian red. For a long time, I said, I had wanted to swim the […]

I took my son to school this morning. And I’m wondering if that was evil. Proponents of human cognitive enhancement are fond of saying that there is nothing very novel about their suggestions. There is no difference in principle, they say, between improving someone’s neural processing power by (for example) manipulation of the genome, and […]