Berenice Abbott : Modernist Photography

A major exhibition of almost 200 photographs by Berenice Abbott goes on show at the Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona

“To me photography is a means – perhaps the best means of our age – of widening knowledge of our world. Photography is a method of education, for acquainting people of all ages and conditions with the truth about life today,” wrote photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), in an unpublished text, Statement in Regard to Photography Today, 1946. From portraits of elite avant-garde circles in Paris, to rapidly-changing cityscapes of her New York City, plus a career in science journalism, ideas of modernity pervade Abbott’s legacy.

Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, Abbott studied sculpture in New York before moving to Paris in 1921, where she worked as an assistant at the Man Ray studio. There, she mastered the art of photography, and in 1926 held her first solo show at the gallery Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris, where she exhibited portraits of the Parisian avant-garde.

When Abbott returned to New York in 1929, she was struck by how rapidly the city was developing. This lead to her series Changing New York, and soon after she turned her attention to scientific phenomena and experiments, eventually working as picture editor for Science Illustrated and inventing photographic machines like a darkroom distorter and picture composer.

Abbott’s long arc of work paints a portrait of modernity in the new century, a premise on which the major new exhibition of her work at Barcelona’s Fundacion Mapfre is based. It will show almost 200 photographs grouped into three sections, along with a small selection of work by Eugène Atget, a great friend and inspiration to Abbott, with 11 of his photographs developed by Abbott herself in 1956.

Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity, on show in Barcelona.  By Marigold Warner. British Journal of Photography , February 25, 2019.

Berenice Abbott aimed her lens at so many 20th-century subjects that her photographs challenge us to rethink modernity itself. With this in mind, Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Fundación MAPFRE presents close to 200 of her photographs, organized into three chapters. It starts with portraits of fellow artists in Paris, then shifts to her New York City streetscapes, and concludes with her scientific photography. By changing focus as abruptly as Abbott herself, the exhibition adheres to her credo that photography uncovers objective truths. “Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions,” she famously decreed, “it teaches you how to see.” As a result, it is left to the visitor to deduce a unifying thread from her long take on modernity. To that end, the exhibition helpfully includes hourly screenings of the documentary Berenice Abbott: A View of the 20th Century (1992), featuring many frank autobiographical reflections by Abbott.

Born in 1889, Abbott felt so in tune with the improvisational rhythms of the new century that she hoped to “see out” the whole of it — and by the time she died in 1991, she almost had. Her principal legacy is her positioning of photography as an autonomous art form, breaking ranks with photographers like Frank Eugene and Alfred Stieglitz, who adopted painterly techniques in an effort to bolster its cultural prestige. Such embellishments were heresy to Abbott. She contended that photography ought to rely on its unadulterated technical means, even if its art is permanently “a prisoner to its time.”

But Abbott was never prisoner to her time or place. In 1918, she left her native Ohio and lived among writers and artists in New York’s Greenwich Village, befriending figures like Djuna Barnes and Eugene O’Neill. Aspiring at first to be a journalist and, later, a sculptor, Abbott learned that Paris was more hospitable to free thinkers and artists and moved there after World War I. She took a job developing photographs for fellow expatriate Man Ray who soon suggested she try taking pictures herself. He paid her so poorly that she did, and she was soon in regular demand as a photographer, opening her own studio and becoming a leading documentarian of bohemian Paris.

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Portraits of Modernity begins at this juncture. In these early photographs, Abbott’s training in journalism and sculptural art is apparent. She investigates surface and shadow and imposes a monumentalizing stillness, even on some of her most animated subjects. The prominent brow and long face of French novelist André Gide materialize as if brightness itself has been carved from the enveloping darkness. Ever the documentarian, Abbott transforms lighthearted or playful scenes into neutral or impassive atmospheres. As French writer and artist Jean Cocteau is bathed in morning light and hugging a mannequin in bed, the scene’s bracing intimacy becomes a subdued, epicene languor.

Abbott’s solemnity relaxes in her portraits of musicians and women artists. The American writer Janet Flanner gazes nonchalantly, wearing a top hat festooned with two colombina masks; the image perfectly captures the writer’s attentive, sanguine wit. A photograph of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of Abbott’s most frequent subjects, and her close friend, brings together youthful spontaneity and dreamlike saintliness. In another nuanced portrait, the intimidating art patron Peggy Guggenheim smiles shyly as her pet dog lolls, seemingly overjoyed, in her lap.

Her photographs of the aged French photographer Eugene Atget are the most moving. Recently widowed, Atget seems to be staring into his own mortality. His bright eyes form a vivacious contrast to his withered frame and weary posture. In fact, he died soon after the shoot and never lived to see Abbott’s developed prints. But Atget would remain Abbott’s muse, as she reclaimed his style and maintained his work. Atget’s wraithlike pictures of late-19th-century Paris motivated Abbott to turn from portraiture to urban photography. Before leaving Paris for good in the late 1920s, she bought his neglected estate and preserved his legacy, archiving the works and creating prints — many of which are included in Portraits of Modernity to underscore her commitment to Atget’s vision.

Following Atget’s lead, she trained her lens on New York’s rapidly modernizing topography. Like her predecessor, she documented the hidden relation between constructed spaces and human presence, as well as its absence, within a city that runs according to a mysterious internal logic. Funded in part by the Federal Art Project, these photographs literally put her on the map, resulting in an archival commission for the Museum of the City of New York and an accompanying book called Changing New York (1939).

She frames New York City as an evolving marvel of engineering. Her pictures concentrate on how old and new architectural features compete with changing light and shifting shadows to create order within the arbitrary. Her subjects range from Greenwich Village shop windows to sleek midtown Automats and the warm facades of uptown brownstones.

Abbott’s camera exhaustively documents the revival of American capitalism and the resulting civic and state-sponsored developments in New York during the New Deal, symbolized by the construction of the RCA Building and, more dramatically, Rockefeller Center. The latter subject yields some of her most memorable cityscapes: she portrays iron girders being driven into unearthed bedrock while cranes overhead cast crisscrossing shadows on the earthbound equipment and laborers below.

She also documents commercial districts, from bustling warehouses and outer borough gas stations to the confined corridors of Wall Street and sprawling waterfront dockyards. She attends to expanding roadways and urban arteries, as she captures soaring views from underneath trestles and across onramps of newly constructed bridges.

Occasionally, the uncanny intrudes. An enormous handgun suspended from a gunsmith shop seems aimed at the street below. Another bizarre scene shows a looming statue about to be unveiled in Times Square; it towers over the city like a bloated mummy. Economic injustice darkens city life, too, in photographs of makeshift huts along Houston Street, in decrepit back alleys behind “Old Law” tenement apartment buildings, as well as in portraits of homeless men collapsed on sun-drenched downtown sidewalks. When an editor saw these latter photos he chastised her, saying that “nice girls” don’t go to the Bowery. She retorted, “I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer. I go anywhere.”

Among her favorite places were skyscrapers and rooftops. One of Abbott’s most famous images, taken at the end of winter and using long exposure, portrays the city’s office buildings as a sort of Bauhaus-engineered apiary electrified by glowing streams of incandescent light.

Her interest in capturing the flow of energy through physical forms likely fueled her turn to scientific and technological photography, which began in the late 1930s and continued into the early 1960s, with early cooperation from RCA Laboratories and, later, more sustained support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

By this time, Abbott had long shared a home and studio with her partner Elizabeth McCausland and had gained a public profile as a photo editor for Science Illustrated and as an influential teacher of photography at the New School for Social Research. Interdisciplinary work had become her forte. Representing physics, thermodynamics, and hydraulics, her late-period photography frequently illustrated college textbooks. This might be the most fascinating work she ever made.

In one close-up image, soap bubbles divulge an architectural grandeur formed from molecular exchanges occurring between air and water; in another, curves and hollows created from molding cheese resemble the beveled patterns in a coral reef. A magnified photograph of penicillin makes the compound look like a cleaved grapefruit, while a photograph from a series of experiments in physical science shows an iridescent skeleton key bathed in a magnetic field sprinkled with iron filings. The radiating lines and cursive waves are so precise and harmonious that the picture verifies a transcendent order that guides energy as it courses imperceptibly through the physical world.

Taken together, Abbott’s wide-ranging subjects are unified by an underlying conviction that modernity — our impulse to replace tired traditions with original methods — aims for progress across human endeavors in the arts, urban engineering, and science. An accomplished inventor, with several patents to her name, Abbott retreated to a home in Maine for her final years. From there she could watch the sun begin to set on a restless century that, despite well-documented atrocities and nightmares, somehow constantly replenished its optimism about modernity. From our censorious, reactionary era, we might look back on that spirit and find much more in it than just another nostalgia trip.

Berenice Abbott’s Optimistic Modernity. By Tim Keane. Hyperallergic , August 24, 2019.

The History of Hormones

From metabolism to sex drive, hormones come in tiny packets that pack a powerful punch, and yet there is a lot of misinformation about these chemicals. So Randi Hutter Epstein, a doctor and medical writer, decided to set the record straight. The result is her book Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything.

Though we throw around the world “hormonal” today, the concept didn’t exist before the 1900s. In the past century, we’ve gone from not knowing what these glands secreted to selling hormonal sprays that promise to make it easier to seduce. How did we get here?

The Verge spoke to Epstein about the short history of hormones, how they were involved in the “crime of the century,” and how we sometimes give them far too much credit today.

AC : The word and concept of “hormone” only date back to 1905. Before that, what did we believe was regulating our bodies?

RHE : We’ve always wondered what makes our bodies function correctly. There was this horrible, weird time of history in America in the late 1800s when doctors started looking at these so-called “circus freaks.” These were people with disabilities or something wrong with them, like the bearded lady or fat lady. They were being put in the circus, and at the same time, doctors were saying maybe they have some sort of glandular disorder.

It’s not like the “nice doctors” versus “mean circus people.” The circus was paying and doctors were researching them and not really helping them. So these doctors who studied anatomy for years saw glands in the body — like the thyroid and adrenal gland — but we didn’t understand what we did. Until the early 1900s, we thought that everything marched along nerves like marching along train tracks, or went through the blood like a raft going down a river, and then it’d just bang into wherever it’s needed.

Hormones are these internal secretions that come out of a gland, and they go through the blood, but they go to a specific target. This was controversial, and there were people saying it can’t be because how do they know where they’re going? I like to talk about hormones like your internal Wi-Fi because they have these signals that allow them to go to places.

AC : Why didn’t we know about them before? What technology really changed the study of hormones?

RHE : The huge technological advance happened in the late 1950s and really took hold in the mid-‘60s and early ‘70s. It was the ability to, for the very first time, measure hormones down to the billionth of a gram. That’s like if you took a gram of salt and threw it into the ocean, and it had a powerful impact.

It wasn’t that we could sort of measure hormones before this, and then we precisely measured them. Before this, we couldn’t measure hormones at all, and it was all guesswork. This technology, which is called RIA (radioimmunoassay) has made it possible to measure things we thought too scarce to measure. We wouldn’t have been able to find HIV in blood if not for RIA. We wouldn’t be able to track cancer markers.

The other part of the story that I love about this technology is that the co-creator, Rosalyn Yalow, graduated top in her class in physics but was told to be a secretary. So she became a secretary for a scientist at Columbia, and only eventually got into the PhD program at the University of Illinois because there were some open spots because the men were gone for World War II. As she told a biographer, “They had to have a world war for me to have a graduate degree.” The rest is history. She revolutionized modern medicine, won a Nobel, and was very supportive of other women becoming scientists.

AC : So RIA lets us measure a billionth of a gram of hormone. Do we need that level of precision? Can that really make the difference?

RHE : Yes, hormones come in tiny packets. When we say you have too much of this hormone or a lack of another hormone, we are talking in terms of nanograms. They’re potent. We’re not talking about extra pounds of hormones.

AC : Are some more powerful than others, if that question makes sense?

RHE : The way to think about it is that most hormones don’t work on their own. There’s a chain of hormones, helper hormones, “factors.” There are different types that are super powerful and interact with each other, which is how things get super complicated, and you can have a glandular issue that has nothing to do with estrogen, but it’ll screw up your fertility because it’s all connected.

AC: Are we still discovering new hormones?

RHE : Absolutely. In the 1990s we discovered leptin, which is the appetite hormone. We discovered it comes from fat cells, which was shocking because most people think fat cells are just blobs of butter you can remove. We’re still learning about hunger and appetite hormones, and there’s a new insulin growth factor, too. I think, in the future, we’re going to be learning more about hormones and behavior, like hormones that impact basic drives to eat, to lust, and so on.

AC : Speaking of behavior, one fascinating part of the book was about the trial of Leopold and Loeb, and how people tried to defend them saying, “The hormones made them do it.” What precedent does this kind of approach mean for hormones and crime and law?

RHE : The trial was in the 1920s and called the “crime of the century” because it was two rich kids who murdered another rich kid. You couldn’t measure hormones then. It was speculative, and it didn’t work as far as the judge was concerned.

From a scientific perspective, we’re still looking into this. Do I think this will get people off murder? Probably not. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to say, “His hormones made him do it.” But from a scientific perspective, it’s fascinating to look at how hormones shape our behavior. And, of course, what they were doing in the 1920s, unsuccessfully, and what we’re still trying to do now, is look at what hormonal imbalances we can detect early on. And perhaps then we can treat it and make sure that we, for instance, prevent killers.

But as I’m saying these words, you can see right away this is a slippery slope. It’s like the designer baby thing. We know hormones control us, and we’d like to control them to the extent they give us quality, healthy lives, like the way we use insulin to help diabetes. But then again, how much control do we need? We don’t want to go the route of eugenics.

AC : What do you think about the way we talk about hormones today? Like all the hype surrounding the “love hormone” oxytocin, for instance.

RHE : We simplify things too much. Too often there’s a seed of fascinating scientific discovery. And before that seed has time to blossom, there are people who glom on and extrapolate way too far. With oxytocin, yeah, it probably does have to do with human mother-baby bonding, but we’re taking a major leap to say, “You can buy an oxytocin love spray.”

There are some clues that oxytocin impacts behavior. It might augment that feeling that you have, but it could turn hate into more hate instead of necessarily hate into love. People are hoping that giving oxytocin to children on the autistic spectrum would help them, but so far, it hasn’t been very successful. So I’m not saying we shouldn’t do this research, but it’s very different from purchasing something over the counter that might not even have oxytocin in it. It could just be water.

How hormones went from theoretical to overhyped in one century. By Angela Chen. The Verge , August 7,  2019. 

Lulu Garcia-Navarro  (NPR) talks with Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein about her new book Aroused, which tells the story of the scientific quest to understand human hormones.

The Scientists Who Explore Human Hormones In 'Aroused'.  NPR,  July 1 , 2018. 

Website Randi Hutter Epstein

This is a well-written and informative book about the history of hormone research. The interested reader will learn how scientists have come to understand what hormones are and how they function. But it is also deeply disturbing: for what this history entails, for how the author tells it and for what she leaves out.

“Aroused” is organized around scientific and medical episodes from the 19th century to the present, many of which involved dubious and unethical practices. Among the central characters are doctors who promoted vasectomy to enhance male youthfulness, who operated on patients without their knowledge and who experimented on their own children. Randi Hutter Epstein, the author of “Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth From the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank,” tells us of a journalist paid by a doctor to ghostwrite glowing articles about testosterone therapy and of a physician who kept a 17-month-old baby boy in the hospital for a month while he performed experimental genital surgery without parental support; the doctor then sent the child home instructing the parents to expunge all evidence that “she” was ever a “he.”

Even more disturbing than reading about these practices is that for the most part Epstein shrugs them off, saying that the physicians involved were well intentioned, that what they did was appropriate for their day or that they did what they could with the information they had. These were the “best practices of the time.” It was “just the way things were.” But that’s not quite true: Some of these practices were questioned even at the time. And it doesn’t take hindsight to recognize hubris.

In a chapter titled “Pickled Brains,” Epstein seems to delight in the macabre spectacle of abandoned organs in a university basement. The brains were collected for research in the early 20th century; she notes that to handle them now requires compliance with biohazard regulations yet she fails to explain why. Neither does she tarry much over the ethical medical treatment of human remains. Consider Charles Byrne, the so-called Irish giant who in the late 19th century became the object of public attention. Byrne anticipated that after his death, physicians would want to study and perhaps display his body, so he instructed friends to seal his coffin and dispose of it in the ocean. They agreed, but Byrne’s directive was circumvented when the prominent physician John Hunter arranged for the cadaver to be stolen and the skeleton displayed in the Hunterian Museum, London, where it remains today. Numerous historians, ethicists and laypeople have objected to the continued thwarting of Byrne’s wishes; Epstein reduces this complex and important matter to a footnote.

Epstein contrasts “quackery” with “legitimate research,” and “craziness” with “serious science,” but the crucial question of how to distinguish between them is unaddressed. Many of the dodgy practices she describes were undertaken by credentialed medical doctors and scientists. Today, testosterone therapy for virility is endorsed by people with medical degrees, but there is little evidence of its efficacy. Epstein offers no guidance on how we might evaluate the untested or otherwise problematic therapies on offer today. If we were to adopt her stance that this is “just the way things are,” we would have no way to judge, and therefore no basis on which to object to current dubious practices.

Epstein also elides the problem of hormone-disrupting chemicals. Among the reasons hormones long eluded scientific understanding is that they can be effective at minuscule doses, and the body is acutely sensitive to when those doses are released. One of the great advances of late-20th-century science was to understand this; another was to recognize that some synthetic chemicals — most notoriously the pesticide DDT but also many others — can mimic hormones with great adverse effect. (DDT was banned in part because it was killing bald eagles by disrupting their reproduction.)

These chemicals are toxic, but not in the way that lead or mercury or arsenic is. Rather, they alter endocrine function: hence the moniker endocrine-disrupting chemicals or EDCs. The human health effects of EDCs are not entirely understood, but the list of potential problems is long: prostate and breast cancer, infertility, fibroids, endometriosis, male and female reproductive dysfunction, birth defects, disrupted immune function, obesity, diabetes, cardiopulmonary disease, neurobehavioral and learning dysfunctions like autism, hermaphroditism and alternation of sexual identity in animals. One estimate places the cost of the disease burden at $340 billion. Surely a book on the history of hormone research should have something to say about that.

Science or Quackery? The Study of Hormones Has Been Both, a New Book Suggests. By  Naomi Oreskes. The New York Times , August 6, 2018.

“I think I’ll go into wrestling. Blood, sweat, and fighting, that’s me.” I looked at my seven-year-old daughter as we left the playground, that hotbed of jungle activity after school. “Did something prompt this?” I pressed. My child has never expressed an inclination toward blood and sweat, and fighting is something she has historically interpreted as a verbal activity. We entered our destination, the grocery store, and she jumped on the rolling basket so she could ride it from the outside. Then: “It’s just — why are boys so … boyish? What makes them that way?”

As it happened, I had just finished Randi Hutter Epstein’s chatty and absorbing book, Aroused: A History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything, out in paperback from Norton. And that was how the old ladies examining the plums at Zabar’s ended up hearing a mother say, “Well, it starts with androgens. When an embryo is XY, it usually responds to hormones in the mother’s blood supply that tell it to grow testes and a penis. Do you want sweet potatoes for dinner? Later on, other hormones come into play.”

Hormones have been on my mind quite a bit of late. Earlier today I sat before a sea of papers, cross-hatched piles of notes and charts. Laundry remained unfolded on the couch. I wanted to eat a pound of cheese for lunch, and no sooner did something occur to me than I had forgotten it, lost in a fog of distraction. Put simply, I have PMS. I begin counting the days at this time, waiting for the near bacchanalian delight of my monthly blood flow. Oh, the release! Oh, the energy! The depression lifts, and I coast into clear-thinking waters! I will no longer study two pages of a newspaper article only to look up and say, “What the hell have I been reading?” I will follow things again — schedules, TV show story lines, a logical order of operations for housework. All this will be from a change in hormones. Two weeks later, my husband and child will marvel at how I’ve vacuumed the living room rug in a perfect pattern, scrubbed the bathtub to a gleaming shine, alphabetized the books by author and arranged them by subject. That’s ovulation. Then I will begin the downward slide once more to PMS. Hormones. They do seem to control everything.

Aroused begins at the turn of the century, when scientists tinkering in the lab began to discover hormones, and how they differ from neurotransmitters: if our nervous system is a highway of linked connections, our endocrine system is what Epstein calls “your wireless network.” Where the book really takes off is in its pointed examination of how social norms and sexual politics have interacted with new discoveries in science. Dr. Louis Berman declared a new field in the 1920s, which he called “Psycho-Endocrinology.” He went on to write a book called The Glands Regulating Personality, in which he suggested that women with irregular periods “will also be aggressive, dominating, even enterprising and pioneering — in short, [they have] masculinized ovaries.” To think: A woman has no chance of being enterprising if she bleeds like clockwork every month! There are plenty of other historical citations here that may make you laugh or cry. In 1924, two doctors, Harold Hulbert and Karl Bowman, from Boston Psychopathic Hospital — yes, that was a real place — were called in to examine Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two teenagers being tried for what had been dubbed, “The Crime of the Century.” They had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a 14-year-old boy. Other than depravity, there was no motive, but because the case converged with the burgeoning era of endocrinology, a shocked public and an eager defense attorney named Clarence Darrow sought answers in the new field. During the examination, which took eight days, reporters crouched outside the prison. Then Hulbert took the stand to declare Loeb suffered from “multigland syndrome” and Leopold had, among other pathologies, a calcified pineal gland, which accounted for his excessively high libido. Their chief instruments were a metabolimeter and an X-ray machine (the theory being that bones are pushed aside by oversized glands and would therefore show up on X-ray). The judge ultimately decided that it made no difference whether the endocrine experts were right or not. Murder was murder, and criminals could not seek absolution in their biochemistry.

It’s a problem that continues to fascinate us as a society: Does psychopathy excuse certain behaviors? Does it make a crime more or less understandable? Many experts debated the nature of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy’s character — was he a classic psychopath? — and felt they had zeroed in on a crucial question. But had they? Was it just about semantics, or were there important questions of science, treatment, and punishment on the line? Certainly it is interesting to see how the discovery of hormones kicked off a round of this debate, and it is gratifying to see a judge apply a moral code equally.

                                                                       

The most moving chapter of Epstein’s book follows the story of a baby named Brian Sullivan at birth in 1956. The baby was labeled a “hermaphrodite” in his earliest hospital records: he appeared to have both penile and vaginal tissue. At 18 months, the doctor — rather drastically, by today’s standards — performed an exploratory surgery and discovered the child had a vagina, uterus, and ovaries in his abdominal cavity. Without consulting Brian’s parents, he amputated the clitoris and then instructed them to begin raising the child as a girl. Brian became Bonnie. Wardrobe, activities, even room color were switched to the conventional “pink for girls.” And Bonnie promptly stopped talking. As Epstein reminds us, it was a dark time for people born with atypical genitalia. There was very little understanding of the complex processes underlying the hard-wiring of gender identity. Discovering a uterus inside a child did not, in fact, entail the discovery of the child’s gender identity. Later, after further research, it would become clear that an initial spurting of estrogen or testosterone into the bloodstream during pregnancy likely shaped at least some of this hard-wiring. So whatever disrupted Brian’s genital development may also have shaped whom he or she felt herself to be gender-wise. Bonnie’s life was again disrupted medically at eight when she was operated on to remove genital tissue from her abdomen. She was told that it was for her “stomach pains,” though she reports not having any pain at the time. She was admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in 1964, where photographers took photos of her naked, and where she endured pre-operative pelvic exams. “The fingers in her vagina and anus were mortifying. She felt like a freak,” reports Epstein, who met Bonnie, now called “Bo,” years later. It was many years before Bo unearthed her medical records, finding the crude designation “hermaphrodite” among the other abuses she endured. Eventually, she founded the “Intersex Society of North America,” in the hope of connecting with other people who had suffered similar sorts of mistreatment and aggressive interventions, and consequentially endured lives of loneliness and confusion. She also wanted to inform doctors on how better to manage intersex children. Soon, letters from lonely and discouraged intersex people flooded her post office box. A support network sprang up.

Aroused shows how hormone and surgical therapies hardened a binary gender system. “The data,” however, “were showing a much more complex picture of humanity,” writes Epstein. Christine Jorgensen, born George Jorgensen in 1926, transitioned at 26 from male to female with the help of surgery and hormones. The Daily News broke the story in 1956 and, before long, the Danish doctor who performed the surgery was inundated with requests for help. Americans turned to Dr. Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist specializing in gender and sexuality. It was Benjamin who would clarify the notion of hard-wiring of the fetal brain toward gender identity as being dependent on hormonal influences in the womb, and would go on to write The Transsexual Phenomenon. (Transsexual is an outdated word, and has since been replaced with the more accurate “transgender.”) He, in turn, referred patients seeking surgery to the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. Epstein navigates this topic well, focusing on the complexity of the issue. “[W]hat causes transgender identity in one person may not be the same as in another,” she writes.

Ultimately, the message of Aroused is that we know a lot about hormones, but definitely not everything, which might well have been its subtitle. Enter the quacks, frauds, careless researchers, and others looking for quick payoffs from new discoveries. In nearly every chapter, Epstein stresses the vulnerability of new scientific information about the maintenance of the human body to industry objectives. Hormones were especially vulnerable since they seem to regulate just about every major process, from growth to metabolism, sleep cycles to sex, parenting to the immune system, stress to lactation. From the “revitalizing vasectomies” and “epinephrine suppositories” of the 1920s, to the oxytocin supplements currently being sold as enhancers of both arousal and intimacy (despite no strong evidence that the hormone can be metabolized with a sublingual dose and despite the precise function of the hormone not being known), companies are eager to make a buck by turning new science into ill-gotten profit. Just as we are vulnerable to well-meaning doctors, we are vulnerable to our desires for treatments and cures.

Hormones are tiny drops in a very big ocean, interacting in complex ways with nerve cells and other chemicals in the human body, Aroused warns. Not only do we need to strive for more knowledge but also for accurate testing of that knowledge. We may have come far from the dark days when Blanche Grey, “The Fat Bride,” was put on display in the New York City Dime Museum — for suffering some type of thyroid or pituitary malfunction — or indeed from the days of nonconsensual clitoral amputation of the sort Bo Laurent endured, yet our society still struggles with accepting just how varied our gender spectrum is. My father, who is 80, says he has no trouble with understanding different sexual orientations, or transgender identity, but “nonbinary” is a bridge too far. Meanwhile, my daughter is growing up in a world where people are claiming the pronouns they feel best suit them, and she may be surprised to learn that there was ever a need for adjustment to the notion of a spectrum. We are currently reading A Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, in which Madeleine L’Engle introduces the concept of more evolved creatures who communicate with one another by “kything,” which allows for a more complete understanding of another’s interior world. This strikes me as an apt metaphor for humanity’s expanding definitions of gender identity as science catches up to human experience. At their best, the biological sciences can bring us closer to understanding and helping one another, introducing our differences not as obstacles but bridges.

And then there’s menopause. “Mid-Life Psychosis,” screamed a New York Magazine cover one week in December last year. “45, female, and hearing voices.” The article examined a link between fluctuating hormones — specifically a drop in estrogen — during menopause, and late-onset schizophrenia. The author admits she was at first reluctant to take the topic on (she did not want to be responsible for furthering the trope of the crazy menopausal lady). But, she continues, it became clear that women were once again an underserved community: how hormones affect women’s minds and bodies is little understood because it is little studied. I am 44 myself and, while not yet in menopause, have begun to notice small changes. I still menstruate every month, but I find my moods a little less like clockwork, a bit more unpredictable. I notice increased restlessness, as well as a driving need for solid exercise every day to calm and center me. I notice a decrease in the symptoms of PMS, but find that those blue moods and sudden cramps might take hold of me at other times in the month. Naturally, I was both horrified and fascinated by the possible link between menopause and schizophrenia. Something is definitely happening, I thought. Please let them figure it out. A recent article linking cognitive decline and menopause made the rounds on Facebook, and I eagerly jotted down what I learned, hoping to glean tips on how to reduce my evidently gender-determined chances of developing dementia. I’ve already added Darcey Steinke’s new book on her own experience with menopause, Flash Count Diary, to my to-read-immediately pile.

Epstein’s dry wit is put to best use in her chapter on menopause: “Some women skip through the whole experience: their periods stop and that’s that. No erratic temperature changes, no mood swings, no brain fog, libido as good as ever. To those women, the rest of us must seem like cranky bitches.” I know how deeply affected my brain is by hormones, not only because of my dramatic monthly shifts and symptoms, but also because I experienced such a wrenchingly awful pregnancy that the memory never leaves my mind. At only six weeks, I began crying when the sun went down. At eight or nine weeks, my uterus began contracting, leaving me breathless, and I developed a painful rash. I spent much of my pregnancy deeply depressed, and I knew, even after I had seen my beautiful child, that I could never do it again. So, I expect to be one of the cranky bitches. I also want to be armed with knowledge. The trouble is, there’s conflicting data. Is it the decline in estrogen that makes women more likely to have heart attacks, strokes, dementia, osteoporosis, or is the reality more complex? Epstein reveals that studies don’t show any benefit to long-term hormone replacement therapy — that is, no reduction in these types of illnesses. However, she does offer some encouraging news: a few years of hormone therapy to ease the symptoms of menopause is unlikely to hurt you. The establishment has been back and forth on that point a few times, and, she acknowledges, who knows? It may swing the other way again. We have to muddle through with the research we’ve got at the moment. If that isn’t exactly comforting, Epstein’s writing so colorfully about the subject certainly is. I felt I had a friend guiding me through the terrifying waters of my own biology. In the meantime, I’ve got to go teach my daughter about estrogen. I sure hope she appreciates her generous stockpile of the mysterious but clearly crucial hormone.

“Your Wireless Network”: Grappling with Hormones. By Leslie Kendall Dye. Los Angeles Review of Books, August 24, 2019. 

A Transhuman Future

In the 2019 TV series Years and Years, a young girl dissatisfied with her life reveals to her parents she is “trans”. Her parents readily express their acceptance and support for their daughter’s supposed desire to have a sex change. But then she tells them she is not “transgender” but “transhuman”, and wishes to leave her physical body behind to become data. Her parents are shocked – and then furious.

 As this scene shows, although technological advances may offer new ways for people to lead their lives, they can also create new prejudices. A growing awareness of trans issues – both transgender and transhuman – is stimulating general debate. But we should not assume that discussion of bodily changes necessarily means progression towards a more equal society. The human body comes in a huge variety of shapes, sizes and colours, yet people outside the perceived norm have often been seen as threatening, ridiculous or hateful. For example, the Hijra, an Indian transgender community dating back 4,000 years, may have achieved legal recognition in 2014 but faces renewed discrimination today. The possibilities for physical change have never been greater. From tattoos to cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment procedures to bionic implants, people have an increasing number of ways to alter their appearance and the way they live.

As Years and Years hints at, technological progress doesn’t only affect gender identity. While prosthetics and implants for medical purposes have been around for years, a whole new range of elective body augmentations are becoming possible. The term “transhumanism” describes the evolution of the human race beyond its current state, particularly through the implantation of technology in the body. This “bio-hacking” blurs the line between human and non-human. For example, Professor Kevin Warwick, often referred to as “Captain Cyborg”, had a microchip implanted that enabled him to control the lights and doors in his lab. He then had further surgery to connect an electrode array with his nervous system, which allowed him to control a robotic arm with his mind. While transgender people have been around for thousands of years, they are offered new possibilities through technology. In contrast, transhumanism is only possible because of technology. In either case, the increase in body modification and gender reassignment procedures suggests now is a good time to reconsider our notions of gender and identity more generally, especially as we live in such an interconnected world. The ability to decide how our body appears and performs in society is transferring more power to the individual, and diverse lifestyle choices are proliferating.

 But the increase in alternative ways of living also gives rise to more and different types of discrimination. There has been a sharp rise in transgender hate crimes in the UK, and even an alleged assault in France linked to transhuman discrimination. In this case, staff members in a fast-food restaurant tried to forcibly remove a man’s augmented reality headset, as they thought he was filming them, but it was attached to his skull. Fiction, in literature, film and TV, plays an important role in showing alternative ways of living. Such stories reflect and foster an awareness and experience of current issues in society. So it is not surprising that a variety of fictional transhuman and transgender protagonists have emerged over recent years. They also can help us to anticipate possible avenues of discrimination.

Two very recent examples of transgender and transhuman matters in British fiction are Jeanette Winterson’s latest book, Frankissstein, and the previously mentioned series Years and Years, created by Russell T Davies. Both of these works depict alternative modes of gender and identity in an increasingly tech-dominated world, showing how technological advances can offer increased choices for people but also create new prejudices. In Franskissstein, the human body is subjected to radical changes in a contemporary world of cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence (AI). The characters, including a transgender doctor, a Welsh sex-bot entrepreneur and an AI professor, collectively push at the boundaries of what it means to be human. Gender reassignment, sexual relations with robots, and the transfer of the mind to digital form are all depicted. Each of these new ways of living are met with resistance and intolerance by others in the book.

Meanwhile, in Years and Years, the character Daniel’s status as a gay man is unquestioningly accepted by his family and friends. By contrast, the desire of his niece, Bethany, to become transhuman through tech implants and bio-hacking is met with anger, fear, and revulsion. 30 years on from the groundbreaking, and at the time shocking to many, presentation of a gay relationship on Eastenders, the portrayal of Daniel shows how far the acceptance of same-sex relationships on TV has come. This also suggests that the desire to become transhuman may take many years to become more widely tolerated.

In real life, as in fiction, the expanding range of lifestyle choices available now and in the future will not simply lead to increased tolerance of difference. Although transgender and transhuman issues are becoming increasingly visible, new forms of discrimination will arise as people move further away from “traditional” modes of living.

But if the end-goal of transhumanism is to leave our biological origins entirely behind us, then a posthuman world would also be a postgender world. In which case, so much of the discrimination that focuses on the body would become extinct.

Transgender, transhuman: technological advances offer increased choices but also create new prejudices . By Shareena Z Hamzah. The Conversation , August 19, 2019. 

In the premiere of the HBO/BBC miniseries Years and Years, two parents are worried. Their teenage daughter Bethany has been hiding behind a 3D animated emoji mask and has scheduled a talk with them. Trying to figure out what they’re up against, they sneak a peek at her internet searches. When they discover that she’s been searching for information about being trans, they’re relieved; they can handle a transgender child.

Except when it comes time for their talk, Bethany tells her parents she’s transhuman and that she wants to “live forever as information.” The show represents transhumanist technology and aspirations, many of which revolve around upgrading and digitizing the human body, as a movement that will bring positive, negative, and downright confusing implications, ultimately changing the human race. The real question is what exactly that means. Humans opened the Pandora’s box of merging technology and biology a long time ago, and we’re now speeding head-on into the consequences, despite not knowing what humanity will become.

Bethany’s “coming out” scene hinges on the fact that the changes she desires are far more dangerous—and, for her parents, far more difficult to stomach—than gender reassignment. Bethany’s excitement at escaping the mortal coil brims with typical teenage naïveté: “Transhumans are not male or female, but better,” she tells her parents. For Bethany, that means no longer being human. “I will be data!” she enthuses.

Transhumanism, or the belief that humans should use technology to escape suffering and to expand human abilities, has gained momentum in tech-advanced circles for decades. The idea has even inspired fringe political parties, including in the U.S. Transhumanists create and support technologies such as robots, artificial intelligence, brain and body enhancements (for both the injured and for those who want an “upgrade”), nanotechnology, bio-printing organs, genetic modification, and consciousness transference—basically, sci-fi and superhero tech.

Years and Years, whose finale aired Monday on HBO, explores the near future, focusing on the years 2024 to 2030. It illustrates political, cultural, environmental, and technological trajectories, tugging on current trends to offer realistic, if discomfiting, glimpses of the near future. The North Pole has melted, the U.K. receives 80 days of rain in a row, and nuclear conflict punctuates growing despair across the globe. Given that backdrop, is it so illogical to decide that an earthly existence isn’t the best idea? Bethany uses the word escape to describe her desire to shed her individual and species-level identity. Her focus on shedding the trappings of the human body eclipses any concerns about retaining some measure of humanity—and perhaps that’s precisely the point. That humanity, after all, is the source of planetary (as well as human and animal) destruction.

The show demonstrates the dangers and far-fetched nature of Bethany’s goal, including when her friend goes through a botched optical upgrade on an unlicensed clinic at sea. But toward the end, the series morphs from treating transhumanism as a destructive idea. Instead, it begins exploring the benefits of integrating with data—and how the concept could become not mainstream, exactly, but common enough. Bethany receives a government-funded upgrade that allows her to use cameras as eyes. She can tap into satellite data, access barometric readings from the ocean floor, and monitor her friends’ and family members’ online activities. She still has a body, but her mind has begun the transhuman transition. While she isn’t data herself, she has access to limitless amounts of it; she is basically a superhero. The technical and practical benefits make up only part of the equation. After her surgery, Bethany describes the access to that information as “joy in [her] head.” Even though technology can strip humanity away, it can also deliver the most sublime of human emotions.

 

Thus, the show illustrates technology’s ultimate conundrum: Technology itself is neutral, as the aphorism goes, but in the hands of humans, it can become a vehicle for destruction or for deliverance. For a show that often represents technology negatively, the choice to cast it as an instrument of salvation is interesting, if not confusing. But perhaps that’s the point: Depending on who wields it and how, technology can be or do just about anything. That also means that those who wield it can be or do just about anything. Such technology transcends human experience. Bethany’s omnipresence helps her aunt Edith expose the illegal and deadly camps where the government imprisons immigrants and refugees. When Edith begins filming at a camp, Bethany closes her eyes, spreads her hands wide, and enables a global broadcast of the footage. In demonstrating omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, she taps into the province of gods. Such status represents a new identity—not simply human, but not (yet) data. Bethany becomes transhuman, which the show depicts as evolution rather than as a wacky cyborg plan. What would it mean for humans to become or create gods? Would that transition involve reaching the pinnacle of existence? Data is digital lifeblood, not just for Bethany, but for the camp’s detainees and for citizens who seek truth. If controlling data elevates Bethany from human to god, then what would happen if someone actually became data? This parallels the ultimate question: What happens after we die? Some people believe the physical body is only a vessel and that the essence of a person—the “soul,” spirit, or something else—continues to exist in some form. While the notion of an afterlife might seem incompatible with science, achieving immortality as data is another form of the same idea. The only difference is that instead of God, technology facilitates that ascendance. As journalist Meghan O’Gieblyn puts it, “What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated.” Preserving one’s consciousness as data may be the ultimate upgrade, despite questions around how much of the human experience can be translated into data (not to mention the associated physical and societal dangers). Humans have been data-driven beings from the beginning, but can all human experiences be captured via data? In the season finale, Edith, dying of radiation sickness, becomes the first character to try to become data by uploading her consciousness so it can continue to exist in the cloud. Through technology, she attempts to forge a new, transhuman identity.

This turn might seem more at home in Black Mirror. Battlestar Galactica, Altered Carbon, Old Man’s War, and so many sci-fi stories feature people (or Cylons) who can be resurrected in another body after they die. In Chappie and Caprica, the dead’s consciousness finds a home in a robot body. And in some stories, such as “San Junipero” (the only episode of Black Mirror with a happy ending), Transcendence, and Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, the uploading of people’s minds results in everything from eternal bliss to mind control to killer computer viruses. While sci-fi demonstrates some interesting possibilities, no one knows what uploading a mind or the transition to becoming data would actually entail. But the fact that a television drama explores these ideas underscores their forthcoming transition from fiction to reality. Even though no one really knows how to map, store, or transfer someone’s consciousness, a few companies have begun trying. A startup called Brain Backups wants to map the “connectome,” or the “genome of the brain.” Nectome is trying to find a chemical way to preserve one’s memories beyond death. LifeNaut gathers people’s data to create a mind backup as well as a robotic “mind clone.” Are these steps along the way to humans becoming data? Perhaps. Regardless, the countless unanswered questions about what it means to become data aren’t preventing researchers from heading down this path.

Years and Years captures that lack of understanding. As the copying process ends, Edith has a realization: “I’m not code.” She says to the technician, “All these bits you’ve copied—they’re not facts. They’re so much more than that. They’re family.” But becoming digital is the dying Edith’s only way to stay connected to her family, revealing further parallels to a religious afterlife—and to eternal salvation. Much as Bethany describes her digital connections as “joy,” Edith’s final words as she completes the transition are “I am love.” But for all the resolve of that statement, the season ends with Edith’s grandmother turning on her smart device and asking, “Edith, is that you?” That is precisely the right question. Would your mind file be you? Is the sum of all my quantifiable information me? No one knows what it would mean for humans to become data or to exist forever in the cloud, but we do know that such an advancement would fundamentally change humanity. That’s neither inherently good nor inherently bad; change is constant and inevitable. Some people worry that we’ll lose our humanity, but what does that actually mean? And is that necessarily bad? Transhumanists want to break free from the slow, natural cycle of hominid evolution. They would argue that doing so would be a confirmation of humanity, rather than a loss of it, because regardless of the ensuing changes, human intelligence and innovation made that shift happen. Technically, we’ve used technology to benefit our lives and our bodies for a long time. With wrenching verisimilitude and “we built this world” blame, Years and Years suggests that the same trajectory that brought us antibiotics, vaccinations, surgical techniques, and so much more will deliver us to a place where we control our own evolution. Juan Enriquez, founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School, argues that Homo sapiens will become Homo evolutis—perhaps not by 2030 or in our lifetimes, but by our grandchildren’s. Whether via genetic modification, nanobots, A.I., cybernetic upgrades, or mind files uploaded to the cloud, humanity races toward change, and in that way remains itself.

What Would It Mean for Humans to Become Data? By Joelle Renstrom. Slate , July 30, 2019.

The aims of the transhumanist movement are summed up by Mark O’Connell in his book To Be a Machine, which last week won the Wellcome Book prize. “It is their belief that we can and should eradicate ageing as a cause of death; that we can and should use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher ideals.” The idea of technologically enhancing our bodies is not new. But the extent to which transhumanists take the concept is. In the past, we made devices such as wooden legs, hearing aids, spectacles and false teeth. In future, we might use implants to augment our senses so we can detect infrared or ultraviolet radiation directly or boost our cognitive processes by connecting ourselves to memory chips. Ultimately, by merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased intelligence, strength, and lifespans; a near embodiment of gods.

Is that a desirable goal? Advocates of transhumanism believe there are spectacular rewards to be reaped from going beyond the natural barriers and limitations that constitute an ordinary human being. But to do so would raise a host of ethical problems and dilemmas. As O’Connell’s book indicates, the ambitions of transhumanism are now rising up our intellectual agenda. But this is a debate that is only just beginning. There is no doubt that human enhancement is becoming more and more sophisticated – as will be demonstrated at the exhibition The Future Starts Here which opens at the V&A museum in London this week. Items on display will include “powered clothing” made by the US company Seismic. Worn under regular clothes, these suits mimic the biomechanics of the human body and give users – typically older people – discrete strength when getting out of a chair or climbing stairs, or standing for long periods.

In many cases these technological or medical advances are made to help the injured, sick or elderly but are then adopted by the healthy or young to boost their lifestyle or performance. The drug erythropoietin (EPO) increases red blood cell production in patients with severe anaemia but has also been taken up as an illicit performance booster by some athletes to improve their bloodstream’s ability to carry oxygen to their muscles. And that is just the start, say experts. “We are now approaching the time when, for some kinds of track sports such as the 100-metre sprint, athletes who run on carbon-fibre blades will be able outperform those who run on natural legs,” says Blay Whitby, an artificial intelligence expert at Sussex University. The question is: when the technology reaches this level, will it be ethical to allow surgeons to replace someone’s limbs with carbon-fibre blades just so they can win gold medals? Whitby is sure many athletes will seek such surgery. “However, if such an operation came before any ethics committee that I was involved with, I would have none of it. It is a repulsive idea – to remove a healthy limb for transient gain.”

Not everyone in the field agrees with this view, however. Cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick, of Coventry University, sees no problem in approving the removal of natural limbs and their replacement with artificial blades. “What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better – or which might allow you to live longer?” he says. Warwick is a cybernetics enthusiast who, over the years, has had several different electronic devices implanted into his body. “One allowed me to experience ultrasonic inputs. It gave me a bat sense, as it were. I also interfaced my nervous system with my computer so that I could control a robot hand and experience what it was touching. I did that when I was in New York, but the hand was in a lab in England.”

Such interventions enhance the human condition, Warwick insists, and indicate the kind of future humans might have when technology augments performance and the senses. Some might consider this unethical. But even doubters such as Whitby acknowledge the issues are complex. “Is it ethical to take two girls under the age of five and train them to play tennis every day of their lives until they have the musculature and skeletons of world champions?” he asks. From this perspective the use of implants or drugs to achieve the same goal does not look so deplorable. This last point is a particular issue for those concerned with the transhumanist movement. They believe that modern technology ultimately offers humans the chance to live for aeons, unshackled – as they would be – from the frailties of the human body. Failing organs would be replaced by longer-lasting high-tech versions just as carbon-fibre blades could replace the flesh, blood and bone of natural limbs. Thus we would end humanity’s reliance on “our frail version 1.0 human bodies into a far more durable and capable 2.0 counterpart,” as one group has put it. However, the technology needed to achieve these goals relies on as yet unrealised developments in genetic engineering, nanotechnology and many other sciences and may take many decades to reach fruition. As a result, many advocates – such as the US inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have backed the idea of having their bodies stored in liquid nitrogen and cryogenically preserved until medical science has reached the stage when they can be revived and their resurrected bodies augmented and enhanced.

 

Four such cryogenic facilities have now been constructed: three in the US and one in Russia. The largest is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona whose refrigerators store more than 100 bodies (nevertheless referred to as “patients” by staff) in the hope of their subsequent thawing and physiological resurrection. It is “a place built to house the corpses of optimists”, as O’Connell says in To Be a Machine. Not everyone is convinced about the feasibility of such technology or about its desirability. “I was once interviewed by a group of cryonic enthusiasts – based in California – called the society for the abolition of involuntary death,” recalls the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. “I told them I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than a Californian refrigerator. They derided me as a deathist – really old-fashioned.”

For his part, Rees believes that those who choose to freeze themselves in the hope of being eventually thawed out would be burdening future generations expected to care for these newly defrosted individuals. “It is not clear how much consideration they would deserve,” Rees adds.

Ultimately, adherents of transhumanism envisage a day when humans will free themselves of all corporeal restraints. Kurzweil and his followers believe this turning point will be reached around the year 2030, when biotechnology will enable a union between humans and genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems. The resulting human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation, uploading itself at will on to a “suitably powerful computational substrate”. We will become gods, or more likely “star children” similar to the one at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These are remote and, for many people, very fanciful goals. And the fact that much of the impetus for establishing such extreme forms of transhuman technology comes from California and Silicon Valley is not lost on critics. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who wants to send the human race to Mars, also believes that to avoid becoming redundant in the face of the development of artificial intelligence, humans must merge with machines to enhance our own intellect.

This is a part of the world where the culture of youth is followed with fanatical intensity and where ageing is feared more acutely than anywhere else on the planet. Hence the overpowering urge to try to use technology to overcome its effects. It is also one of the world’s richest regions, and many of those who question the values of the transhuman movement warn it risks creating technologies that will only create deeper gulfs in an already divided society where only some people will be able to afford to become enhanced while many other lose out. The position is summed up by Whitby. “History is littered with the evil consequences of one group of humans believing they are superior to another group of humans,” he said. “Unfortunately in the case of enhanced humans they will be genuinely superior. We need to think about the implications before it is too late.”

For their part, transhumanists argue that the costs of enhancement will inevitably plummet and point to the example of the mobile phone, which was once so expensive only the very richest could afford one, but which today is a universal gadget owned by virtually every member of society. Such ubiquity will become a feature of technologies for augmenting men and women, advocates insist.

Many of these issues seem remote, but experts warn that the implications involved need to be debated as a matter of urgency. An example is provided by the artificial hand being developed by Newcastle University. Current prosthetic limbs are limited by their speed of response. But project leader Kianoush Nazarpour believes it will soon be possible to create bionic hands that can assess an object and instantly decide what kind of grip it should adopt. “It will be of enormous benefit, but its use raises all sorts of issues. Who will own it: the wearer or the NHS? And if it is used to carry a crime, who ultimately will be responsible for its control? We are not thinking about these concerns and that is a worry.” The position is summed up by bioethicist professor Andy Miah of Salford University.

“Transhumanism is valuable and interesting philosophically because it gets us to think differently about the range of things that humans might be able to do – but also because it gets us to think critically about some of those limitations that we think are there but can in fact be overcome,” he says. “We are talking about the future of our species, after all.”

Limbs

The artificial limbs of Luke Skywalker and the Six Million Dollar Man are works of fiction. In reality, bionic limbs have suffered from multiple problems: becoming rigid mid-action, for example. But new generations of sensors are now making it possible for artificial legs and arms to behave in much more complex, human-like ways.

Senses

The light that is visible to humans excludes both infrared and ultra-violet radiation. However, researchers are working on ways of extending the wavelengths of radiation that we can detect, allowing us to see more of the world - and in a different light. Ideas like these are particularly popular with military researchers trying to create cyborg soldiers.

Power

Powered suits or exoskeletons are wearable mobile machines that allow people to move their limbs with increased strength and endurance. Several versions are being developed by the US army, while medical researchers are working on easy-to-wear versions that would be able to help people with severe medical conditions or who have lost limbs to move about naturally.

Brains

Transhumanists envisage the day when memory chips and neural pathways are actually embedded into people’s brains, thus bypassing the need to use external devices such as computers in order to access data and to make complicated calculations. The line between humanity and machines will become increasingly blurred.

No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman? By  Robin McKie. The Guardian,  May 6 , 2018.