The previous work of project director Hava Tirosh-Samuelson has paved the way for a serious academic analysis of the cultural significance of transhumanism. That work focused primarily on movements and trends within the United States, and only touched on the European discourse on human enhancement and converging technologies. Europe is also a site for leading intellectual developments regarding postsecularism. In order to engage European intellectuals who are at the forefront of this...

The previous work of project director Hava Tirosh-Samuelson has paved the way for a serious academic analysis of the cultural significance of transhumanism. That work focused primarily on movements and trends within the United States, and only touched on the European discourse on human enhancement and converging technologies. Europe is also a site for leading intellectual developments regarding postsecularism. In order to engage European intellectuals who are at the forefront of this...

The term "transhumanism" denotes an ideology of extreme progress, giving coherence to the accelerated pace of advances in science and technology. As a future-oriented outlook, transhumanism offers a vision of and for humanity in which genetically enhanced humans will live extremely long, intensely happy lives, free of pain and disease. In this imagination of the future, humans will be liberated from the constraints of embodiment and will triumph over death by uploading the mind into...

The term "transhumanism" denotes an ideology of extreme progress, giving coherence to the accelerated pace of advances in science and technology. As a future-oriented outlook, transhumanism offers a vision of and for humanity in which genetically enhanced humans will live extremely long, intensely happy lives, free of pain and disease. In this imagination of the future, humans will be liberated from the constraints of embodiment and will triumph over death by uploading the mind into...

Philip Clayton (Ph.D., Yale University) is a philosopher, theologian and public intellectual specializing in the entire range of issues—ethical, political, and theoretical—that arise at the intersection between science and religion. Over the last several decades he has published and lectured extensively on all branches of this debate, including the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of science, comparative religions, and constructive theology. Addressing the cultural battle over the...

Paul Root Wolpe (Emory University) is the Raymond F. Schinazi Distinguished Research Chair in Jewish Bioethics and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Bioethics in the Emory School of Medicine, professor of religion and adjunct professor of sociology, and director of the Emory Center for Ethics. A nationally recognized intellectual leader in bioethics, Wolpe holds a Ph.D. in medical sociology from Yale University and was at the University of Pennsylvania until 2008. With an intellectual focus on...

Charles Townes (University of California at Berkeley) is a Nobel Laureate, Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, and inventor of the laser. He earned a B.A. and a B.S. from Furman University, an M.A. from Duke University and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. Professor Townes was chair of the Physics Department at Columbia and Institute Professor at M.I.T. before joining the faculty at UC-Berkeley as University Professor in 1967. Dr. Townes was...

Steven P. Goldberg (Georgetown University) is James M. and Catherine F. Denny Professor of Law at Georgetown University. He is best known for his work at the intersection of law, religion, and science. His books include Bleached Faith: The Tragic Cost When Religion is Forced Into the Public Square (2008), Seduced By Science: How American Religion Has Lost Its Way (1999), and Culture Clash: Law and Science in America (1994), which won the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award. Following graduation from...

Ronald Bailey (Reason Magazine) is the award-winning science correspondent for Reason magazine and Reason.com, where he writes a weekly science and technology column. He is the author of the book Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution (2005), and his work was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004. Bailey testified before a congressional committee in 2004 on the impact of science on public policy. He is a member of the Society of...

Jean Bethke Elshtain (University of Chicago) is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, with joint appointments in the divinity school, department of political science, and committee on international relations. A political philosopher, Elshtain has explored the connections between our political thought and ethical convictions in numerous books, lectures and articles, including Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (1981, 1992);...

Michael H. Shapiro (University of Southern California) is the Dorothy W. Nelson Professor of Law at University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Professor Shapiro earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was associate editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He specializes in bioethics and in constitutional law, and in particular, medical and legal ethical issues surrounding...

Maxwell J. Mehlman is the Arthur E. Petersilge Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and the Director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western University’s School of Medicine. Professor Mehlman received a BA from Reed College in 1970 and a JD from Yale Law School in 1975. In between college and law school, he was a Rhodes Scholar, earning his second Bachelor’s Degree from Oxford University in 1972. After completing law school, he practiced with the Washington D.C. firm of...

Margaret Wertheim is an internationally noted science writer and commentator who, in addition to her books, has written extensively about science and society for newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. Her articles have appeared publications such as The New York Times, The Sciences, New Scientist, Omni, Science Digest, The Australian Review of Books, 21C: Magazine of Science, Technology and Culture, The Daily Telegraph, Die Zeit, Australian Geographic, Vogue, Elle, and Glamour. She has...

Maxwell J. Mehlman is the Arthur E. Petersilge Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University and the Director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western University’s School of Medicine. Professor Mehlman received a BA from Reed College in 1970 and a JD from Yale Law School in 1975. In between college and law school, he was a Rhodes Scholar, earning his second Bachelor’s Degree from Oxford University in 1972. After completing law school, he practiced with the Washington D.C. firm of...

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is professor of social and political philosophy and director of the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée at the École Polytechnique, Paris. At Stanford University, he is a professor of French and Italian, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information and professor of political science by courtesy. A member of the French Academy of Technology, Dupuy’s research interests encompass cultural theory, social and political philosophy, the cognitive...

Don Ihde is Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is the author of thirteen books and the editor of many others, including what is often identified as the first North American work on the philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis (1979). In the mid-1970s, together with his colleagues at Stony Brook, Ihde developed an intentionally eclectic school of experienced-based “experimental phenomenology” with bridges to pragmatism, which has concentrated on...

Andrew Pickering is internationally known as a leader in the field of science and technology studies. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (1995) and Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality (with Don Ihde, Evan Selinger, Donna Jeanne Haraway, and Bruno Latour, 2003). He has written on topics as diverse as post-World War II particle physics; mathematics, science and industry in the...

Katherine Hayles is Distinguished Professor of english and media studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests concern topics related to literature and science in the 20th and 21st century; 20th and 21st century American fiction; electronic textuality, hypertext fiction and theory; science fiction; literary theory; and media theory. With degrees in both chemistry and English literature, Hayles is one of the foremost scholars of the relationship between...

Ted Peters is professor of systematic theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and Graduate Theological Union and director of the Institute for Theology and Ethics, in Berkeley, California. The author of GOD-The World’s Future (2000), Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom (2002) and Science, Theology, and Ethics (2003), Peters writes prolifically on issues of science, theology and religion. His recent work includes Anticipating Omega (2006), Can You Believe in God and Evolution?...

Daniel Sarewitz is the director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO) and professor of science and society at Arizona State University. His work focuses on understanding the connections between scientific research and social benefit, and on developing methods and policies to strengthen such connections. His most recent books are Shaping Science and Technology Policy: The Next Generation of Research (with David H. Guston, 2006) and Living with the Genie: Essays on...

Daniel Sarewitz is the director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO) and professor of science and society at Arizona State University. His work focuses on understanding the connections between scientific research and social benefit, and on developing methods and policies to strengthen such connections. His most recent books are Shaping Science and Technology Policy: The Next Generation of Research (with David H. Guston, 2006) and Living with the Genie: Essays on...

Brad Allenby joined ASU in 2004 after spending over twenty years working for AT&T as counsel, senior environmental counsel, research vice president for technology and environment, and environment, health and safety vice president. During that period he also served for two years as Director of Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and as the J. Herbert Holloman Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering. He also taught as an adjunct professor at Yale...

Brad Allenby joined ASU in 2004 after spending over twenty years working for AT&T as counsel, senior environmental counsel, research vice president for technology and environment, and environment, health and safety vice president. During that period he also served for two years as Director of Energy and Environmental Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and as the J. Herbert Holloman Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering. He also taught as an adjunct professor at Yale...

John Tooby is best known for his work in pioneering the new field of evolutionary psychology, along with Templeton Research co–Fellow Leda Cosmides. For the last two decades, Tooby and his collaborators have been integrating cognitive science, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and hunter–gatherer studies to create the new field of evolutionary psychology. The goal of evolutionary psychology is the progressive mapping of the universal...