The vision of genetic engineers is to do to humans what we have already done to salmon and wheat, pine trees and tomatoes. But why stop there? Once you accept the idea that our bodies are essentially plastic, and that it’s okay to manipulate that plastic, there’s no reason to think that consumers would balk because “genes” were involved instead of, say, “toxins.” Especially since genetic engineering would not promote your own vanity, but instead be sold as a boon to your child. And more so all the time: public approval of “aesthetic surgery” has grown fifty percent in the United States in the last decade.
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People, in other words, will do fairly far-out things for less-than-pressing causes. As the world now knows, Botox has become, in a few short years, a staple weapon in the cosmetic arsenal - so prevalent that, in the words of one writer, “it is now rare in certain social enclaves to see a woman over the age of thirty-five with the ability to look angry.” With their facial muscles essentially paralyzed, actresses are having trouble acting since the treatment requires periodic booster shots, doctors warn that “you could marry a woman (or a man) with a flawlessly even face and wind up with someone who four months later looks like a Shar-Pei.” But never mind - now you can get Botoxed in strip mall storefronts and at cocktail parties. It sounded like a Monty Python routine, some clinic where they daubed your soles with plague germs to combat athlete’s foot. So I refused to believe the early reports, a few years back, that socialites had begun injecting dilute strains of the toxin into their brows in an effort to temporarily remove the vertical furrow that appears between one’s eyes as one ages. It was one of those bad things measured in extinctions, as in “three tablespoons of botulism toxin could theoretically kill every human on Earth.” Or something like that. Dented cans were, according to my mother, a well-established gateway to botulism, and botulism was a bad thing, worse than swimming immediately after lunch. I GREW UP IN A HOUSEHOLD where we were very suspicious of dented cans.