Generosity: An Enhancement Read Online Free PDF Page A

a clean room at a biotech facility. She turns, removes her sterile cap, and shakes out a mass of flaxen hair.
     
 
Is Thomas Kurton the villain in a morality fable gone terribly wrong? Or is he the hero of a noble experiment that’s just about to pay off? No matter how the future judges him, he’s already helping the present to spin . . .
Over the Limit
.
     
     
    As the host’s Mid-Atlantic accent shapes these three last words, they animate, strobing in dozens of languages, spinning off mathematical proofs, chemical symbols, and physical equations until the entire laboratory is buried in bits of self-replicating information.

     
    Establishing shot: a crazy-cantilevered, glass-skinned building near Kendall Square, Cambridge, one of those prestige-designer palaces that look like the solution to a logic puzzle.
     
    Interior: the big-windowed corner office reserved for high-volume grant winners. Ambient sounds of wind and trickling water fill the room. On a five-foot-wide LCD panel across one wall, wild landscapes cross-fade into one another.
     
    Close-up: Thomas Kurton seated behind a swept-wing desk that looks invisible to radar. A complex pneumatic chair props up his spine. Hishands work with the detachment of someone throwing the I Ching. More screens dot the glass desktop. He speaks into one, brushes two fingers across another, dragging data in changing formation across the parade ground.
     
    Voice-over, the cool voice of Tonia Schiff, the video journalist who hosts this world:
     
 
Thomas Kurton made his first splash at twenty-eight, when his PhD research helped lead to the creation of transgenic cows that produced disease-curing proteins in their milk. He formed his first biotech company soon after he got his first academic job. At Harvard, he plowed his pharmaceutical farming profits back into the search for a bacterial catalyst for fermenting bio-butanol from sugar beets. He spun off this search, too, into a successful venture . . .
     
     
    The ginger-headed figure dispatches brisk communiqués. Between commands, he leans over to his desk’s long glass return, and from a stash of hundreds of capsules and tablets, he selects two dozen rust-colored supplements, washing them down with a large bottle of Swiss spring water.
     
 
At the Wyde Institute, Kurton helped to develop a technique called rapid gene signature reading. Using it, he has produced three landmark association studies, isolating complexes of genes correlated with susceptibility to anxiety, childhood hyperactivity, and depression . . .
     
     
    The ginger man waves a matchbook-sized device in the air. The room dims into a hushed dusk. He spins to face the picture window behind him, gazing out on a cluster of glass buildings oozing venture capital. He tips up in the chair, closes his eyes, and starts to meditate.
     
 
He has founded seven companies and advises fifteen more. He serves on the editorial board of six scientific journals while holding positions with three different universities.He races in triathlons and breeds exhibition-quality zebra finches. In his spare time, he writes ecstatic pieces about the coming transhuman age that electrify hundreds of thousands of readers . . .
     
     
    Close-up of his right wrist: a red medical-alert bracelet instructs the finders of his dead body to act quickly, administer calcium blockers and blood thinner, pack his corpse in ice water, balance its pH, and call the 800 number of a firm that will helicopter in paramedics to begin cryonic suspension.
     
    The view out the window darkens and the sound of electronic surf starts up again. He swings back around to the circle of screens and resumes conducting a symphony of scientific management. In a sound bridge, his cheerful voice says:
     
 
I don’t see why, given enough time and creativity, we humans can’t make ourselves over into anything we want.
     
     
    A jump cut, and Tonia Schiff, the amused show host, is sitting in a rocker in a