“Improving Nature ?”, at first glance, may appear to be a eugenics manual, until one notices the question mark, and the subtitle- “The Science and Ethics of Genetic Engineering”. This book provides an introduction to both ethics and genetic engineering, applying the latter to the scrutiny of the former. What surprised me was the well reasoned and fair conclusions arrived at in the discussions put forth in this book, as genetic engineering is something misunderstood on the whole by non-scientists, among whom one of the authors belong, and with the book being more than ten years old.
Perhaps major errors have been avoided by the way that many of the questions of ethicality have been left unresolved, with the predominant attitude taken, where situations are not clear-cut, that it is best not to answer the question, where perhaps it would have possible for them to make a decision one way or the other. Of course though, with the philosophy of ethics, we are not going to reach conclusions as easily as we can in many other disciplines, and the reading of a book on ethics is always going to be less satisfying than something relatively more concrete in its conclusions as other branches of philosophy such as metaphysics. But, all the same, questions of ethicality need to be addressed, even if we can't answer them, and this book does not do a bad job of this. Genetic engineering is something the public do not need to fully understand, but it is something that will effect them ever more in the future, as biotechnology advances, and by reading something books like this people can save themselves possible irrational distress on sighting modified tomatoes in the supermarket, or “gene technology cheese”, neither of which are necessarily differently constituted than those produced traditionally. ( )