Gregory Stock has explored the larger evolutionary significance of humanity’s recent technological progress for many years, and he examined the subject at length in his 1993 book, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (Simon & Schuster). Following its publication, he spent a year at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs looking specifically at the implications of recent breakthroughs in molecular genetics. It was as an outgrowth of that work that he teamed up with John Campbell to organize this conference, the first ever on human germline engineering. Currently Dr. Stock is directing the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at UCLA and is a visiting senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life.
