The Genetic Underground

In 1973, at the lowest point in his life, Timothy Leary had a vision. He was in Folsom Prison, facing a 15-year sentence at the age of 53, psychedelics were banned, Nixon was back in power, the Sixties were well and truly over.

But sitting in solitary confinement, Leary had a vision. He would lead humanity’s exodus into space. Homo Sapiens would become a multi-planet species. And we would advance in evolution, becoming more intelligent, happier, longer-living superbeings. He planned to lead the exodus, with 5000 of the finest genetic stock, to create a new species off-world. He even wrote a letter to astronomer Carl Sagan, inquiring how much it would cost to send a manned rocket to Mars (no less than $300 billion, Sagan replied).

In the near future, Leary imagined an underground market for genetic enhancement, like the underground market for psychedelic drugs. Parents would hustle to get the best illegal genetic upgrades for their kids.

Hey! ―Did you hear? There‘s a new shipment of black market Einstein RNA in the Village!…I know it‘s against the law, but Willy is five years old and can‘t work quantum-theory equations. So, in despair, I‘ve connected with some Max Planck RNA

Just as hippies travelled to Mexico or Afghanistan for drugs, so the genetic pioneers would go to off-shore islands, or even off-world space stations, to evade FDA regulations, access new treatments, and upgrade themselves and their children: ‘brain-changing drugs (LSD), cloning, and genetic research can only be safely employed in frontier, experimental communities which can be found only in High Orbital Mini Earths’, he wrote.

It was a truly far-out idea at the time. But Leary was a prophet, anticipating by 50 years the visions of billionaire transhumanists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — explore space, get high, colonize other planets, and use genetic technologies to evolve into intergalactic immortal super-beings.

And the offshore, offworld genetic underground that Leary predicted? That’s already coming into existence as well.

A tweet from Nils Gilman, Executive Vice President at the Berggruen Institute, funded by transhumanist billionaire Nicholas Berggruen

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He Jankui’s selfies

Every day, He Jankui posts a new selfie of himself on X. They’re always the same — He in a white coat, in an empty laboratory, staring into the distance.

Every day a different tweet:

Everyone deserves freedom from genetic disease.

In two to three years, most countries will accept heritable human gene editing.

Gene editing therapy before birth will be priced at a few thousands of dollars, affordable to most families.

Gene editing technology has the power to reshape the world, like nuclear bomb.

I am not interested in biological weapons.

He Jankui is the renegade Chinese scientist who was arrested in 2018, in China, for illegally editing the embryos of twin girls to make them immune to HIV. He was recently released, has opened a laboratory in Beijing, and is apparently open for business. He now has 27,000 followers though he only follows one account himself — the Committee for the Nobel Prize.

His daily tweets have prompted various business inquiries from people interested in experimental genetic treatments, including Silicon Valley biotech investors. Sebastian Brunemeir, a venture capitalist and ‘effective accelerationist’, asked him: ‘Have you considered cloning high IQ geniuses?’ ‘NO!’ replied Jankui, pinning his reply to the top of his X account.

Other messages are more poignant. A woman called Fernanda messages him: ‘Hi, my son has a genetic disease and I would appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about it and see what could be done to help him.’

I contacted He to ask about these business offers. Not long ago, he was under house arrest and cut off from all communication by the Chinese government, but now I just send him an email, he replies the same day, and he agreed to an interview as long as I refer to him as a ‘CRISPR pioneer’ (CRISPR is the leading gene editing technology). We talk on Google Meet. Behind him is a large painting of the moment he met James Watson at a conference and asked the co-discoverer of the double helix what he thought of Jankui’s research. ‘Make Better People’, Watson replied.

He Jankui tells me:

People from all kinds of countries contact me. There are several investors, mostly from Silicon Valley, who have contacted me. Some are going to invest in me to start a research laboratory in Austin, Texas, to do pre-clinical research for Alzheimer disease. It will open next year.

I ask him if he’s been approached to do more far-out research like genetic enhancement of human IQ, or even cloning. He replies:

Oh, absolutely. People from Honduras, for example, or some from a small country in Eastern Europe. Some people even want to move my lab to cruise the open sea. I refuse all those suggestions. I only want to research in major countries.

A journal article in Cell suggested the twins whose DNA he edited could also be cognitively enhanced, perhaps by accident, as the gene that grants HIV immunity can also improve cognitive performance. Would He Jankui be interested in, literally, ‘making people better’?

I’m opposed to gene editing for intelligence enhancement, or to make people faster or stronger, or to make super soldiers, or anything like that.

I asked some genetic ethicists if his comments should be taken seriously, and if there is an underground offshore market for genetic enhancement and experimental technologies — even human cloning. Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, is sceptical:

He is a disreputable liar. I trust nothing he says. Can you edit embryos anywhere? No. You need a lot of technical assistance, money and time. Could you get your work published? From a private fringe operation — very unlikely. Would others trust your work? No.

Francoise Baylis, Distinguished Research Professor Emerita at Dalhousie University, says:

I am unaware of any “credible” claims about underground human genome editing though it is often said in jest, that if someone seriously wanted to sidestep legal and regulatory constraints they could simply go into international waters with a state-of-the-art ship (floating lab and reproductive center) and do as they please. But here is the rub — what pleases scientists is kudos from their peers and at this time these would not be forthcoming.

Still…for the right price surely some scientists would be willing to do some secret genetic work in an offshore tropical laboratory?

The 100-year-old fantasy of offshore genetic enhancement

From Jurassic Park to Prometheus, from Bioshock to The Boys from Brazil, sci-fi novelists, biohackers and billionaires have long been fascinated by the idea that somewhere in a jungle, floating at sea, or maybe deep in space, there is a secret laboratory conducting wild and possibly horrendous bio-genetic experiments to create ‘super-species’.

The fantasy of offshore bio-experiments goes back to HG Wells’ 1896 book, The Island of Dr Moreau, about a tropical island where a British vivisectionist secretly constructs human-animal chimeras. Wells’ friend Sir Julian Huxley imagined a similar sci-fi fantasy in his 1926 short story The Tissue Culture King — a British biologist secretly working in the African jungle manages to achieve immortality through genetic engineering. That story was partly inspired by the real-life work of Nobel prize winning surgeon Alexis Carrel, who performed the first heart transplant and thought humans could achieve immortality through biology — especially eugenics. Carrel bought an island off the coast of Brittany, where he conducted experiments on German shepherd dogs in an attempt to breed superbeings.

In 1962, Julian’s brother Aldous published his last novel, Island. It follows a similar script — a renegade British scientist works in secret on a tropical island, creating paradise through psychedelic drugs, tantric sex, hypnotherapy and eugenic engineering. The population of the island is carefully controlled and partly bred from a ‘genius sperm bank’.

A few months after Island was published, inspired by Huxley’s novel, Timothy Leary and his colleagues moved to Mexico to run an experimental science hippy commune called the Zihuatanejo Project. It only lasted six weeks before the Mexican government closed it down. A decade later, when he was in prison, Leary decided that the only way to escape tyrannical nation-states and be free to biohack one’s minds and genes was to head off-world and create space colonies where his team could breed a new super-species.

Leary, in turn, inspired a 1990s fringe movement called the Extropians, who dreamed of creating transhumanist superbeings through experimental technologies — psychedelics, genetic enhancement, robotics, nanotech and AI. The name ‘extropian’ meant escape — from taxes, regulation, the tyranny of the state, and finally from our imprisonment to mortal ‘meat-sacks’. This, it was decided, could only happen in anarchist-libertarian free zones beyond the reach of the FDA. The father of Extropianism, Max More, liked to quote Nietzsche: ‘There beyond the state, the superman is possible.’

Genetic tourism

Transhumanism was little more than a fringe philosophy and sci-fi fantasy until the last few years, when it has become the religion of the wealthiest people on the planet — Silicon Valley investors and founders. Some tech oligarchs are prepared to commit their fortunes and their bodies to experimental genetic treatments, in pursuit either of immortality, or genetically optimized children.

It’s notable, for example, that He Jankui was invited to Honduras, and (from what I understand) specifically to a place called Prospera, a libertarian free economic zone where investors can choose their own legislation — whether that’s for a business or for a scientific experiment. It’s home to a transhumanist biohacking hub called Vitalia, ‘where death is optional’.

Prospera / Vitalia are the latest attempt by anarcho-capitalist libertarians to escape the tyranny of mass welfare democracies and create low-regulation tropical utopias. One of the key figures in this movement is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and immortality-seeking transhumanist who made his fortune founding PayPal (with Elon Musk) and investing in companies like Facebook.

Thiel spends his fortune seeding new ideas and political movements (he was an early backer of future vice-president JD Vance, a former employee of his). One of Thiel’s favourite books is the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. It predicts a future where multicultural welfare democracies sink under government debt, but the ‘cognitive elite’ are able to opt out and take their crypto-fortunes offshore to secure tax havens.

This vision inspired Thiel, who has expressed scepticism about multiculturalism and the future of mass democracy. Looking for an exit, in 2008 he gave $500,000 in seed funding to the Sea-Steading Institute, an NGO founded by Patri Friedman (grandson of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman). The Institute explored ways to create new libertarian cities floating at sea where the ‘cognitive elite’ could avoid regulation, and thereby escape not just taxes but death. They would be free to try out new experimental treatments not approved by the boring-old FDA. Medical tourism, said Friedman, was the initiative’s ‘killer app’.

Like most libertarian experiments, it never worked out (a few floating libertarian initiatives have got washed away). So the anarcho-libertarian outlaws turned their attention instead to free economic zones within countries, like Hong Kong used to be, or Prospera is trying to be. Patri Friedman is one of the investors in Prospera. ‘I am going to Prospera to get my genes edited!’, he announced recently (he received stem cell injections).

Another adviser to Prospera is tech guru Balaji Srinivasan, who has written about the tech elite exiting from the chaos of modern woke democracies to launch ‘start-up societies’ or ‘network states’. Consumers would opt in, choosing their preferred utopias based on shared values — one example he gives is a desire to biohack yourselves free from FDA interference. Bryan Johnson, a transhumanist tech tycoon who launched the Don’t Die movement, also made a recent visit to Vitalia in Honduras, before travelling to a clinic in the Bahamas to be injected with 300 million Nordic stem cells. And Vitalia / Prospera is home to biotech start-ups like Minicircle, which according to Le Monde is conducting 12 gene therapy trials, two of them phase 1 human trials. Minicircle founder Mac Davis recently declared in a podcast:

The keys to immortality, we’ve already discovered some of them. Our choice is just whether or not to try it out and not be hampered by fear and regulation completely.

Unfortunately for the would-be immortalists, Prospera and Vitalia look like they’re about to be stripped of their legal license by a new, less-friendly government in Honduras. This is the problem with libertarian utopias, as Aldous Huxley saw in Island — there’s always a nearby state looking to take control.

Some billionaires resorted to buying their own islands where they could play out their transhumanist dreams. Jeffrey Epstein invited prominent scientists to his private island in the Virgin Islands to outline his plan to impregnate 20 women at a time with his sperm to seed the human race with his ‘superior’ DNA. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Foundation considered buying the island of Nauru so it could set up a lab under ‘sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement’. This lab could help repopulate the Earth, according to one FTX Foundation memo, in the event of a sudden population collapse.

Reprotech and would-be parents

Transhumanist tycoons and outlaw genetic scientists seeking immortality in secret tropical laboratories is a good sci-fi story. But there’s a much more human aspect to the genetic underground — would-be parents who are desperate to have healthy, successful kids

In 2016, for example, a couple travelled to Mexico to have an IVF baby using a ‘three-person DNA’ technique (which combines the DNA from three people) to avoid a genetically-inherited disease. The procedure was carried out by US fertility doctor John Zhang in Mexico, where ‘there are no rules’, in Zhang’s words (the procedure is legal in the UK but not in the US).

My partner and I are presently doing IVF — a technology that was greeted with a mixture of wonder and horror when it was first introduced in the late 1970s, and which is still condemned as ‘eugenic’ by some on the Christian Right. We were offered Preimplantation Genetic Testing of the embryos, and it was suggested that any embryos that tested positive for Down Syndrome should be treated as non-viable and terminated — a choice that 95% of parents make (partly because such embryos are much more likely to miscarriage).

A friend told us about a company called Progenx that offers more advanced embryo testing. I was given a test-run by the founder, Dr Jonathan Anomaly. Your embryos’ polygenic scores are displayed on a bell curve for IQ, athleticism, BMI, extraversion, openness, and likelihood of developing a whole range of diseases. On any of these scales you can see your embryos ranked on a bell curve from below to above average. Parents can choose the embryo that fits their desired profile in some way. Why spend decades and hundreds of thousands struggling for the best outcomes for your child, when for a few thousand dollars you can pick the best child for your outcomes?

The company is presently in ‘stealth mode’ and I had to follow a convoluted route to set up the meeting. It felt a bit like I was buying drugs on the Dark Net. I was vetted (not very well) before being connected with Dr Anomaly. He’s wary of negative publicity — he used to be a university philosopher at Penn, but his academic career took a hit after he published an academic article in 2018 called ‘Defending Eugenics’. He subsequently left academia in 2022, and moved to launch his new start-up in Austin, Texas (where, as chance would have it, He Jankui plans to open an embryo editing lab next year, backed by anonymous US investors).

Dr Anomaly is part of a semi-secret coterie of scientists, philosophers, biohackers and tech investors who are trying to bring back eugenics — a liberal eugenics based on parents’ right to choose the fittest children. He tells me:

We’re in stealth mode now, but we think this is going to scale gigantically when we launch. It’s still a bit…not taboo…unusual. But selecting the best embryos will become less and less so. The relevant crowds in the big cities like New York and San Francisco, even people on the left, when it’s their own kid they’re openly in favour of it. At first, journalists will denounce it as Nazi or whatever, all kinds of nonsense they’re conditioned to say. But a lot of them will privately use it. Because why wouldn’t you, if you’re doing IVF already? There’ll be a tipping point when more and more people go public about it, which will lead to a preference cascade where not only is it normal, it becomes wrong not to use it.

A handful of companies already offer polygenic scores for embryo selection — there’s Genomic Prediction, set up by Dr Steve Hsu (a physicist who has long advocated for genetic enhancement of intelligence and who recently met with He Jankui in Beijing); and there’s Orchid, a start-up funded by Peter Thiel. But neither of these offer customers their embryos’ IQ scores yet, and both have apparently struggled to find IVF clinics to work with them. The US medical establishment at present does not think polygenic embryo scores are accurate enough to be sold ethically to parents. Dr Anomaly dismisses this as ‘paternalistic’.

The medical establishment thinks customers don’t understand probability. And some of them are just morally opposed — they think this is eugenics and it’s bad. But we’re like, it’s eugenics and that’s good. It’s not coercive eugenics — if clinics are denying customers the choice, they’re the ones being coercive.

PolygenX offers polygenic scores for up to 100 embryos for $50,000. That’s far more embryos than most IVF parents would ever get, if they’re doing it because of infertility issues. But PolygenX’s customers are not typically infertile, they’re ‘very wealthy tech bros in their 30s’, Dr Anomaly says, who are paying for IVF and embryo selection in order to optimize their children. The company’s website points out that parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to optimize children through school, tuition, extra-curricular classes, university fees, and then hundreds of thousands more on hospital fees if / when they develop serious illnesses as children or adults. Why not pay $50,000 right at the beginning to optimize your children’s life-chances?

If you do several rounds of IVF and get a lot of viable embryos, Dr Anomaly says customers could get as much as a 12-point difference in the IQ of the various embyros. ‘That’s huge’, he tells me. ‘It leads to very significant differences in life outcomes. 100 is the average, by definition. If you go down to 70 you can’t even be held criminally responsible for your actions. Look at this graph.’ He shows me a page explaining IQ scores, with the headline ‘More than anything, IQ makes us human’. There’s a graph showing IQ scores and the likelihood of various life-outcomes.

So at this IQ [he points at the curve] it becomes likely your children graduate from university, at this IQ it’s likely they could do a PhD. IQ correlates with the success of your marriage, with income, with the likelihood of volunteering and donating money. Smarter people are less likely to exhibit addictive behaviour like drug abuse or even being arrested, probably because it’s correlated with self-control and thinking about the future.

So who are PolygenX’s handful of ‘very rich tech bro’ customers? Dr Anomaly won’t say, but he drops into the conversation that he ‘just texted Elon Musk. All 12 of Musk’s children were born through IVF, including X Æ A-Xii. X’s mother, pop star Grimes, once compared the child to Paul Atreides, the eugenically-bred ruler of the universe in Dune.

But the only customers of PolygenX to go public about their decision to use embryo selection to optimize their children are Malcolm and Simone Collins, a married couple in their early 30s, bright, contrarian and nerdy in their matching steel-rimmed glasses. They’re both entrepreneurs, part of the Silicon Valley diaspora, who moved to a farmhouse in Pennsylvania to raise their kids. Their vibe could be described as neo-trad — they dress like they’re Amish but their conversation bubbles over with Silicon Valley philosophies like Transhumanism, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and Techno-Natalism. Plus they organize ‘secret societies’, by which they mean exclusive off-the-record gatherings for the Silicon Valley business and intellectual elite. Simone organized private gatherings for Peter Thiel, like Hereticon, where some of the pro-eugenic renegades have spoken in defence of their taboo views.

‘We are the Underground Railroad of Gattaca babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids’, Malcolm tells me. He and Simone had their three children through IVF, and chose their third child from various embryos according to its low polygenic risk scores for depression, migraines and anxiety (all of which Simone sometimes gets). Having children is always a genetic gamble, Malcolm says, but this technology ‘lets us peek at the cards a little’. Using the polygenic scores, they picked embryo number three and named the resultant daughter Titan Invictus, as an ‘exercise in nominative determinism’. They clearly have high hopes for Titan, and for all their family — Malcolm says he wants to help save the world from demographic collapse, have lots of kids, and establish an inter-galactic empire called ‘House Collins’.

While they hope House Collins has a major role in the future of humanity, it is not the case that they want to turn humanity into a sort of monogenic plantation. They encourage individual, cultural, racial and genetic diversity, what John Stuart Mill called ‘experiments in living’. And they plan to launch an Index, to keep track of all these experiments, monitor House outcomes, and perhaps track inter-house marriages and their achievements — similar to the Bene Gesserit Breeding Programme in Dune, or what in horse-breeding is known as a Stud Book.

The ‘E’ word

I personally think genetic medicine — and yes, even potentially genetic enhancement — has huge potential to reduce suffering and improve lives. Most people already support genetic medicines to heal diseases in people or embryos, and the line between disease treatment and enhancement is blurred. If you live a very long time through genetic treatments, is that treatment or enhancement?

But there are also very clear risks. These are still experimental treatments, and they can go very wrong. The FDA has approved a few new gene therapies, but there are still occasional deaths in human trials. In the genetic underground, the risks are even higher, and there have been several deaths in the ‘genetic tourism’ off-shore stem cell market. Bryan Johnson, the transhumanist wannabe-immortal billionaire, tweeted (then deleted) the following email he received:

Of course, a tech bro can freely choose to try out high-risk experimental treatments. The twins whose genes He Jankui edited did not consent to be used in a risky human experiment. There’s also a question of informed consent for parents — the IVF market is something of a wild west, and desperate parents are being sold expensive procedures, like polygenic embryo tests for IQ, for which there is not a lot of evidence yet.

And then there’s what you’re probably feeling — moral disgust and political outrage at the E word — eugenics — because of its awful history and the gross human rights abuses by eugenicist scientists in Germany, Japan, the US and elsewhere from the 1900s to the 1960s. He Jankui was widely condemned for his experiment on the twins, and he’s something of a pariah in international science now, alone in his lab waiting for a call from the Nobel Committee, but he tells me:

I would say that’s a standard way to treat a pioneer. They first criticize him, but then it’s accepted and he is seen as a hero by history, like Sir Robert Edwards for IVF or Edward Jenner for the small pox vaccine.

The new genetic underground is not an authoritarian top-down eugenics like that of the 1920s-1940s, but rather a free market libertarian eugenics of the sort Timothy Leary envisaged. Nonetheless, people’s biases will inform their market decisions — for boys over girls, say, or for higher IQ, or for certain ethnic features like lighter skin (the most popular market for sperm donations is Denmark — people from all over the world choose Viking genes for their kids). I wonder if it isn’t dangerous to lure parents with the promise of a perfect baby according to their consumer specifications — would that make them less tolerant of the inevitable imperfections or diverse life-choices of their child?

There is also the possibility of inequality of access — the high-net-worth tech bros get access to the expensive experimental treatments and they and their offspring become ever healthier, smarter, longer-living, a new genetic caste. Sean Parker, founder of Napster, once said:

I’m a billionaire, I’m going to have access to better healthcare so…I’m going to be like 160 and I’m going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords. Give us billionaires an extra hundred years and you’ll know what wealth disparity looks like.

Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton and the author of Remaking Eden, imagined a future society of two different species — Gen Rich (or the enhanced) and Naturals. He wrote:

with the passage of time, the genetic distance between Naturals and the Gen Rich has become greater and greater, and now there is little movement up from the Natural to the Gen Rich class…All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by members of the Gen Rich class…In contrast, Naturals work as low paid service providers or as laborers…Gen Rich and natural children grow up and live in segregated social worlds where there is little chance for contact between them…[eventually] the Gen Rich class and the Natural class will become the Gen Rich humans and the natural humans — entirely separate species with no ability to crossbreed and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.

Would genetic enhancement always be libertarian and opt-in — is there not a chance it could be imposed on populations, like China’s one-child policy? Finally, there is the risk of some accident, or even a mad apocalyptic plot, wreaking devastating consequences on humanity — a lab in China, say, conducts secret experiments to enhance DNA, it goes wrong and unleashes a pandemic that kills seven million people. Hard to imagine?

Choose your jurisdiction

The international scientific community has tried to limit these risks by agreeing to a worldwide moratorium on ‘human germline editing’ (the process by which the genome of an individual is modified in such a way that the change is heritable). But it seems likely these treatments will get introduced, and some countries may break ranks to introduce them.

In the last few weeks, for example, South Africa appeared to pass legislation that allows human germline editing. It was welcomed by He Jankui, who said Africa would be first to allow embryo editing (for HIV immunity) then Japan would follow suit. However, bioethicists said this was a misreading of the South African law. Other countries could have secret genetic programmes — Russia, for example. And it’s interesting that China has allowed He to promote his work online (‘Why is the Chinese government allowing it?’ asks Francois Baylis. ‘That’s worthy of investigation.’

Soon, in fact, American genetic tourists may not need to travel to Honduras to edit their genes. The new MAGA government is, in some ways, a takeover by transhumanists like Peter Thiel who want to strip away government bureaucracy to enable things like genetic enhancement (Brexit at least partly had a similar goal). RFK Jr has tweeted that, when or if he’s confirmed as Secretary of Health, he wants to liberalize regulation for stem cells (and psychedelics). And his nominated-deputy secretary is Jim O’Neill, who previously headed up the SENS Foundation, a company that seeks immortality through gene editing and other technologies, funded by Peter Thiel.

And then there’s Elon Musk, apparently Trump’s new right-hand-man, who claims his over-riding goal is to make humans a multi-planet species, like Timothy Leary imagined back in 1973. Musk wants to begin with a space colony on Mars by 2044. That, he says, will require genetic editing to create new types of plants. And humans?

Previously, Musk has steered clear of investing in gene editing because of ‘the Hitler problem’, but it’s notable all his 12 kids were born through IVF. There was a report in the New York Times that Elon Musk plans to create a new population of Martians using his own sperm, although Musk denied this. He also denied a Rolling Stone story that he offers his sperm to friends to create more intelligent babies.

Many scientists and transhumanist investors think that, if Musk’s dream of space colonization is to be achieved, humans will need to be genetically modified. Christian Angermeyer is a psychedelics and genetics billionaire, a transhumanist, and colleague of Peter Thiel’s — the two launched the Enhanced Games, where muscular Apollos can fight it out. Angermayer has suggested space colonization could lead to a bifurcation of humanity:

humanity could split up into two species, because you have a part of humanity who says ‘hey bring it on, lets fly to Mars’. If you want to go to Mars you will need to change your bodies. We’re going to have to modify, everyone knows it. But there might be a part of humanity who says ‘this is not for me’. So humanity might split into two species.

The enhanced and the left behind, much as Leary imagined in his prison cell, 50 years ago. Which would you choose to be?