Cold Utopia.

Libertian Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, by Ronald Bailey (Prometheus, 310 pp., $28)

I EXPECTED to disagree with most of what Ronald Bailey advocates in his new book, but I didn't expect to be disappointed by the book itself. Bailey, the science correspondent for the libertarian magazine Reason, has long supported granting scientists a virtually anything-goes license to engage in human cloning and other biotechnologies. But even though the subjects he tackles are almost unfathomably deep, Bailey barely manages to get his feet wet.

Part of the problem is that he eagerly swallows the propaganda that if we would just untie scientists' hands and lard on the public funding, we would achieve an earthly Nirvana. Bailey predicts that bioscience will permit us to become "forever young": "By the end of the 21st Century, the typical American may attend a family reunion in which five generations are playing together. And great-great-great grandma, at 150 years old, will be as vital, with muscle tone as firm and supple, skin as elastic and glowing, as her thirty-year-old great-great grandson with whom she's playing touch football."

Surely, an author should back such an apparently unrealistic prediction with solid, compelling evidence. But it isn't there. Astonishingly, most of the proof in this book consists of hype, speculation, and an almost desperate hope--bordering on faith--that science will overcome all obstacles to the corporeal Promised Land.

Here's one sequence from Bailey's book: One scientist lengthened the life of lab mice by restricting their caloric intake. Another researcher was studying the effects of this process in rhesus monkeys. In a third, related experiment, lab mice were being given a drug that allowed them to overeat but not gain weight. The monkeys' test results aren't in, and researchers don't know whether the treated mice will live longer--yet Bailey breezily expects that this research will result in a pill "providing the benefits of calorie restriction [life extension] while still allowing you to inhale all the ice cream and beer you want." The book's credibility is seriously undermined by such wave-the-magic-wand-and-it-will-be-so assumptions.

Another big problem with Liberation Biology is Bailey's obsession with the "bioconservatives"--of both political Left and Right--whom he caricatures as seeking "to restrict scientific research, ban the development and commercialization of biotech products and procedures, and deny citizens access to the fruits of the biotech revolution." This is nonsense. While it is certainly true that many wish to ban human cloning and germ-line genetic engineering, these represent only very small pieces of the huge biotech pie. Indeed, many of the very areas of experimentation that Bailey touts in his book encounter little opposition. There is certainly no organized move to ban the calorie-restriction experiments--except perhaps from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which seeks to ban all animal research. Nobody is trying to prevent scientists from developing a cancer cure called telomerase therapy, which would--if it worked--use the mechanics of cell aging to stop cancer cells from dividing. I have never heard any moral objections to gene therapy that might one day be able to correct genetic defects by inserting healthy genes into diseased body systems. And adult-stem-cell research is universally supported.

Speaking of which, for a writer obsessed with avoiding "the certain oblivion of the grave," Bailey gives amazingly short shrift to the stunning advances occurring in human medicine thanks to adult stem cells; he spends a meager few pages on the issue. In contrast, he trembles with excitement at the potential for embryonic-stem-cell research and therapeutic human cloning. He also makes much of Geron Corporation's supposed success in treating crippled mice with glial cells the company claims were successfully derived from embryonic stem cells. Mice given this treatment, Bailey writes, have gained bladder control and the ability to use their hind legs while walking. The company told Bailey it would begin human trials in 2006.

Yet Bailey fails to mention that two dozen human beings have already received many of the same results, in experiments conducted in Lisbon by Dr. Carlos Lima using paralyzed patients' own nasal stem cells. Not only have the patients regained bodily sensation and even bladder control, but, as two of Dr. Lima's American patients testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee last year, some can now get to their feet and walk using braces.

Human heart patients have also received measurable benefit using their own blood or bone-marrow stem cells--to the point that candidates for heart transplants no longer needed transplants. The FDA has now permitted human trials to begin here in the U.S. Mice with late-stage juvenile diabetes have been cured outright by a Harvard researcher using spleen cells--a potential miracle treatment that is also now ready for human trials. The list could go on--but Bailey ignores these and most other advances in animal and early-human-adult stem-cell experiments, apparently so that he can convince readers that the morally controversial (and less advanced) embryo-based alternatives offer greater hope for cures.

The final area of disappointment is Bailey's failure to grapple deeply with the profound moral issues at the heart of the human-cloning and genetic-engineering debates. The author concedes at one point that the "moral choices" we face are not easy. But throughout the book he writes as if they were all slam-dunks. Therapeutic cloning? Bring it on! Reproductive cloning? Once it is safe, why not? Germline engineering and the genetic enhancement of children? Go for it! What about going as far as the late bioethicist Joseph Fletcher, who advocated creating human/animal hybrids to do dangerous and menial jobs? Bailey shrugs: "Is Fletcher's proposal all that different from training dolphins to find underwater explosives, or using dogs to corral dangerous criminals?"

Is there nothing that should be off limits? How about injecting human brain cells into the developing brains of fetal chimpanzees? "That's clearly a bit closer to the line," Bailey writes. But what line? How do we decide where it is to be drawn? What are the philosophical bases for having a "line" at all? Bailey never explains. Indeed, the only tiny qualm he expresses in the entire book about the brave new world toward which we are being driven concerns mixing human and animal genes, cells, and tissues. "The main ethical concern about such research," he writes, "is not the creation of improved and useful animals, but the risk of producing what would be, in effect, diminished human beings." But why would this be a problem? Is there something intrinsic to humanity that makes us special? If not, when--if ever--is life sacrosanct? This is the important subtext of the entire debate, yet Bailey barely skims the surface.

Biotechnology is too important to the human future to be treated so shallowly. Already, nascent human life has been reduced to the status of a mere commodity by bioscience. Recently, the National Academy of Sciences supported the creation, both naturally and through cloning, of human embryos exclusively for use in research--something that would have generated negative headlines just a few years ago. New Jersey has legalized the cloning of human embryos, their implantation into wombs, and gestation through the ninth month--in essence, a license to engage in cloned-fetus farming. Scientists are creating animal/human hybrids with increasing amounts of human DNA. A new social movement known as trans-humanism believes that we should bioengineer ourselves and our posterity into a "post-human" species.

Surely, given the high stakes, society has a duty to debate these matters thoroughly and make careful and deliberate choices about what areas of biotech we want to encourage, what areas we are willing to tolerate but not publicly fund, and what we should, in a few cases, prevent. Bailey doesn't agree: He claims that democracy has no place in these matters, being "an appeal to the prejudices and emotions of an uninformed public." In other words, we should leave one of the most important moral issues in human history to the scientists, many of whom have a vested interest in moving the research forward.

But if history proves anything it is the need for checks and balances over powerful segments of society--and bioscience is extremely powerful. Moreover, science itself is amoral. No matter how well-meaning researchers are--and let us stipulate that they are almost all well-meaning--science unleavened by a profound respect for all human life is dangerous. If you doubt it, just look at the eugenics movement and the Tuskegee experiments.

Finding the right moral leaven is precisely the task at hand. Everybody wants scientific progress and improved human health. But laudable ends do not justify all means. We have to guard against hubris, and the ever-present risk of unintended consequences. More fundamentally, we are now forced to decide what it means to be human and whether that status is even important. And we will have only one chance to get it right.

This will require careful discernment and respectful and informed debate from all perspectives. In Liberation Biology, what Bailey offers instead is mostly boosterism and polemics. As a consequence, he fails to make "the scientific and moral case for the biotech revolution."

Mr. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His current book is Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World.