Science is starting to uncover a number of techniques
for enhancing or changing the human race as we know it.
One way is to start early, really early.
At conception.
We use the word "designer babies" rather carelessly.
I don't think anybody should get the idea that you can go to an IVF clinic
and choose exactly the kind of baby you would like.
The first process of choosing an embryo by design
was really to eliminate embryos carrying disease.
That's how it all started.
It's a very patient led industry and the principle seems to be, "I want a baby",
but you move from, "I want a baby", to, "I want a very good baby".
You could rapidly move to a stage where you're creating a two tiered society.
There are, this is not science fiction.
I have read articles by very significant academics who say, "Why not?"
In fact, they even move to the stage of saying
you have a duty to enhance your children if you can afford it.
So what about living longer?
I work on the application of regenerative medicine to ageing.
I want to be able to stop us from getting frail,
and diseased and decrepit, however long we live.
That means people could live hundreds, even thousands of years,
so long as they don't get hit by trucks or asteroids or anything.
What regenerative medicine can do in principle for ageing
is to keep us biologically like young adults, indefinitely.
In other words, to ensure that from the molecular and cellular level
right up through the organs and the whole body,
we stay just as healthy as we are in young adulthood.
We won't get Alzheimer's disease, we won't get most cancers,
heart disease, type 2 diabetes - because those are things that happen
as a result of the things we are going to stop.
Should we be the people making the choice whether this should happen?
It's perfectly clear to me that we today have a moral obligation
to develop these therapies as soon as possible
so that humanity of the future can make the choice.
But is it ethical to interfere? Who's responsible?
I think good science is slow and it's careful.
It doesn't take extraordinary risks
and if something is deeply complicated, and deeply controversial,
it usually needs a lot of unpacking to find out if it's right or not.
The development of new technologies gives humanity choices they didn’t have before.
Society in a post ageing world will be different
in more or less every way you can possibly imagine.
I do not know for a fact whether humanity will in the long run
choose to make widespread use of these technologies,
but I do know that humanity has the right to the option.
The media is responsible, the public is responsible,
we have to demand that our money is used wisely
and how much of our taxes are thrown away on sexy but useless research.
Over the past 100 years we've made a good impact on life expectancy.
Let's face it, if we could have had that same effect that happened
over the course of the 20th century in say, 10 years, we would have done so.
My proposal is for a new way to go about this that may achieve that even faster.
I'm a great supporter of growing old naturally... We only have so much time on this earth.
We pass through and then we leave space for others to come along.
What would be unnatural would be to say, "Oh dear,
we shouldn’t go there because even though we want to and are able to, it's natural".
It is natural for us to want to change nature.
I would like to encourage a more global approach to these questions.
I do find sometimes that it's sad to think we are spending money
on life-prolonging procedures when other people aren't even getting to 40.
If we're, at the moment, reaping the harvest of our careless attitude to the environment,
we have to be very careful we don’t do the same damage to the human species.