This is most likely the most important book I have ever read. It goes into many not so obvious benefits of both adult and fetal human cloning. He cites ALL of the research to back it up too. (I am doing inter-library loans for many of these scientific references.) He also cites many online resources in the book regarding surrogate motherhood businesses which are so essential to these technologies which he calls "reprogenetics" for reproductive genetics. This inventive word also suggest (to me) the notion of reprog-ramming and human genetic engineering or "germ line gene therapy" is explained in both technical and philosophical details.

Written by a New York Times science writer who "broke the story" to media attention, this is a history of cloning from the late 19th century to the present.  It looks at the scientific personalities and the influence pioneers have had on their contemporaries.  It is a wonderful book to get a detailed social history of the events as they unfolded.

This is the first completed adult mammalian cloning. As such it is the most important. Dr. Wilmut did, however, use the same nuclear replacement technique that had been used many times before in various animals starting originally with frogs. The man below (Shettles) used adult germ-line precursor cells (male spermatogonia, female oogonia could have been used just as well) to do this kind of cloning on a unfertilized human egg. Wilmut used a somatic cell instead on lambs not humans. However, Wilmut did the experiment to completion whereas Shettles intentionally aborted the experiment at the morula stage so as not to clone a human in 1979. (Avoiding controversy was his motive I suspect.) Wilt transferred the morula staged clonal lamb fetuses into surrogate ewes. His success rate was low but would, I believe, have been much better if he had used the germ-line precursor cells Wilt used.

This is the short and sweet article by Shettles showing how he began the adult human cloning technique up to the morula stage. He has several photographs which show normal morphology indicating that the surrogate pregnancy would have likely worked if he had not terminated or aborted the experiment at this stage.

These two are both attorneys at the Law School of University of Chicago.  Their book is an anthology of various viewpoints divided into 5 sections: Science, Commentary, Ethics and Religion Law and Public Policy and Fiction and Fantasy.  Some excellent essays are in here.  I particularly enjoyed the  hypothetical but very realistic Supreme Court case opinions - both for and against human cloning - that "Justice" Cass Sunstein wrote. A very enjoyable reading book.
 

Dr. Pence is a philosophy professor who argues in favor of the many benefits of human cloning. The book is very scholarly and academic and *any* philosophy student who wants to delve into the subject deeply should get a copy.

Intended as realistic science fiction of the near term future, this book is very believable and realistic.  I learned in very emotionally moving fashion about the psychological blocks most people have regarding cryonics and got a fairly good idea of how to overcome some of them.  Many sociological, legal, cultural issues were very perceptively explored in this literary genre of a fictional "documentary of the future" complete with news clippings dating into the 21st century.  A very interesting read.  I look forward to the motion picture adaptation that is already in the planning stages.  One can visit the First Immortal web site at www.firstimmortal.com.

This book was the first to open my eyes to how anencephalic clonal copies of ourselves could be used for "cephalic exchange" in which brain transplantation would lift the lid, remove the ceiling on human life expectancy. Neither the adult cloning or brain transplantation had been done to my knowledge at the time. That, I found out was a mistake.... Drs. Shettles (1979) and White (1971). This still leaves the "born again" clonal body recipient quadriplegic due to the severing or transection of the spinal cord but much progress in this field of neuroregeneration has been made too. This book, as far as I know is out-of-print. Not to be deterred, one can simply order it through inter-library loan and photocopy each and every page.

This article shows the protocol Dr. White developed and tested for brain transplantation at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). Dr. White wrote many other articles discussing various detail of the procedures involved but this gives one a good first time, general over view of his technique which he calls "cephalic exchange by carotid-jugular interposition with cannula".

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This book, published in 1995, is presently out of print so you may have to get an interlibrary loan like I did.  The review I read from Kirkus at Amazon.com was excellent though.  If one could not find it in an out of print search, he could make a personal copy and still probably be within the "fair use" clause of copyright laws. It covers the theory and development of regeneration from its beginnings in the study of wound repair (which is naturally occurring regeneration in humans and other animals) through invertebrate limb regeneration to present efforts to regenerate livers, skin, organs etc.

Mr. Kotulak, a science writer for the Chicago Tribune, writes engagingly about how the brain functions to generate the phenomena of mental activity.  In later chapters, he describes fascinating research regarding neuroregeneration and many ways that repair, renewal and memory retention are chemically preserved.  He suggests that many neuropsychopharmacological medicines may be available in the near future (10 to 20 years) to assist quadriplegics, Alzheimer's patients and many others.  He gives many particular names of the drugs and biotech companies that are pioneering these areas of research.

It is an enjoyable read from a well qualified professor.  Browsing through the rest of the book, there are many illustration to help explain the techniques and procedures involved.  For a biology graduate student or a medical student, much of this may be a quick review and for those without a biological or medical background it may be a little too quick but the doctor tries to split the difference it seems.

 I have read a half dozen rave reviews at the Amazon.com web site and it looks to be the definitive book on the "science, scientists and politics" of the next step in human evolution, gene therapy. Gene therapy can remove genetic defects or diseases and eventually enhance our progeny's genetic make up.  It is 636 pages and appears to be a comprehensive study of reprogenetics and related efforts that Remaking Eden describes. It is, however, very detailed and slow reading.  This book may be an excellent sequel to The New Healers for those who would like a more in depth recounting of the past and prospective future of gene therapy, the molecular medicine of the 21st Century.
 

An excellent anthology of innovative scientists, John Brockman does a superb job at weaving the contributions of various scientists into a natural integrated whole.  Each chapter is self-contained nonetheless so that one can read it in small, inspirational dosages.  I highly recommend it. It covers complex adaptive systems which includes organisms in biological evolution but also is meant especially to include artificial intelligence and artificial life as it is programmed to adapt to complex situations.  The  root  of consciousness is proposed to be massively parallel processing at a high rate of speed with a large store of memory.  Simulations do generate novel solutions indicating that this formula may work as an explanation.  Also, using this new insight in various ways to augment our consciousness is suggested.

The subject of this book, believe it or not, is somewhat afield from my scientific comfort zone.  The book describes the psychological merger of man's mind and machine in media culture.  It later depicts the uploading of consciousness onto computers.  The nanoscale (atomic) scanning of organic information onto a silicon substrate to permit "human" mental activity to reside outside the wetware of the brain and onto the hardware of the computer is the completion of this vision.  I understand how this is possible in principle but I do not necessarily see how it is desirable in principle unless the goal is to transform not only our biology (bios logos, knowledge of life) but to transmorgrify intelligence itself. "Artificial intelligence" becomes natural to us as we meet our made machines intimately and become one with them as an extension of ourselves.  As discussed in Third Culture, the questions of what is life (biological life? artificial life? extraterrestrial life?) what is intelligence (artificial intelligence? human intelligence? alien intelligence?) and awareness (sentience?) become blurred as the physically familiar manifestations of these concepts become slippery.  What are the philosophical or metaphysical foundations of these critically important concepts?  These questions are, I believe, the deepest ponderings of Transhumanist thinking today.  They are  hotly debated and not even close to agreed  upon in the Transhuman and Extropy Discussion Lists online.  A unifying theme is that the answers to these questions are essentially UNKNOWABLE at present. This Unknown is due to our inability to comprehend the experience of a post-human consciousness in its digital cybernetic thinking.  Here we reach the boundary of what Transhumanists call the Singularity.  A singularity is at the core of a Black Hole and is when the known laws of physics collapse. Similarly, the Singularity is when the knows laws of life, intelligence and consciousness collapse.
 

Of the various grand unified theories out there, either Hawking's "wave function of the universe" or Kaku's Superstrings notion of hyperdimensional space is the most promising to me. This "wave function of the universe" is where the universe is quantized into a probability wave at the Big Bang. The reason is that the universe must have behaved like a Black Hole at the beginning due to its infinitesimally small, compact size (like a Black Hole's singularity). At such subatomic scales quantum mechanics takes over not general relativity which is for large scale structure. Thus the universe logically co-exists with related universes based on Schrödinger wave equation and Heisenburg's uncertainty principle. These quantal interconnections may be found subatomically in the highly transient virtual particles that blip in and out of existence so rapidly...these ghostly particles are referred to collectively as the "quantum foam".

Dr. Thorne at CalTech wrote this book based on the premise that the above mentioned quantum foam could be amplified to "classical size" (big enough for a space ship) by an arbitrarily advanced civilization" that his friend Carl Sagan needed for a fictional story called Contact. Amazing properties were noticed by this hypothetical mode of intergalactic transportation which included intercosmic and intertemporal transit not just ordinary breaching of intergalactic distances. This became the source of a scientific paper discussing these ideas in mathematical detail. This reference is cited in the Extended Goals bibliography of this web site.

Kaku explains very well the background and ideas of superstrings, a theoretical approach to grand unification that he is a major proponent of. In his book, the inherent compatibility of Hawking's "wave function of the universe" and Thorne's wormhole's are demonstrated convincingly. The book is for serious readers as is a bit harried at places but he has a very useful, fun odyssey to take you on.

Savage took about 20 years to research this book and it is obvious....the manual of how to colonize the galaxy has been figured out in a logical step by step manner with many details included as to "how to" do much of it. This book is actually a real Project that is the foundation of his organization called (appropriately enough) the First Millennial Foundation. A superb book with many gorgeous full color illustrations in the middle of it to help you visualize the distant future of humanity (i.e. later decades and centuries in this 1000 year plan he has devised).