'Our Posthuman Future' by Francis Fukuyama and
'Redesigning Humans' by Gregory Stock.
Both published simultaneously by Profile Books at £17.99 sterling, hardback.

In 1968 Gordon Rattray Taylor published 'The Biological Timebomb', an analysis of how the fledgling sciences of genetics and biotechnology might develop in the ensuing decades. He may not have been the first to wonder how these sciences were to affect our lives, but he was in the vanguard of bringing these ideas into the public forum. Not surprisingly some of his predictions have proved incorrect, but many of them have come to pass, even within his predicted time-scale.

Predictions are what what brought Francis Fukuyama to world-wide public attention with his essay 'The End of History?', just fifteen pages long in the quarterly 'The National Interest' in 1989. With communism in retreat all around the globe, his contention was clear and well-argued; when ideological struggle ends and liberal democracies become the universal system of government, the history of human ideas ends. He contended that although the argument had not been won on the ground - wars and tumults would still continue - the argument had been won in the intellectual arena. This was an idea that sat well with the first Bush administration, one that the young Fukuyama worked for in his capacity as a deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff, and it could be argued that it has affected much of America's strategic planning and foreign policy since then.

September 11th 2001 has left us in no doubt that the ideological debate is far from over. Fundamentalism is rife - in the Muslim world, in Israel and increasingly in America - and fundamentalism is the antithesis of liberal democracy. One of the main tenets of fundamentalist thinking is that our world, our universe, our destines and our lives themselves are the product of a God. In this view any attempt to manipulate our genetic structure is to meddle with God's will, and consequently is wrong. In his new book, 'The Posthuman Future' Fukuyama argues that the exponential acceleration in genetic research and its capacities needs reining in, an argument that would find favour with fundamentalists of any hue. He argues thus: 'human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is, conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values'. To alter any part of our make-up is to change our very essences, from human to posthuman, just as the inhabitants of Huxley's 'Brave New World' lost their essential humanity to their controlling masters.

And in the blue corner, from UCLA, published simultaneously, is Gregory Stock, whose book 'Redesigning Humans' takes up a differing view. Unlike Fukuyama, who, for example, urges the banning of human cloning, Stock takes a more pragmatic and less regulatory view. He argues that the genie is already out of the bottle: once a technology exists, someone, somewhere will avail of it. If the western democracies ban cloning technology and its derivatives, then more permissive regimes (at least in this respect) will allow research to continue, which could eventually lead to a species divide between an enhanced new race of humans and those who continue to inherit their genetic make-up randomly in the traditional manner.

These two world views are as diverse as those of liberal democracies and al'Qaida, but the questions that they address are truly fundamental. This is a debate that goes to the very heart of our self-perceptions, of our destinies and our purpose in living. And this isn't an issue that will go away if it's ignored; almost daily there are new papers and articles published that describe further advances in biotechnologies. There are choices facing us now, not at some vaguely defined time in the future, but right now. It's no longer a question of do we want to select the sex of our children, but do we want to select their intelligence quotient, their life-span, their resistance to disease, their athleticism, their physical appearance and their emotional make-up. These are issues that cut to the very quick of human nature, freedom, and scientific inquiry.