Speechification

Misha Glenny’s new book McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers has been recieving excellent notices all over town, and the World Service have snapped him up for a four-part series charting the explosive growth of international crime following the end of the Cold War and other conflicts. He estimates that industrious crooks account for a fairly staggering 20% of the world’s GDP.

In the first programme [MP3] Glenny travels to British Columbia to meet the Canadian weed growers who use science (and Blackberries) to get their product over their border to a wealthy, heavily toking, but increasingly annoyed US. Access is key here, and as a former and much-honoured reporter in the former Yugoslavia (him, not me), I look forward to seeing who he’s cosied up to next week, reporting on cigarette smuggling in the Balkans.

An absolutely fascinating piece, this. Scary, but fascinating. And leaves you wondering quite why it feels scary (I think I know).

Professor Julian Savulescu, an eminent ethicist at Oxford University, on why it might benefit society as a whole to allow genetic modification and enhancement of humans. Simplifying, his arguments are relatively straightforward: ignoring the fact that we already enhance - via ritalin, say, or even coffee and alcohol - if we could genuinely and safely improve IQ, behaviour, even morality through tweaking genetics and pharmacology, shouldn’t we do that? The impact on everything, from architecture to sport to law to relationships, is barely capable of being comprehended - at least, without the sharpener of modafanil and Ritalin that US airforce pilots use when flying over Iraq.

The image I’m left with, however, is that of a rabbit that had a fluorescent gene from a jellyfish transferred into it. Perfectly safely, apparently. Thus, a fluorescent rabbit, and Savulescu points out that there’s no reason we couldn’t make a fluorescent human right now, the same way. At least they’d have each other.

Background Briefing: Stronger, smarter, nicer humans (mp3)