Future Tense Newsletter: Life Everlasting

Last week, we published "Mpendulo: The Answer," the latest installment of our Future Tense Fiction series. In it, author Nosipho Dumisa imagines what life and humanity might mean to a "synthetic person"--in this fictional world, someone born out of artificially created stem cells--and what their experience of their own humanity might be like while living in a society fraught with discrimination. In a response essay to the story, tech journalist Sarah Elizabeth Richards looks at the major global debates we've already seen over real advances in reproductive technology, and what public fears over things like "playing God" with in vitro fertilization or "designer babies" with progress in genetics say about how we think about being human. Elsewhere on Future Tense, we've been exploring the wild world of tech enforcement. Charles Duan argues that the move to change the rules for patenting laws of nature seems eerily similar to a related attempt to do so in 1923.