TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

This bioart roundtable starts from the premise that art and aesthetics have a role to play in determining the ethics of designer baby production. The research project examines human germline genetic editing seen through the lens of bioart, the artform that uses biological processes and experimentation to display living systems as art objects. If we debate the reengineering of the human genome as an art project to sculpt future generations in a hereditary cascade of living aesthetics, this warps the balance of the bioethical scale and distorts the practice based arguments surrounding the germline human engineering debate. The process becomes less about science, health and neo-eugenic enhancement versus the heirloom global human genome and more about questions of contemporary aesthetics, non-pragmatic bioethics and the non-speculative turn that is both non-utilitarian bioart and human germline editing practice.