 I have to lower that because my mouth isn't in my forehead yet. Good afternoon, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, and especially students. I won't replicate what's in the program. That's pretty clear. She has an amazing background, Dr. Thompson does. And just to fill in a few little blanks for you, in addition to being the chancellor's professor and chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, she's also the director at the Center for Science, Technology, and Medicine in Society, the director of the Lee Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science at the University of California, Berkeley. And she is also an RQIF professor of Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a trained scientist in her undergraduate and continuing interest throughout her graduate career. She has been an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, at Harvard University. And as I said, she is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has visited institutions worldwide, and she is the author of books Making Parents, the Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies, and Good Science, the ethical choreography of stem cell research. In addition to numerous articles on scientific research, biomedicine, biodiversity, social justice, and governance. Her 2005 book, Making Parents, which won the 2007 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science, introduced the concept of ontological choreography in which she lays out the different order of things, such as emotions, politics, technologies, and clinical measurements, and how they work together in medicine, and for her concept of promissory capital and biomedical mode of production. She serves on the stem cell research oversight committee of the University of California, Berkeley, and previously served on the Children's Hospital of Oakland research institute stem cell research oversight committee. She is currently a member of a group that has already been discussed here several times, the Nuffel Council on Bioethics and the Working Group on Genome Editing. She has been a panelist at several international meetings, and she is a frequent contributor to the public discourse and policy discussions of biotechnologies, the role of science and society, and most recently, CRISPR technology and human genetic engineering, as well as systems of stratification that limit technology access. Her work reaches across disciplinary boundaries and has found a broad audience of academics and non-academics alike. Dr. Thompson's work continues to broaden the biopolitical paradigm by asking iconic questions about the social transformation and entanglements of the social material environment as we move forward with new and evolving technologies. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Thompson. That was so nice, thank you. Gosh, good afternoon, and thank you, Professor Jenner, for that lovely and very generous introduction. I'd like to start in general, actually, by thanking everyone who's made this conference so fantastic. The organizers, especially Professor Helke and Hong and Bob Blassen-Taylor and Professor Bergman, but also all the other faculty and staff and students, donors and audience members whose interventions have been so valuable, and also a special thanks to my team, Professor Jenner, Lindsay, and Rachel, who've attended to my every need and more, and whose company has been so delightful these past two days. This event has modeled the very best that can result from terrific organization putting to public good the values of a liberal arts ethos and the power of making happen a conversation of vital importance to us as a society today. I guess I should say congratulations to you all for that, and what a wonderful university. Unfortunately, I can't see you because of the lights, but I'll imagine people. I turn now to my talk, and I want to begin with a statement of my commitments, and the reason that I want to spell them out at this point in the conference is just sort of to fess up to a couple of things, and to make it clear that I don't think that they're the only ways to go, but they are the point of view that I'm going to be speaking from. So a couple of things where I stand. I have a background in the life sciences, philosophy, transnational, intersectional, feminism, and science and technology studies. I'm therefore predisposed to seek to combine the knowledges and practices of each in how we navigate science and technology. I'm very much pro-science and very much pro-social science, despite the deep and lasting damage that both have promulgated in their long histories, and we forget those at our peril. Labeling, in my opinion, labeling people as pro or anti-science is a way of dismissing or silencing people's views, and it's antithetical to having a deep and rich conversation that actually produces results. A corollary of this is that I believe in sorting out the various kinds of concerns where appropriate. In particular, I'm very invested in arguing for different mechanisms for collecting data on and reviewing the social issues that arise and the clinical issues that arise and taking society-wide patterns of discrimination, of racism, sexism, and ableism, and classism, off the backs of individual patients and their clinicians. Commitment number three. I can't emphasize this enough. You don't know how you're going to react in a given situation unless you've been there. From many years of field work around reproductive and genetic technologies, there's a process that people often go through when they're diagnosed with something, and a very typical one around IVF would be starting off by saying when you find that you can't as easily get pregnant as you might like to, taking, perhaps, going to see a physician, perhaps being willing to take a drug to help you ovulate, and people will frequently say during that period, oh, I would never do in vitro fertilization. Comes the time when that's their only way to get pregnant, very, very often, they radically change their point of view. The last thing I mean to be implying is that people are hypocritical or that there's anything wrong with this. I think these things are journeys. I have enormous compassion for people going through these journeys, but just that remembering that you don't know how you're going to react and your views quite likely will change when you have a particular conditioning question. And finally, I personally believe that context is everything, and some of the previous speakers have emphasized this. And so for myself, rather than drawing hard lines against particular procedures, I find it's better to pay detailed attention to what would be best in a given set of social and technical circumstances. I realize that this places me in a minority among both scientists and social scientists. For example, I'm not prepared to say, oh, we should do germline genome editing, or we should do somatic genome editing. I'm much more interested in looking at the particular circumstances in question, although I do greatly respect and appreciate the reasons why many people think that lines in the sand are important. Okay, so much for my commitments. Okay, so I've been tasked with addressing the history and future of reproductive technologies and their impact on society. So let me start with perhaps one of the greatest hits, and at least some ways to think about the topics at hand. So as Professor Hong pointed out yesterday with her examples from antiquity, a concern with fertility is not new. It's neither tropically new in terms of stories we tell about fertility, nor is it new temporally. And one place that North American fertility clinics often begin the story is with Sarah and Abraham in the Bible. Through their belief, they were eventually able to conceive despite their advanced ages, reputedly 90 and 100 respectively, at the time of conception, and despite Sarah's previous infertility. I don't know if you can see the caption at the top of this children's book here, but it says that learning Bible stories is fun. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that this image flies in the face of what most practitioners would consider responsible messaging. Fertility declines with age, and it precipitously declines with age in women. Even egg freezing should be done when you're young if it's going to hold out a good chance of preserving your fertility. The point here in this story, in the Abraham and Sarah story, is more the miracle of birth in the context of belief. And there are many, many more such stories in the Bible, Isaac and Rebecca, who gave birth to the twins Esor and Jacob, Rachel and Jacob, Elizabeth and Zachariah and Luke, and so on. It's worth taking a detour just for a minute to think about the gendering of infertility diagnoses. Most English translations of the Bible use the expression baron and attribute it to the woman. Baron is a horrible word, right up there with sterility, premature ovarian failure, and other words that infertility patients hate, but it gives us a glimpse into just how deeply women's reproductive capacity, youth and worth are mutually entangled. When you Google baron, this is the kind of picture you get. I don't think most women with facing infertility feel that that's a good representation of their entire selves. Thanks to a far better understanding of reproductive biology and of the causes of infertility, we now know that the causes and prevalence of infertility vary in different countries in part due to environmental and workplace toxins, but that overall there are approximately as many cases of male infertility as female infertility, with both partners being implicated in some cases and unknown etiology in others. Typically, clinics treat the couple for that reason. Lest we think that only women are subjected to an elision between their reproductive capacity and their gender identity, consider another image I've seen used in infertility information sessions, the crane. This image incorrectly equates a man's capacity to sustain an erection with his ability to father a child. We know from many cases, including fathers who are paralyzed below the waist and others who've used electrojaculation, sperm aspiration, or pre-advanced illness or pre-surgery sperm freezing to get pregnant, that this is not necessarily the case. But something we can all do right away is to interrupt these harmful associations that traffic in gender and sexuality stereotypes when we hear them. It can be extremely painful being involuntarily childless and suggesting that a woman's creativity, generativeness, and femininity are compromised because she's not pregnant or that a man's sexual prowess and masculinity are being questioned through the careless use of language and metaphor is something that we should all resist. Would we say that those who choose not to have children are barren or impotent or might they be carers of other kinds, for the earth and environment, for their life's work, for the children or dependents of the community? In addition, we should assume that fertility is important to gender non-conforming and non-binary individuals and couples and to LGBT individuals and couples for whom the stereotypes and barriers to treatment often carry the additional burden of being heterosexist. Assisted reproductive technologies are often the only or the best way to become biological parents. Gay fathers, for example, have been pioneers of cross-border reproductive care and have turned to surrogacy despite their frequent ambivalence about the privilege and possibilities for exploitation contained in third, fourth and fifth-party reproduction necessary for them to have biological children. Comprehensive trans-reproductive healthcare also has a long way to go, but it's a growing area of reproductive medicine and activism and fertility preservation is a major focus, especially for transitioning youth and their carers. And I should point out that it's not even legal to preserve your fertility when you're transitioning in all countries. But it's not enough to stop with gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality play out in very different ways in relation to fertility as in relation to all things. When race, class, disability and citizenship are taken into account. Sorry, I missed a slide. The picture here says the path to parenthood is not always straight. Gender and sexuality and fertility is complex. I return now to the story of Abraham and Sarah. I started with this story because it's so frequently alluded to in the world of infertility and because it shows that although in vitro fertilization and more recent ARTs may be newish, infertility and concerns with gender, genealogy and biological clocks is anything but new. In the spirit of this entire conference, however, I want also to remind people that the links between fertility and stratification, gender, race, nation, class are also not new and in fact, co-emerge with the social and biological facts of infertility itself in every instance. Remember that 14 years prior to conceiving Isaac, Abraham had a child with Hagar. In Genesis 16.1, the new American Standard Bible says, now, Sarah, Abraham's wife, had born him no children and she had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. So Sarah, I said to Abraham, now behold, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Please go into my maid, perhaps I will obtain children through her. In other translations, she's referred to variously as a slave, servant, a servant girl or a handmade. In this short passage, we see that third party reproduction was already a thing and as it followed a logic whereby Hagar's reproductive laboring body and indeed her own fecundity could be owned or at least appropriated by the procreative intent of Sarah and Abraham. If second wave feminism often ignored the racialized and immigrant child care labor making it possible for middle class white women to enter the workforce, the framework of reproductive choice often ignores the race, class and national dynamics of stratified reproductive labor too. In my book, Making Parents, I came up with the phrase selective pronatalism to point to the logics whereby some people are contraceptive and some are procepted. Actually originally I combined it with biodiversity conservation but I was talked out of trying to do animals and humans in the same format. PhD logic there. And also to refer to the processes whereby some people become intended parents and others become parties to the reproduction of intended parents. I've learned throughout my career from the brilliant work of my colleagues in the social studies of science and medicine and transnational and intersectional feminisms. Of particular importance to our theme at this conference is the concept of reproductive justice. At once a scholarly and activist movement, reproductive justice was pioneered by US women of color, collaborating or in close kinship with many colleagues and allies from gender identity, disability justice, indigenous studies and environmental justice activism and scholarship and increasingly has joined up with colleagues around the world. Reproductive justice expands the concept of reproductive choice that Sarah and Abraham should have options in my allegory today to encompass the case of Hagar and her right to her own reproductive autonomy to have and to raise her own children and to do so free from economic and other kinds of structural violence including enslavement, the removal of children by intended parents or the removal of children by the state. In my second book, Good Science, I focused in on the innovation economies. These embryos are my children by the way on these books or two of my children. I focused in on the innovation economies and geopolitics of human pluripotent stem cell research. In that book, I investigated how human embryonic stem cell research became permissible by combining three elements that hadn't been necessary to articulate for the private treatment based rise of the fertility industry. So it's very important that in the US, the fertility industry developed mostly in the private sector, mostly free from scientific regulatory apparatus. That was not true at all of stem cell research and is not true at all of genome editing. In this book, I looked at, I talked about something called the procurial frame and I analyzed it as being composed of three things. The moral imperative of being procures about which disability justice and racial justice scholars have taught us to be extremely wary. The use of public measures and funds to de-risk the social and ethical risks surrounding the procurement of human eggs, sperm, embryos and embryoid products into the lab. And bio curation, keeping tabs on chains of custody and the future potential reversibility for these materials. So these are the frames through which I think about the history of US reproductive technology. I'm going to turn now to landmark aspects of the history of reproductive technologies in the United States. In an article earlier this year in the IVF Global History Special Issue of Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online, a paper that I called Between Rock and a Marketplace, I documented the rise and unique characteristics of the US reproductive technology field. The US has played and continues to play a distinctive and significant part in the history of in vitro fertilization and assisted reproductive technologies worldwide. US IVF emerged in the scientific context of contraceptive and fertility research, in the social context of a wealthy nation without universal healthcare, something that's come up so already. And in the political context of the abortion, IVF had its first clinical success in the US in 1981. Since then the US has become known for procedure date and its impact on federal versus state funding and regulation, involving third, fourth and fifth parties, sperm donors, egg donors and surrogates in the practice of IVF. It's also been one of the pioneers in domestic and transnational deployment of IVF for same sex and trans intended parents at a pioneer of the social egg freezing revolution, since the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies declared the egg freezing procedure no longer experimental in 2013. US IVF has been marked by debate about such things, has really characteristic things that it's been marked by. In particular debate about such things as poor success rates, misleading patients with undue hype and hope, poor insurance coverage and organizations like Resolve, a patient activist, patient advocacy organization, have lobbied from the very, very first days for universal health coverage for fertility. Only 15 states to this day offer or cover infertility for those who have health insurance. Then there's all those who don't have health insurance and all the exemptions that there are on that allow people not to offer this coverage. It's also been marked by extraordinarily high payments for the right kind of egg donor, upwards of $50,000 for the rights, race, ethnicity, IQ, and musical talent and such things. Beautiful music at this conference, by the way, thank you. And that doesn't mean go and get an expensive egg donor. And the gendered, racialized, and class-based access to and meanings and experiences of infertility and ARTs. The exploitation of surrogates and donors, postponed childbearing, and donor offspring searches for their genetic parents. There have been waves of public debate and public controversy around each of these things. Debates about the biomedical interface, including the use for stem cell and gene editing research of supernumerary embryos created during IVF is also a signature aspect of US IVF. And you might remember President Bush's adage, there's no such thing as a leftover embryo. And there are places that freeze leftover embryos and you can adopt an embryo and bring it to term. Two Time Magazine articles, nicely bookend the rise and mainstreaming of US IVF. US researchers were the first to publish evidence of human fertilization in vitro, with the publication in 1944 of John Rock's, that's the rock in the hard place, Mock in the Marketplace, and Miriam Mencken's report in Science, of the creation of two two-celled and two three-celled human embryos. The Time Magazine article that reported on Rock and Mencken's paper famously summed up the framing of the public debate at the time in terms of man against nature and an affront to womanhood and motherhood in the face of scientific reproduction. The quote reads, man will never be happy until he has proved that he is at least as smart as nature. One thing he would like to show the world is that he can reproduce himself scientifically. Artificial insemination was one step. He took another step last week with the first recorded fertilization of a human ovum outside the mother's body. In Science last week, Harvard gynecologist John Rock and his assistant, Miriam F. Mencken, note the gender division of labor there, reported the scientific affront to womanhood. It's worth noting that this framing as a scientific affront to nature and to woman was very short-lived and the major concerns quickly became concerns from religion and concerns about safety, monstrosity, and so on. Fast forward to 2007, and a Time Magazine article from December 2007 asked what the 10 best chores to outsource might be. At the top of the article, it said, outsourcing brings to mind big factories and call centers, but entrepreneurs around the globe now offer services from tutoring to sculpting a bust of your grandpa to regular folks for a fraction of the cost in the West. Thought the world was flat before? Well, now you can hire someone in India to carry your child. Task number one, best chore to outsource of December 2007, pregnancy. Just for your interest, task number two, playing a video game to reach higher levels. Really similar, lots of hashtag false equivalences going on here. Three, illustrating a book your mother wrote for her grandchildren. Four, tutoring your son in math, because you just better get that edge. And five, making a video tribute for your sister's wedding. Okay, pregnancy is not only ranked number one. The fact that now you can hire someone in India to carry your child is taken by the article's author as a sign that the world is flat. Economic, regulatory, religious, legal, and ethical gradient all push people, scientists, clinicians, patients, instrument manufacturers around the world in search of third party reproduction. To portray these gradients as evidence of flatness rather than evidence of profound structural inequality and sustained structural inequality often shored up by imperial and colonial relations of today or yesteryear. And to fail to skip a beat in referring to hiring someone to be pregnant for you or to imply that it would obviously still be your child, she gave birth to, is to suffer from an intense form of neoliberal blindness. So gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, nation, markets, and innovation are the story of infertility and of IVF in the US. It seems vital to ask how we can go about science policy differently as new technologies are developed and deployed if we're going to take care of all of these concerns. We need some way to make the right kinds of conversations happen as this conference is doing where real listening and learning across specializations can occur. I'm going to turn now to the case of genome editing and ask how we should be thinking about onboarding new technologies in this area. Genome editing is a great case for this because there's almost universal agreement that an older model of science policy doesn't work in this arena. So the older model that you may or may not be aware of is one that's, but you'll recognize it even if you don't know it by this name, is that that's called the public understanding of science. The public understanding of science is sometimes slightly derisively called the download model because or sometimes the Charles River model because it's thought to come from policy schools at Harvard and MIT where knowledge flows in one direction from experts to lay people. This model was based on two premises about scientists and two about the public. The two about the scientists were that experts know best, they understand the science in question and second that experts also know best how to think about the issues raised by the science in question. The two premises about the public were the following. The public needs to be educated because they don't understand the science. There's a gap or a deficit or a failure of understanding. And the second premise that the public will agree to and see the wisdom in science policy based on scientific expertise once they are educated. It's a highly hierarchical model, it puts experts above lay people and scientific knowledge over other kinds of knowledge. It's paternalistic and it gets described as having a democratic deficit. This model works well when the position of science in government is secure and when there's good reason to trust that the science in question is tried and true and will be broadly speaking beneficent. This model has been largely replaced in science policy circles, however, by another model. And this model is called public engagement in science. So instead of understanding of, the emphasis is now on engagement in science. So public engagement in science is sometimes called the co-production model after Professor Sheila Jasanov's work where all kinds of stakeholders should have a say in science policy. This model is also based on two premises about scientists and two about the public. The first one is identical. Experts know their own fields best. Scientific experts, other kinds of experts know their own field best. But the second premise is that they have no special understanding of other fields. Experts are neither any better nor any worse prima facie than anyone else in knowing how to think about the various kinds of issues raised by the science in question. The two premises about the public are also slightly different. The public in this model is conceived of as having many areas of expertise, including many other kinds of science, but also all kinds of non-scientific kinds of knowledge and experience, such as law, ethics, humanity, humanities and life and environmental experience and exposure. And the second premise about the public is that the public's knowledge is relevant to science policy. For example, in provenance of materials, who's an eggs and embryos? Who are going to be your donors? Procurement, how do we move these precious humanoid materials around the place? And disposition, what do you do to get rid of no longer wanted embryos, for example. It also contains the idea that including these kinds of expertise might improve the science in question. Public engagement in science is a much less hierarchical model where different actors and kinds of knowledge are important. It's participatory by design and it has a democratic circuit which can make it unruly. It works well when the case for the science in question needs to be made, where limits are at stake and or where there are reasons to be concerned about ethical and social risks such as becoming or perpetuating a selecting society. The famous cartoon The Peasants Are Revolting captures the cost of what Professor Benjamin was referring to yesterday as social illiteracy, just as much as the commentary about cross-border reproduction as evidence of the world's flatness did. The king cannot see the threat posed by his own illegitimacy as ruler precisely because he cannot see the power of the people. A second cartoon plays on the theme of the same cartoon. It riffs, it assumes everyone knows the earlier cartoon and shows what happens when you apply that kind of logic to healthcare priorities and health funding. The guy, the supplicant says The peasants are revolting and the king says, I know, put deodorant and mouthwash in the healthcare bill. So this cartoon highlights the way in which the wrong medical priorities are funded if the social problem is incorrectly diagnosed and if there is an excess of social illiteracy. So rather than the public understanding of science, in the case of human genome editing calls for a different model, that of public engagement of science, and the call for this has been made far and wide. What might the public engagement in genome editing look like? The key questions then, if we take that model of public engagement seriously, fall into two groups. First, who are the public? Does the public mean stakeholders? It's important to note that who sits on these committees varies from country to country. So Professor Murdoch was telling us earlier about what gets called the great and the good in England. People who rise to a position of power in their respective fields are considered to be good spokespeople about issues that they don't necessarily have expertise on, whereas in the US it's much more domain specific and they look for what are considered to be the relevant expertise to make up a committee. So the first question is, who are the public? Does the public mean stakeholders or does the public mean everyone? And perhaps there's a case to be made, especially for those who are not stakeholders who don't have an interest in the science in question and who thus might be seen as better at judging the public good. There's a long standing body of social theory suggesting that people who have less of an interest, less to lose, see better the reality of the social problems at hand. Who are the stakeholders in genome editing? They're scientists, clinicians, politicians, patients, those living with disabilities, those marketing the technologies, those profiting from the technologies and their value-added add-ons, those currently or historically underserved by the medical or technical fields of the technologies in question. They're ethicists, religious leaders, social scientists, and so on. Can everybody play a role? And then as Professor Saxton pointed out, can anyone speak for the entire group for which they're representative? And how do you represent those who cannot represent themselves? Unborn generations who might be edited before their birth, those who don't have the power of speech, and so on. How do you weigh up, for example, the risks of becoming an ever more selecting society versus the right or need for biomedical cures? How do you balance, in other words, individual good versus societal harm? How do you factor in economic activity and its downstream effect on the public? So with that bio-innovation model that I talked about earlier from my book, Good Science, the premise was not just that pro cures would come up with cures, but it was regenerative in two senses. It would also regenerate and revitalize the economy and that would have trickle-down effects which would enrich the taxpayer and would enrich the state in general, paying into public coffers and public benefits from which everyone stands to benefit. Second, how should the public engage? How do you or whoever incentivize the public to participate? Harder than you might think. It's actually very hard to get, for example, non-stakeholders to come and have a say, to weigh in about particular issues. What's meaningful participation? Is it being surveyed by experts? Is it commentating during public comment periods? So, for example, in the UK, we're really good at surveying people's opinions, but we're not necessarily that good about bringing people's opinions to bear on the eventual solutions we come up with. Is it comment which you might think is a good thing or you might think is a bad thing? Is it commenting during public comment periods? Is it just having a voice? Is it the fact of being heard? Is it protesting and resisting? So, many different ways that you can have meaningful participation. What's the goal of the participation? Is it having a chance to speak and be heard in an official forum? Is it or is it something more substantive? Is it influencing the framing of the debate from the outset? Or should there be a traceable impact? So, this is kind of from the least having a voice and being heard to framing the terms of the debate or should it go all the way to having a traceable impact on how the science is done? What studies to carry out? For what conditions? And with what clinical interface? And with what consequences to morality and to the economy? Perhaps it's only real engagement if the public's voices in a wide range of opinions are visible in the resulting legislation. But then you have to ask, are there any views that are too extreme to be included? Are there any that are outside the polity writ large? Are there things that are intrinsically violent or dangerous? Things that should be ruled out of bounds from the start. Again, this is one with a big difference between the US and the UK. The free speech and First Amendment, things make more things acceptable to say in the US than they do in most places in Europe. The kinds of things we know we need to do if we're to add real social justice goals to excellent science are things that those of us at a group called Science Fair tackle. So Science Fair is an informal group of us, anybody who'd like to is more than welcome to join. And Fair stands, it's a bad pun, and it stands for feminist anti-racist equity. It's a data sciences initiative to argue for data infrastructures and collecting good data on social and political and economic factors, separately from or independently from the clinical context. So we know that we need robust and ongoing public consultation when there's a question of public trust and when the risks and efficacy of technologies are still at stake. We know that we need funding models that internalize things that have previously been thought of as externalities to healthcare funding and innovation funding. We would also argue that we need panels selected to oversee the goals that are being monitored and that these should have very strong representation. For example, Professor Saxton referred to as disability consultants, people who have experienced conditions in question, people who have particular kinds of insight into the phenomena that we're collecting data for. So for example, this group, Science Fair is interested in collecting data on sexism, racism, ableism, classism and so on in technologies that are mostly being rolled out in an individualist clinical context. You need government buy-in. At least the government needs not to be opposed to it. We need health infrastructure and data analytics buy-in. We need robust and regularly updated measures of increased well-being. And in particular, we need marching rights to call for new research or tweaks in ongoing research in the light of findings. So the interventions, the findings of such groups must be robust. They must have teeth. There must be ways to tweak what we're doing in our science policy writ large on the basis of the social patterns that we're finding. And remember from all the talks we've heard so far, we know that we have a predisposition to normalize and naturalize certain orders that are anything but flat. So the work it takes to reveal these things and to bring to light the patterns of discrimination, patterns of selection and their mitigation is significant and substantial. I also want to emphasize that there is a very, very strong continuity between what's going on in things like genome editing and non-invasive prenatal testing, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, but also how we segregate our schools, the differences between privatized and public childhoods, the numbers of resources we put into preparing different children for college, the emphasis we put on quote, unquote, meritocracy. All of these things are leading us to an increasingly selecting society in my view and I don't believe that we should make, put any more or any less weight on any one locus than on any other. Today's technologies promise what is perhaps, so that's the right to say about that. Today's technologies promise what is perhaps an even greater series of challenges and opportunities to how and whether and for whom we think about reproduction. So in my forthcoming book, Getting Ahead, Automation, Augmentation and Deselection, I turn my attention to the coming together of a suite of emerging technologies which perhaps even more radically will affect what it will mean to be human and for whom in the years to come. Gene editing and the newest versions of reproductive technologies are emerging not just with bioinformatics and personalized medicine, but also with 3D printing, drones, the internet of things, hyperloop, blockchain, autonomous cars, robotics, big data, computation and the financialization and digitization of everything. At the same time these technologies have been deployed in a time of rising populism that in many ways sets itself against technology elites and in a time of unprecedented and unstable inequality that will likely maintain if not exacerbate all the digital and other technology divides. They are also co-emerging in a time of environmental and migratory crisis. In some parts of the world, we'll be confronted with questions such as the possibility of an end to bodily pregnancy. Many of my students think that sounds absolutely fantastic. Have a robot that does the pregnancy for you and that will be a great help in gender equity. The possibility of life extension, a lot of money and it's easy to dismiss the singularity and other things by saying well, what about the multiplicity? But there is actually a lot of money going into views into science and technology related to life extension. What do we do with life extension, especially in the light of an aging population and the economic dynamics of aging populations? Will life extension, if it's red, becomes even somewhat widely available, reduce the need for frequent reproduction entirely? And what about the possibility of routine cognitive and physical super enhancement and hybridization with AIs? Will that attenuate the biological relationship that parents and offspring feel for one another? Will it mean that we're all closer to each other and further away from one another in a way that disrupts the seeming imperative of the nuclear family and the urge to reproduce? So if any of these things come to pass, what will they mean for gender reproduction and family and what will they do to the relations among the haves and the have nots? And in general, will a biological, family-based reproductive drive still exist? And if so, how will it be realized? What will we value and how will we live a good life if the stages encompassed by the reproductive and non-reproductive life course are phased out? And if we are all augmented and our children selected for, in what will we seek individuality, worth, competition and compassion? If there are two things that the history of reproductive technologies has taught us, it's that they are always already stratified and that reproduction always already stands in for things that go far beyond the biological facts of the matter and a moment of individual reproductive choice. I should emphasize that I don't only see gloom and doom. I'm very excited by many of these developments. I see great promise, for example, to many kinds of assistive technologies designed by and with our disability consultants and I look forward enormously to the day when naturalized models of cognitive and bodily worth are disrupted beyond recognition. But it will take an enormous and collective act of will to steer these so-called fourth industrial revolution technologies rather than away, to steer them toward rather than away from thriving planetary and human futures and towards rather than away from curiosity-driven science and justice for all. If we don't remember our histories and if we don't dream of better futures, we are doomed to get carried along by the selective pronatalisms and other technological divides we inherit. Please join me in this struggle and thank you for your attention. Okay, slight regroup. Because of the time I propose that we have our seventh inning stretch now. So go ahead and take a brief break and we will reconvene in about 10 minutes and we will seamlessly connect the Q and A.