I share some of your frustration about the irrational preference for "natural" things. Too often these attitudes result in the rejection of critical advances li

I share some of your frustration about the irrational preference for "natural" things. Too often these attitudes result in the rejection of critical advances like GMOs and vaccines. But I also have to preach some caution about meddling with human genetics. At this point we have what I think you can agree is a relatively poor understanding of the potential consequences of splicing DNA in a human zygote. Crashing headlong into an age of careless modifications could be disastrous for the survival of the species. I just finished reading the Firefall duology by Peter Watts (http://rifters.com/ http://rifters.com/) and one of the themes in the second book is that "baseline" humans are in some ways hardier than modified transhumans. Natural selection has fixed a lot of the bugs in us baselines over millions of years, and that's a hard-won legacy that we shouldn't be too quick to discard for barely-understood alterations.