On October 1, Prof. Riccardo Campa - IEET Fellow, Chairman of the Italian Transhumanist Association, and assistant professor of sociology at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow - presented a lecture to post-graduate students of the State University of Milan, Biotechnologies and Transactional Medicine Department.

Campa took part in a public seminar with Prof. Massimo Reichlin of dell’Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele on the subject “Tomorrow’s People: Stronger, Smarter, Happier, Fairer?”

His presentation concentrated on the cultural origins of the idea of human enhancement, in an excursus going from Plato to Pico della Mirandola and Francis Bacon, from Condorcet to Nietzsche, from Marinetti to Trotsky. He showed how an undercurrent always survived in the European culture that opposed monotheistic taboos against Promethean ambitions and eventually led to the breakthroughs offered by contemporary technoscience.

In the debate with Prof. Reichlin he demonstrated how everyday, laymen’s discussions about transhumanism and human enhancement reflect in both their partisans and their opponents a fundamental philosophical divide that pervades the entire western culture.

Several students took the opportunity to state their intention to work on dissertations on the debate about human enhancement and its impact on current bioethical trends.

The seminar was successfully organized by Anna Rollier, Professor of Genetics at the Faculty of Medicine, and Maria Antonella Piga, Senior researcher in Legal Medicine. The event filled the Aula Magna with students, academics and lay public.