Price of Perfection

Maxwell J. Mehlman is the Petersilge Professor of Law and director of the Law-Medicine Center in the School of Law, Case Western Reserve University, where he is also a professor of bioethics in the School of Medicine and the associate director for public policy in the Center for Genetics Research, Ethics, and Law. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of several books on medical ethics and genetics, including Wondergenes; The Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal, and Policy Issues in Biotechnology; and Access to the Genome.

• Introduction1. The Technological Horizon2. Self-Satisfaction3. Social Reward4. The Hegemony of Meritocracy5. Access to Enhancements and the Challenge to Equality6. Lack of Choice7. Enhancements in Sports8. The Lessons from Sports9. The War on Enhancements10. Promoting Safety, Efficacy, and Informed Decisionmaking11. Protecting the Vulnerable12. Access and Inequality13. Abominations14. Research on EnhancementConclusionNotesIndex

In his highly readable and especially timely new book, The Price of Perfection, Mehlman makes it clear that he is not at all persuaded that the ethical response to the availability of performance-enhancing drugs in sports-or elsewhere in society, for that matter-is to ban them and then spend a lot of effort testing for those who use them anyway. -- Arthur Caplan Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Bioethicists, as well as policy makers and the public, must think more often and more deeply about science's rapidly growing ability to improve human functioning. But what is present in The Price of Perfection, and sufficiently inspiring, is a well-balanced and well-documented look at how we now are positioned (at least in the United States) to control this process, and what some of the pros and cons of enlarging control, or alternatively loosening it, might be. -- Anita Silvers International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics