Annual JBS Haldane Award
for Best Undergraduate
Transhumanist Paper
The Haldane award is given to the student paper that best advances transhumanist thought, analysis or applications. Please submit
complete papers to James Hughes Ph.D. james.hughes@trincoll.edu
by May 1, 2008 for consideration for the 2008 Haldane award.
Eligibility criteria:
- authors must be students enrolled at a high school, college or university, who have not received their baccalaureate degree by January 1, 2008
- authors must be members in good standing of the World Transhumanist Association
Previous Award Winners
2003: John Schloendorn for "Evolution and its Implications for Aging, Death and the Extension of the Human Life Span"2004: Kip Werking for "The Posthuman Condition"
2005: Brian Fritz for "Genes, Memes, and Gender: Transhumanist Anthropology and Cultural Evolution"
Kip Werking accepting his award from Mike Treder in 2004
2006: Guido Núñez-Mujica for “The Ethics of Enhancing Animals, Specifically Great Apes” published in the Journal of Personal Cyber-Consciousness.
Guido Núñez-Mujica presenting The Ethics of Enhancing Animals, Specifically Great Apes
2007:
Benjamin Hyink for his extraordinary accomplishments on behalf of transhumanism over the last four years. As the former organizer of the Transhumanist Student Network he has helped spread the transhumanist message to a new generation of activists, from Stanford and Western Oregon University, to the University of Nairobi and the University of Cape Coast South Africa. His first-rate scholarship on the philosophical underpinnings of personal identity have addressed central transhumanist concerns, and his numerous detailed plans of action and operating procedures for volunteers and interns have made the Transhumanist Student Network a model organization of its type.
JBS Haldane
Transhumanist Pioneer
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane is an excellent symbol for this award since his essays had such a wide impact on the transhumanist imagination. John Haldane was one of the first twentieth century biologists to promote the posthuman possibilities made possible by science and technology. In his landmark essay "Daedalus or Science and the Future" (1923) Haldane argued against knee-jerk biases against biological progress and predicted "ectogenesis" or "test-tube babies" and other futurist technologies. He said:The biologist is the most romantic figure on earth. With the fundamentals of ectogenesis in his brain, the biologist is
the possessor of knowledge that is going to revolutionize human life....The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.
J.B.S. Haldane, 1923 "Daedalus, or Science and the Future
Haldane was a tireless and charismatic popularizer of science in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932 Haldane was elected to the British Royal Society and the following year became Professor of Genetics at University College in London.
Haldane was an active anti-fascist, and worked to defend the Spanish
Republic against the rise of fascism. While at Oxford Haldane had joined
the eugenics society, but later he became a leading critic of eugenics
as unscientific nonsense. Haldane became a Communist in the middle
part of his life (1937-1950), but left the Communist Party over the travesty of
Lysenkoism and the revelations about Stalin. In 1957 Haldane emigrated to India to protest the
Anglo-French invasion of Suez. He worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta before becoming head of the Orissa State Genetics
and Biometry Laboratory in 1962.
In 1964 Haldane coined the term "clones" in his essay
"Biological
Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten-Thousand Years."
For more information about John Haldane:
