In the ethics community, there has been much hand-wringing over the idea that, as genetic testing and manipulation improve, one can anticipate that customers will combine their flexible gestational activities described above with detailed genetic engineering of human children, leading to a world of designer offspring. All the palaver about healing disease and human suffering is a sideshow compared with the real objective of commercialized science, which is to empower the affluent to play God in defining their own pedigree to accommodate their individual tastes. But the beauty of twenty-first-century neoliberalism is that it thinks not one, but three moves ahead in the game of custom-made selves. As has been recently pointed out, designer children are only an imperfect way station on the path to a perfectly flexible self. Why lock those children into a corporeal cage that they may themselves not like, or themselves seek to transform according to good neoliberal entrepreneurial imperatives? The ultimate goal of genetics is therefore a DNA upgrade: the ability to freely alter yourself at will at the ribonucleic level.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 428