Contributors

Who should control the biotech revolution, the individual or the state? Johns Hopkins' Francis Fukuyama and UCLA's Gregory Stock debate the question in "The Clone Wars" (page 34). Fukuyama first engaged the subject when writing a retrospective on his 1992 bestseller The End of History and the Last Man. "The one irrefutable criticism of my argument was that you couldn't have an end of history without an end of science. So I started to think about how biotech could change our assumptions about liberal democracy." The result is the new Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Stock, author of Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future, says he's long been interested in studying human evolution. "Usually we look toward the past, to explain how we got where we are. To me, it's more interesting to ask where will we go and how technology will change our future."

"In a less free society they'd have locked me up by now," admits Contributing Editor Loren Lomasky, who defends liberalism's core value of toleration in this issue ("Tolerating Freedom," page 56). "I've been taking on opponents of liberalism for 20 years now. And it was only after I began to do this that the Berlin Wall came down," deadpans the Bowling Green State University philosophy professor and author of Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford). What tests Lomasky's tolerance? "Bright yellow mustard. If I had my way, I would outlaw it."

In "Che's Secret Diaries," veteran cultural commentator Cynthia Grenier considers Ernesto Guevara's incredible resilience as a revolutionary icon (page 55). She's sure she knows at least part of the answer: "He just happened to be better looking than all the others." Currently a resident of Washington, D.C., Grenier has lived in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Her career highlights include being a book editor, a film and theater critic, a New York Times reporter, and a vice president at United Artists, where she secured the American release of the pathbreaking gay farce La Cage aux Folles.