Second Excerpt from The Edge in The Guardian

A second excerpt from The Edge has been published in The Guardian this week. It is the second of three such pieces that will appear over the coming weeks.

Here is how it starts:

Humans are improved by technology. For instance, I’ll venture that you were vaccinated at an early age against multiple diseases, a technology that has altered the biological fabric of your body in such a way as to enhance your performance against various debilitating, even fatal, diseases.

Athletes are humans too, and they sometimes look for a performance improvement through technological enhancements. In my forthcoming book, The Edge: The War Against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports, I discuss a range of technological augmentations to both people and to sports, and the challenges that they pose for rule making. In humans, such improvements can be the result of surgery to reshape (like laser eye surgery) or strengthen (such as replacing a ligament with a tendon) the body to aid performance, or to add biological or non-biological parts that the individual wasn’t born with.

Read the whole thing here.