Here's a list of possible topics we came up with on September 22, supplemented with some additional ideas:
The Writing Center is now open, with the following hours:
Sunday: 4 to 8 pm
Monday: 9 to 10 am and 10:30 am to 6 pm
Tuesday: 9 am to 5 pm
Wednesday: 12 to 1 pm and 4 to 9 pm
Thursday: 10 to 11 am and 4 to 9 pm
These are a few years old, but here are clips from the world's most reliable news source detailing new developments in bioengineering plants and humans.
Of the numerous books I considered adopting for this course, there are two which are particularly good, and which you might want to look at. Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau opens with the sentence "This book can't begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey." Enough said. The other is Gregory Stock's Redesigning Humans. Stock focuses on the biological, while Garreau ranges more widely in what he discusses, but both are very well written and excellent resources for further reading.
Here is an essay from Prof. Ruth Schwarz Cowan's recent book, Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening; the essay is entitled "Medical Genetics Is Not Eugenics."
You may be interested in "a paper written as a background for discussion" by Schichor et al. entitled "Should We Allow Genetic Engineering? A Public Policy Analysis of Germline Enhancement." It presents a number of arguments against genetic engineering and points to a number of other resources.
Anita Allen examines some of the arguments in favor of genetic enhancement in an article entitled Genetic, and Moral, Enhancement and finds them wanting.