Garreau to attend McCain Conference at Naval Academy

Joel Garreau, Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values, and Director of The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures at the College of Law, will participate in the 2010 McCain Conference, April 22-23, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

The event will be the culmination of a year of research by a multi-university consortium at ASU, the Naval Academy, Case Western Reserve University, California Polytechnic State University, and the Naval Postgraduate School. Experts from academia, government and industry will discuss the ethical and legal ramifications of emerging military technologies, especially robotics, nanotechnology, biomedical human enhancements, and information/communications systems.

Garreau will participate in a panel, "Soldier enhancements - ethical & legal ramifications," focusing on ethical arguments for and against possible soldier enhancements via pharmacological, mechanical and genetic technologies, and recommended education, policy and legal initiatives.

Garreau, who joined the College in 2010, and also is an Affiliated Faculty Member, ASU Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, is a student of culture, values and change. He is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means to Be Human, a look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. As director of The Prevail Project, he will build upon a Radical Evolution concept that the Prevail Scenario - the humanistic possibility that we can control and direct this future - might be encouraged. Garreau also is Co-director of the ASU-New America Foundation Partnership and a Thrust Group Leader for "The Seven Horizons Project" of the ASU Consortium on Emerging Technologies, Military Operations and National Security.

Janie Magruder, Jane.Magruder@asu.edu
(480) 727-9052
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law