Biotechnically Human: George Estreich on disability, biotechnology, and how technologies are defining who counts as ”human”

In this episode of "Technically Human," I speak to author George Estreich about the intersection of biotechnology and disability. We discuss the ways in which biotechnology is changing the nature of "the human," the ways in which technology defines and determines our understanding of disability, and George talks about what it means to write about disability and technology at the intersection of the personal and the political.

George Estreich's publications include a book of poems, Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, which won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books; the Oregon Book Award-winning memoir The Shape of the Eye; and Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories we Tell Ourselves, which NPR's Science Friday named a Best Science Book of 2019. Estreich has also published prose in The New York Times, Salon, The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Tin House, Essay Daily, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with his family, where he teaches in Oregon State’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. You can read more about his work at georgeestreich.com.

This episode of "Technically Human" was produced by Emily Bowden and Erin Jeffs.