Australian artist Patricia Piccinini created this for her 2003 Venice Biennale exhibition We Are Family. This features a variety of bizarre genetically engineered organisms that are strikingly different to what we know, but at the same time, strangely familiar.

The figure (sculpture) is not really human but it gives a feeling of flesh and blood, of a living creature--posthumans.

Patricia Piccinini, Still Lives with Stem Cells, 20003

This aises questions about our attitudes towards physical disability and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. While we afford some parents the right to screen embryos for genetic mutations that signal a possibility that the potential child may have a debilitating disease, would we allow the selection of physical attributes that seem more desirable? Given the technology, would we choose to eliminate disability, imperfection and difference all together?