Are there such things as superhumans

And, according to the Center, in a society where human beings are enhanced, previous "models" of human risk become obsolete, echoing Hawking's fear.

But the closer a bioethical argument gets to the world Hawking envisioned, the vaguer the predictions become — because the science is still a long way off from that point. And right now, this sort of conversation often amounts to confusing scaremongering, said Matthew Willmann a biologist and director of the Plant Transformation Facility at Cornell University.

Scientific institutions and governments are developing strict ethical codes and laws that would regulate gene editing, he pointed out.

And those laws would be incredibly difficult to circumvent without the world noticing. In the TV show "Orphan Black," a cabal of scientists decide to edit and enhance a group of cloned babies — and all the scientists need is money and a willingness to do evil things. But the reality, Willmann pointed out, is that genetics is too complicated and confusing for that to work.

In his research, he's able to create plants with specific genetic traits only by first creating lots of plants with damaged, deadly, or otherwise screwed-up genes. Over time, he and his colleagues figure out which genes do what and therefore how those genes need to be modified to get the results they want.

A similar project in human beings would take far longer, and be — if not unimaginable — difficult to pull off in a modern society. So, was Hawking right to worry about a new species of superhumans replacing our own? It was interesting and counterintuitive to find people who, you would think, would not be happy because of an awful thing that happened but, in fact, are. That was extraordinarily interesting to investigate. The common take-home message is that we often feel we have to strive for happiness in a commercial way, by buying things, getting a job that will pay us more money or moving to a bigger house in a better place.

There is a whole academic field where people spend their careers arguing about what happiness is. A study in New Zealand looked at a gene variant that seems to be linked with higher or lower levels of depression or, conversely, higher or lower levels of day-to-day contentment. We can say that there does seem to be a genetic component to many behavioral and physiological traits.

It is! Setting the two against each other is completely false. No geneticist would argue that something is either nature or nurture because nothing works in isolation. Any genes you might have are expressed in an environment. The question is, then, which one is more important and can one override the other or make up for its deficit in the other?

Over the years people have rather hopefully suggested that you can get by on nurture. And that, if you try and practice hard enough at something, you can become the best. In the eighties, there was all this Gordon Gecko, sleep-is-for-wimps philosophy, which still persists, especially in city workers and macho business culture.

Donald Trump brags about sleeping very little. Blue Zone places tend to be nice and warm. Okinawa, in particular, has some of the highest longevity in Japan and Japan has the highest longevity in the world. So, many people in Okinawa are the longest-living people in the world.

These places do have all these things that are conducive to good health but you also need good longevity genes. So, it looks like Blue Zones are not just pockets of conducive climate and nutrition, but also of genetics.

These populations are quite closed and have high concentrations of the genes associated with longevity. But she was in a coma, most of her skin and face was burned off with lye—industrial cleaner—and she was beaten. She was in a coma for three months but when she woke up she immediately knew that she could make something positive out of what happened. She took control of her life in an extraordinary way by having a face transplant.

One wonderful outcome of that is that she then became friends with the daughter of the woman whose face she now wears. The Resilience Project is something different. It looks for people who have the genes for a condition that normally would kill them, like cystic fibrosis, but for some reason, as yet unknown, are able to tolerate this condition. Regulations require all non-residents be fingerprinted when they enter the country.

It's often even referred to as "immigration delay disease. Another gene mutation that one might consider a superpower could have been caused by the Black Plague. It's one of many deadly diseases that killed hundreds of thousands in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Studying gene mutation can naturally lead scientists to gene manipulation — that's when they directly manipulate the genome using molecular engineering techniques. Scientists have been trying for decades to grow organs as a kind of backup for human parts or as a way to harvest stem cells.

And some, quite controversially, have tried creating animal-human hybrids like the humanzee in China, and have conducted studies to find out how long a sheep could carry a human fetus.

Experimentation with human biology hasn't been limited to a lab, either; plenty of people, called "biohackers," have taken it upon themselves to enhance natural human abilities.

Some of this biohacking is limited to simple dieting fads like Bulletproof coffee, but others have taken it to the surgical level , implanting magnets in their fingertips, for example. Sounds like some crazy science fiction, but wetware — or human-implanted technology — isn't so strange. Technically, a pacemaker is wetware, and some might argue that even glasses count as wetware because they artificially boost your eyesight. Governments, including the United States, China and Russia, have been particularly interested in wetware and gene mutations to enhance human abilities to create super-soldiers.

These soldiers would have to be immune to pain, need no sleep, and have super-intellect, strength and stamina.