This manifesto outlines a global strategy to get rid of suffering in all sentient life. Scrapping the biological substrates of aversive experience is ambitious, wildly implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. As a long-term species-project, the biological program is both instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. Third-millennium nanotechnology, genetic engineering, eugenics and psychopharmacology can help us escape from the poisonous legacy of our genetic past. Applied biomedical research will eliminate the atrocious kinds of suffering which today's legacy wetware routinely entails.

        The neurochemistry of pain and malaise evolved only because it served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. Its metabolic pathways will be superseded by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Lifetime happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable is likely to become the new norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when and why this major transition in the evolution of life on earth is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted.

        Images of opiate-addled junkies and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats are deceptive. They tend to stigmatise, and unjustly discredit, the only kind of solution to the world's horrors and everyday discontents alike that can authentically work. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. Exalted states of dopamine-overdrive can actually enhance motivated, goal-directed activity. They also increase the range of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of hypomanically euphoric "high-achievers". Their formidable productivity is likely far to eclipse our own. It is possible, too, that a more informed age will view any fear and suspicion of the biological panacea to the ills of the world as part of a mood-congruent cognitive pathology. Today's psychological resistance to the prospect of genetically-enhanced mental well-being may be diagnosed as part of a broader, gene-driven syndrome of warped consciousness - a spectrum of disorders tragically typical of the emotional primitives of our era.

        Two hundred years ago, before the development of potent analgesics and surgical anaesthetics, the notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed bizarre. Most of us in the urban-industrial western nations now take its daily absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as mental pain, too, could be discarded is equally counter-intuitive. The technical option of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of political policy and ethical choice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Conclusion

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