One of the obvious ways of producing your superman is one that was taken so seriously in the last century that it was actually tried.  Ever since the basic ideas of Darwin and the mechanism of genetics were understood, the idea popped into the mind of Sir Francis Galton that what can be done to dogs and pigeons can be done to men, so if you want to create Homo Superior, why not simply breed human beings selectively? 

This wasn't just idle speculation, he was dead serious and many a philanthropist, scholar, scientist, businessman, and politician became determined advocates of improving the lot of the human race by making sure that the "best" of the breed intermarried while the sick, feeble-minded, and generally undesirable were prevented from reproducing.    For some,  this was simply a matter of educating the population in the selection of a "proper" mate and the forced sterilisation of the insane.  For others, it was part of a grand vision of people being required to carry around health passports and pass batteries of genetic compatibility tests before they could marry-- if they were given a choice in the matter at all.  

Can't make an omelette and all that.

And while you're at it, why not go for particular traits?  General improvement is all well and good, but a narrower focus is also possible such as in Robert Heinlein's novel Methuselah's Children, where a secret foundation ran a program for breeding long-lived people who, by fortunate side-effect, also had a penchant for mathematical prodigy and telepathy.   Of course, there was also the drawback of producing smart-ass libertarians who fancy themselves as cracker-barrel philosophers, but one must take the rough with the smooth.

But Eugenics did not stay on the pages of sci-fi magazines or the lecterns of advocates.  In the early decades of the 20^th century governments such as in the United States adopted the idea of improving public health through eugenics  and passed legislation aimed at keeping "unhealthy" races from immigrating and sterilising the feeble-minded or even the epileptic!  And some of these laws stayed on the books for fifty years.

And then there were the really nasty little pieces of work.  Joseph Stalin in the USSR was determined to create the New Soviet Man; a superman who would take to collectivism like a duck to water and would arise spontaneously out the of utopian conditions of Soviet Communism. That was a lot of hooey, of course, but, being Stalin, he wouldn't let an untidy little thing like facts get in his way, so he decreed that biology must conform to the party line and heaven help any biologist who begged to differ.

But this was as nothing compared to the leaders of Germany's Third Reich, who became so obsessed with their worship of the Aryan and so determined to create a "master race" that they took practical steps to do so by introducing meticulous racial classification of the population, breeding camps to produce as many blond blue-eyed übermensch as possible, and tried exterminating "inferior" races by the millions as quickly and efficiently as a modern industrial society can.

Needless to say, Auschwitz and the Nuremburg trials put paid to the Eugenics movement and gave the world a very stern lesson of what happens when you stop seeing people as children of God and more as laboratory animals.

What is even more frightening is that we have been so slow in learning our lesson and so quick to forget it.  We've made great strides in medicine, particularly in genetic research, but in doing so we have reached the point where we are in danger of doing far more harm than good.  If not to our bodies, then to our souls.  Our society is tampering with things such as contraceptives, fertility drugs, genetic engineering, selective abortion, infant euthanasia, in vitro fertilisation,  designer babies, and artificial insemination with so little real discussion of the ethics of what we're doing that we face a very real risk of one day turning 'round and discovering that we are not becoming genetic supermen, but moral monsters. 

Tales of Future Past | Ephemeral Isle | Freelance Writing | Radio Plays | Shop