As you might expect, transhumanism originally came about through science fiction writing, much of which has been devoted to the idea of cyborg technologies. J D Bernal, a pioneer of x-ray technology, was one of the first academics to take the concept seriously back in the late 1920s. In the 1960s, the New School in New York City began to be a focal point of transhumanism from a philosophical point of view. The first symposium of transhumanism took place at the University of California in 1980.