Bateson was acutely aware of the potential social and political impact of the newborn science. “What will happen when . . . enlightenment actually comes to pass and the facts of heredity are . . . commonly known?” he wrote, with striking prescience, in 1905. “One thing is certain: mankind will begin to interfere; perhaps not in England, but in some country more ready to break with the past and eager for ‘national efficiency.’ . . . Ignorance of the remoter consequences of interference has never long postponed such experiments.”
Crazy to think that the word genetics is only 120 years old, AND it only took that long for us to learn how to mess with genetics so deeplyh with CRISPR
