Enigma (FBI Thriller #21)

by Catherine Coulter

what about all the businesses and governments that might want to make use of our DNA information? The abuses could be endless. We could be denied insurance, a good credit rating, certain jobs, for example. They could even use our DNA to predict how to advertise to us.”

more and more people are getting their DNA tested, to evaluate their health risks or find out where their families are from. It’s getting cheaper and faster all the time.

“I’m sure they have guidelines, some precautions in place, but we all know computers can be hacked.”

“I find it amazing we might be able to extend life by slowing or reversing aging with some kind of medical procedures, or even a simple pill. To think of living, say, two hundred years, now that’s mind-blowing.” Savich said, “Sherlock and I were talking about

that earlier, about mortality, and what it means, and we find we disagree. I guess I come down on the side of things as they are. Most everything we human beings value, everything we call wisdom and experience, is a consequence of our being mortal and knowing it. We are granted a finite number of years and everything we strive for is shaped by the inevitable fact of death. “Everyone whose words you’ve read who came before us, all those thoughts you’ve shared, all of them lived knowing their lives would end. I wonder what the world would be like where no one died except by accident?” He paused, smiled. “I wonder if after a while, we’d all get bored.”

“I don’t think that would be good news for the planet. We’d all have longer to keep destroying it, and there would be more and more of us to do just that.”

Forget forever, say if we could all live a couple of hundred years. Don’t forget we now live twice as long as people who lived two hundred years ago, and we seem to be managing. I think it would be incredibly exciting. Think of what we could make of ourselves, learn about ourselves and the world, the time we’d have to recognize and right our mistakes, travel new roads, goodness, we could travel the universe, all of this if only our own mortality didn’t hover over our shoulders. I hope, Cam, we’d gain enough wisdom, not to continue trashing the planet. Oh, and I think of the video games Sean could come up with if he had two hundred years.” She grinned. “I asked MAX to tell me about what he thought and he gave me geneticist Francis Collins’s quote that ‘one man’s longevity is another man’s immortality.’ ”