What happens after that knowledge? Well, to see it means to change it. “Genetic engineering” is generally thought to mean changing DNA in some brisk, direct fashion, by complex technical means. But as our friends the microbes have demonstrated, there are plenty of quick, effective, untechnical ways to change DNA. Genetic researchers can do a great many useful and profitable things to DNA without any genetic engineering.

  Let’s have a close look at the loopholes here. Suppose that “recombinant DNA” is—somehow—made illegal worldwide. Let’s further suppose that you are a reasonably clever, law-abiding person who still wants to work in the genetics industry. Splicing together DNA from different sources into a single creature is now forbidden to you. For your genetic industry, this is a speed bump but not a roadblock. You don’t have to “add” any alien genetics to an organism. With “knockout” techniques, you can remove chunks of the organism’s DNA and learn a great deal.

  The vast majority of DNA appears to be archival, in other words, historical “junk.” So you don’t have to invent or insert any weird or foreign DNA in order to create novel organisms. Just recycle the junkyard! There are spare parts galore inside every organism. Junk DNA can be repurposed and reactivated. Heaven only knows what a pig has in storage in its ancient genetic attic. There used to be Paleolithic pigs the size of Volkswagens.

  Traditional livestock breeding already combines DNA, through sex. If you test for desired DNA in the offspring, you can vastly increase the genetic efficiency of traditional sex. You’re no longer guessing about results when you breed an animal. You hit the bull’s-eye every time.

  It takes a long time to breed a champion bull. But microbes can reproduce every twenty minutes. That makes seventy-two generations of breeding selection, every working day. Here you have a road wide open to genetic revolution. Just make the invisible visible; the rest will follow. There’s no crying need for you to become Dr. Frankenstein. You need not rub your latex-covered hands together as Mother Nature quails in horror and the lightning flashes out your garret window. Just take a hard, fresh, serious look at the natural world. Look deep inside what you already have, what you already are. Come fully to terms with that knowledge. Knowledge is power. Options will multiply.

  Technology never leaps smoothly from height to height of achievement; that’s just technohype, it’s for the rubes. In the real world, technology ducks, dodges, and limps. If genetics can’t march to victory by the straight path, it can reclassify itself as “chemistry,” or “medicine,” or “farming,” or even “nanotechnology.” Then it can pursue the same goals under a different set of regulators.

  Genetic industry is a newborn infant. Barely christened, fawned over by anxious venture capitalists and medical ethicists, it’s mewling there in its crib, trying to find its toes. When it gets bigger, genetic engineering will radically expand our knowledge—especially our medical knowledge. However, it won’t look or sound medical. It will break medicine open at the seams. It will reinvent its language and repurpose all its tools. The art of medicine is thousands of years old. It still speaks Greek and Latin. Its practitioners are bound by oaths that are older than Christianity. Its values are centered in ancient standards of sickness and health, not gene-centered values of implants, copies, and upgrades.

  Medicine is concerned with restoring sick people to a standard of human health. Genetic engineering transcends this. It redefines health on a sliding scale, as an industrial process. A doctor asks you how you feel; a medical geneticist would properly ask how you want to feel.

  At its core, mastering genetics means giving human beings some of those wonderfully elastic and vital qualities that formerly belonged to bacteria. If we humans ever become as skillful as bacteria, then our genetic engineering will resemble theirs. It will be common, cheap, temporary, and reversible. Alien DNA will plug in and out of our human flesh, and it will leave no trace when deinstalled. Our flesh will grow and decline on command, and it will be ageless. Our genetics will be scalable and upgradable. (It may be too much to ask for genetics to be virusproof.)

  We can aspire to mimic the skill of bugs; that doesn’t mean we’ll achieve it. We can describe a geneticized world that seems safe, efficient, and logical—a world that fulfills the promise that genetics offers. But trend is not destiny. Even the best technical prognosis is merely a child-rearing guidebook. No kid in the real world ever gets raised by a book.

  As the twenty-first century dawns, people are unhealthily obsessed with cloning human babies. This endeavor is certainly not the summit of genetic skill. It is one rather simpleminded stunt in a vast spectrum of genetic possibility. Every modern political authority frowns on this practice. However, it is technically feasible and increasingly affordable. There is a definite groundswell of interest in cloning people. It is propaganda of the deed.

  Cloning human babies does not have much of a future. This may seem like a counterintuitive thing to say, but it quickly becomes much more plausible when we stop thinking about cloned babies and start thinking about ourselves.

  Let’s move from the abstract to the specific. Forget the cloned baby. Instead, let’s talk about you. You are the cloned baby. You are the child who has the rather severe social misfortune of being a clone. Your “parents,” or rather, your technical sponsors, carried out their weird goal, and you were their end product. You are the child they have on their hands—not the child of their love, of course, but the child of their boundary-shattering technological ambition, carried out in the teeth of stiff social resentment.

  Once upon a time you were a highly publicized, headline-grabbing baby. But you didn’t stay a baby. Nobody ever does. Secondhand shops are full of baby clothes, scarcely worn. Babies always get bigger. Babies rise right up. They want to walk among us. This has been the baby chapter of this book: stage one in the Seven Ages of Man. This infancy section will be over very soon. There are just a few pages left! You’re holding this very book in your hand—infancy is fading fast, but look how many ominous pages still lie ahead of you!

  So never mind your bronze baby shoes and the shocked media coverage you once got in your bassinet. Unlike, say, a complaisant and brainless E. coli cell, you are fully capable of holding lasting grudges. And you surely deserve to. When were you let in on this cloning deal? Who asked your permission to transform you into a cutting-edge freak, a crass industrial experiment? You never asked to be born (or, in your case, cloned). You are furiously bitter and angry about this amoral imposition on your autonomous individuality. What are you supposed to tell your teachers about this? Your boyfriend? Your husband? Your employers? Your own kids?

  It gets worse. Your personally lousy situation and your embittered prospects are not the full, grand story of human eugenic ambition. Alas, you are merely a passing stunt. We can forget about you; like the formerly marvelous test-tube child, you are so over.

  There’s little reason to create a cloned child when normal children are so available. The grander scheme in messing with the human genome is a genetic improvement of the subject: a superbaby.

  Cloning might create genetic copies of, say, prominent politicians or pop stars. Given their difficult personal circumstances, these belated twins aren’t likely to do well. However! Once it’s possible to implant chosen genetics into a human egg and a womb at will, this creates an exciting potential for brand-new genetic installations. These people are a new kind of people—radical improvements on the sordid norm. Genetically modified superbabies surely seem much sexier and more dramatic than mere clone babies.

  Learning nothing from experience or common sense, our malefactors boldly advance into the superbaby business. Their aim is a fabulous new-model human with—just imagine it—Olympic strength, maybe, genius IQ, drip-dry hair, Teflon skin.

  But never mind the stellar publicity bonus. Technologies limp. Technologies never make a sudden Nijinsky leap from here to Oz. First, logically and necessarily, must come the alpha-rollout of a superbaby. Not some ultimate Nietzschean superbaby, mind you, but first, the experimental superbaby. The guinea pig superbaby.

  And this superbaby is no mere abstraction; this baby is, once again, you. You were that infant in question, and yes, by human standards, you were indeed a superbaby. But never mind those humans. Their standards can’t apply to you. Except for your moronic “parents,” humans offer no standards by which you can be judged. Since you are “super,” you are painfully subjected to an entirely different set of standards.

  By generic superbaby standards, you are, once again, nothing much. In fact, you are lousy, and you know it. Why? Because the first superbaby cannot be the best superbaby. How could you possibly be the best? Nobody’s had any real-world practice at creating ultrapeople like you. You are a beta-release superhuman. You are merely a prototype. And since the people who built you are incapable of thinking through the issues, you are almost certainly a hack job.

  Foolish people yielded to temptation and created you, because that prospect sounded exciting to them. But now that you have reached majority, you’re not particularly “super”—you’re a prototype with a raw deal. Why? Because of the nature of technological advance. When you finally become twenty-one years old, genetic understanding is twenty-one years deeper and broader than it was when you were first put into production. So you’re not only a hack job—you’re also an antique.

  Two decades is a very long time in a technorevolution. Two decades is the distance between the technologies of the First and Second World Wars, the difference between the lumbering Sopwith Camel biplane and a supersonic V-2 rocket. You finally reached young adulthood only to find yourself obsolete. There are already better, faster, and cheaper ways of doing whatever it is that you were genetically altered to do. And these alterations are probably not inscribed within human eggs, the way your alterations were. That is a hopelessly slow and clumsy way to handle the power of genetics. You are stuck with hardwired genetics inside your own flesh. “Normal” humans swallow their advanced genetics, genetics that they can plug and play.

  Your contemporaries use their modern microbes to do whatever your “supergenes” are supposed to be doing for you. They never had to undergo the shattering trauma of being superbabies. They sensibly let microbes undergo all those hazards. Their microbial bugs may go obsolete, but those are replaced on a technical whim. Microbes have no problem with becoming obsolete; they don’t mind it a bit. You, however, are becoming obsolete, and you mind it plenty. You, the superbaby, once looked like the greatest baby in the world, but after your babyhood, you really got burned by this deal. You have every reason in the world to sue. You should supersue.

  The outcomes of baby engineering are heavily weighted toward the tragic and the shameful. The risks, even in a technical “success,” are very great. You, the beta-release superbaby, were cruelly manipulated without your own consent. You were brought all unwilling into a world you never made. You were an uninformed test subject, an abused child deprived of human rights. Your own creators—your so-called parents—are clearly your worst enemies. If you are bright, you will be bright in doing them harm. If you are strong, you will be strong for their evil. If you are eloquent, you will be eloquent in reproach.

  So, even if we crassly set all ethical issues aside, the benefits of perpetrating a baby stunt are doubtful. There are powerful reasons to do this, and it may well get done; but the likeliest candidates at the moment are crazy religious cults.

  Corny ideas about the uebermensch are not native twenty-first-century ideas. They are outdated Victorian and Nazi kitsch from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are not realistic concepts about the true potential of DNA; they are phony ideas about racial destiny. A racially pure eugenic regime, the Nazi Reich, was supposed to last for a thousand years. A thousand years is ten long centuries. No technology, and certainly no technological society, ever lasts that long. Knowledge is not and never can be that static. A thousand-year regime is a mythological monster.

  Messing with DNA won’t and can’t create Men Like Gods with a utopia in their tow. In taking command over DNA, we are not taking command of our evolution and our destiny. We are merely gaining a transformative knowledge and multiplying our future options.

  There are wave after wave of potential applications in genetics. Genetics is the primal bedrock of both medicine and agriculture. Farming and healing are two lines of human work that are prehistoric, planted at the very basis of civilization. During the whole course of history, healing and farming have been in continuous, roiling development, full of excitement and crises and massive, terrible failures, with nothing less at stake than our life and our death. Genetics cannot make either of these ancient arts more stable. It will drive them both into stampede.

  As this first chapter ends, we can sum up infancy in this way. When your own child is born, it’s a very big deal. It is a concrete demonstration of your adulthood, your fertility, and your potency. Yes, it’s quite the step up, in many ways. It’s rather gratifying to one’s ego. It is maturing and quite educational. It radically expands your outlook on human life and its generational continuities. Reproduction has a lot to recommend it.

  However, it is anything but simple, clean, minimalist, and utopian. Infancy is the last place to look for stasis or perfection. Childbirth is the polar opposite of all things remote, detached, and sterile. Childbirth is the future, the genuine version. Having a baby around is a wailing, sleepless, septic mess.

  That is what tomorrow will look and feel like with a lot of seething DNA around. Genetics means new life, reproduction, with all its grave hazards and without any guarantees. Like the birth of a child, it means furious arguments, grim responsibility, anxious compromise, and seriously wrecked routines. It means ear infections, weird stinks, constant nervous monitoring, medical checkups, and postnatal depression. It means that we’re always watching, always engaged, always worried, always tied by the heartstrings, and we never get off that hook of responsibility, not until our children bury us and we become the dead past.

  We are the raw material. Biotech is us, industrialized.

  Technology always “improves,” but the wisest path forward is a path that allows us to keep making fresh mistakes. When we’re dealing with genetics, the stuff of life, we need to shy strongly away from approaches that are irreparable and can work us into a fatal corner: monocultures, monopolies, and the obliteration of alternatives. We mustn’t fly before we can walk.

  Everything we do with genetics in the next few decades will look very primitive, even stupid and counterproductive, in the full light of a more sophisticated understanding. We should never design anything genetic without an “undo” button handy. We should not make permanent decisions in a state of mind that can’t last.

  Let me offer a last and quite cogent consideration. There will always be large numbers of our fellow citizens who refuse the language of genetics, who are implacably and effectively opposed to its view of the world. They will not go away, and they cannot be converted or won over. Anyone who expects smooth sailing for genetics when evolution and abortion are so ragingly controversial—well, that defines a fool’s paradise.

  It’s a lot to ask that a technology should grow up under these trying circumstances. However, when you think about it, this is the human condition. People do grow up under such paradoxical circumstances. Genetics is the twenty-first century’s new baby. So give the little kid a sandbox first. Don’t expect him to play God.

  A baby is small, but a baby is serious business. Confronting the future can mean genuine existential anguish. A baby can mean real, immediate, personal dread. There was a vital moment in my life when I knew full well that I might suddenly lose everything that I held most dear. A moment whose intimate consequences, all bitterly unpredictable, stretched not just through my own life but beyond my life into the lives of many others.

  Then my child was born. I was there for the birth, in all its gooey, visceral glory. My daughter was placed in my arms. She was just fine. Toes, fingers, eyes, ears, a small but entire human being, a new Shakespearean player in the old human drama, shoved through the gate of futurity with a kick and a lusty wail. And I was really happy about that. I was overjoyed. I felt overwhelming relief and cosmic gratitude. It must have lasted an entire five minutes.

  Then, of course, parenthood started.

  And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,

  And shining morning face, creeping like snail

  Unwillingly to school.

  When Shakespeare describes a schoolboy lugging his burden, these five-hundred-year-old lines require no footnotes. The ways in which we civilize children are very conservative indeed.

  “Learning” is not the center of school life. Elementary schools are socializing institutions. They teach children to behave in civilized groups. As a kid, you don’t get to go home when you learn the lessons of the day. If this were the case, all the bright kids would be gone inside an hour. Then they would devote their days to earnestly studying the complex topics that children find genuinely engaging, such as sports, cartoons, and video games.

  No matter how clever they are, children are always kept in school till the bell rings. This teaches them to behave acceptably in large, bureaucratically organized institutions. They’re also kept there in order to free up the productive time of their parents. Their parents, in theory at least, are already civilized. They supposedly work in situations that are even more stiff and constraining than those of their children.

  At least, that was the case when public schools were invented. Personally, I work in the culture industry. As a novelist and journalist, I ply my trade mostly at home. My productive routine involves mushy, nebulous activities such as schmoozing with colleagues, websurfing, reading e-mail, avoiding conference invitations, and leafing through books and magazines. Sometimes I type. I do plenty of research, but my work has little to do with the rote labor typical of schoolwork. I have no rote and would be very alarmed if I did. I rarely fill out forms, and I never take tests or pop quizzes.