Genetic editing is going to change almost everything you take for granted

Their announcement has caused excitement and concern in equal measure. Sure, it is not yet legal for embryos genetically tweaked in this way to be implanted in mothers and born, but the direction of travel is clear. Time may soon be up for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – and a host of other inherited conditions.

But the power of genetics will go much further than medicine. Gene editing has the capacity to shape what we look like too – from the colour of our eyes to how muscly we are. The poseur seeking a six-pack and bulging biceps may soon be ditching their personal trainer for a gene editor. Mental characteristics, too, are tweakable. Attributes like increased intelligence are the result of a complex web of factors, not the simple excising of a single gene as with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but behavioural scientists are already able to induce symptoms of autism in macaques.

The scale of this means that instead of asking “What will genetics change in future?”, we should be asking “What will genetics not change?” And even this does not go far enough. For the realm of the change to come is not simply confined to the future. Our understanding of the past is also being revolutionised by genetics. So fundamental is this technological breakthrough that it has the potential to revolutionise not only the fate of man in generations to come, but also our understanding of mankind’s fate in millennia gone by.

Take for instance the online spat this week between the eminent classicist Mary Beard and Nicholas Taleb, an American philosopher and statistician who takes something of a delight in puncturing preconceived ideas. Responding to criticism that a BBC picture portraying a black man in Roman Britain was ludicrously politically correct, Mary Beard noted: “This is indeed pretty accurate, there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.” To which Taleb countered: “Where did the sub-Saharan genes evaporate? Genes [are] better statisticians than historian hearsay.”

The argument raged back and forth, and umbrage was taken. Apologies, whether sincere or not, were offered. But the line of battle was clear: it is impossible to be a “proper historian” today without a grasp of genetic data. How else, the logic goes, can you even know what people looked like in the past, let alone what they did.

In this world history as we currently know it is simply a twee, anecdotal – and often wrong – imagination of the past. You really might as well read a novel. And it is true that archaeology and anthropology are being transformed by genetic research, whether it be plotting the connections between Neanderthals and early man, or between Europeans and American Indians. Our most fundamental stories about how Homo Sapiens emerged and colonised the planet may have to be retold.

How far can this go? Gene editing techniques are now being turned to mind boggling new ways of chronicling the history not just of our species as a whole, but of individual cells in our bodies. Just last month researchers announced they had tuned Crispr – the most common editing technique – to enable it to record hundreds of events within living cells. The scientists organised this information in the DNA of some E Coli bacteria and then, as a party trick, assigned pixels from an image to each piece of information, thereby encoding a film of a galloping horse. In in the future, this could enable each of our own cells to carry a kind of DNA-based logbook, recording everything that happens to it like a black box recorder in an aeroplane. 

Of course, just because Mary Beard can’t turn E coli into her local picturehouse, doesn’t mean she isn’t a splendid and revelatory academic. But it probably does mean that, 100 years from now, the most important story historians will tell is how the genetic revolution changed not just medicine but everything.