ABSTRACT
While cleaning out my mother’s garage, I came across a well-worn Time magazine. On the cover were two people, male and female, each entwined in a red double helix; between them, in yellow, were the words “The New Genetics: Man Into Superman.” The date was April 19, 1971. The associated story speculated about “the promise and peril of the new genetics”—correcting defects, avoiding the ravages of aging, increasing physical and mental ability, shaping Homo futurus. All this had become theoretically possible because of the work of scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, who had deciphered the double helical form of the macromolecule deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953. Watson and Crick’s unraveling of the structure of DNA was worldshattering and has been likened to the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the smashing of the atom. In the now familiar twisted ladder of DNA resides the so-called “secret of life”—mechanisms of heredity, development, disease, and aging.
