The word 'transgenics' sounds sinister and clinical. It should, because it means implanting the genes of one species into another. Many people feel repelled by the notion. Transgenics is, however, on the rise, its influence no longer restricted to crops such as soy beans.
Watch out for man-made moths, chickens and sheep, and the various new breeds of 'Frankenfish' coming soon to fish tanks everywhere. According to The Los Angeles Times, scientists in Singapore are now tweaking zebra fish so that they glow green when infused with a jellyfish gene. Likewise, American genetic engineers have created so-called 'supersalmon' which, endowed with a gene found in flounder, grow twice as fast and more than twice as big as their natural cousins.
Genetic engineering is all the more topical because of the birth last Monday of Britain's first 'designer baby' a boy genetically matched, while still an IVF embryo, to his four-year-old brother, who has a rare form of anaemia that can be cured only with a transplant of stem cells from a sibling with identical tissue.
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson. The latter snorts at the notion that the human genome is sacred, calling it 'utter silliness'. If Mr Watson and his kind have their way, one day society will be crawling with 'posthumans': genetically enhanced people with awesome physiques and genius IQs.
Enter an environmentalist campaigning to stop the march towards genetically modified everything - the redoubtable Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book, The End of Nature, alerted the world to the problem of global warming. In his new book released this month, Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Nature, the 43-year-old argues that science must restrain its appetite for meddling with the genome of plants and animals. 'We need to do an unlikely thing: We need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough,' he writes.
Whatever the potential health benefits, the human genome in particular should be left pretty much intact. If science is allowed to start creating designer babies, the result will probably not be paradise. More likely, in McKibben's view, we will see a version of Brave New World: the mindless dystopia described by the classic British writer Aldous Huxley. Life would supposedly have no meaning because everyone would be perfect and have nothing to strive for - we might have turbocharged brains and muscles, but our 'souls' would atrophy from disuse.
Despite denying that he wants to turn back the clock and return to an untampered Arcadia, McKibben comes across as deeply hostile towards gene splicing in general. When he considers the issue of souped-up salmon, his eyes bore angrily into the carpet: 'I think it's insane,' he says, adding: 'I think it's one of these solutions in search of a problem.'
