DAVID EWING DUNCAN
Masterminds
GENIUS, DNA, AND THE QUEST TO REWRITE LIFE
To my mother and father.
I’ve had to face up to the
fact that most of our society
thinks of scientists as people
who are likely to do something
bad. Either bad to make
money for themselves, or
to cause trouble in the
Frankensteinian sense.
And the fact is, scientists
that I know are trying to do
good for people.
—Douglas Melton
Harvard embryologist
It is not possible to be a
scientist unless you believe
that the knowledge of
the world, and the power
that this gives, is a thing
which is of intrinsic value
to humanity, and that you
are using it to help in the
spread of knowledge, and
are willing to take the
consequences.
—Robert Oppenheimer
November 1945
CONTENTS
Prelude: The Geneticist Who Played Hoops with My DNA
The Language of Biotech: A Genetic Primer
1. Prometheus • Douglas Melton
EPILOGUE: What If Frankenstein’s Monster Had Einstein’s Brain?
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …
Q and A with David Ewing Duncan
The Greatest Story in Human History
If You Loved This, You Might Like …
PRELUDE: The Geneticist who Played Hoops with my DNA
There’s a high probability that for Homo
sapiens, the process of evolution as we
currently think about it, as natural selection,
is for all intents and purposes over. It is
going to be replaced by our desire and
capability to tinker.
—Stuart Schreiber, Harvard geneticist
I’m playing hoops with Erik the Red on a half-court at the ends of the Earth, and he is toying with me. Also Iceland’s most famous geneticist, he’s dribbling a basketball in a Reykjavik gym on a typically damp, cold day in August near the Arctic Circle. Notorious for being rude, as well as brilliant and filled with an infectious passion, Kari Stefansson, a descendent of Erik—an early Viking explorer and marauder—insisted that I go one on one.
Every day at 2:00 P.M., when he’s not wandering the globe rustling up cash or giving talks, Stefansson drives from his office downtown across this speck of a capital city, home to nearly all of Iceland’s 290,000 people,