I Dream of Genes.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, by Matthew Cobb (Basic Books, 464 pp., $35) EVER since 70 years ago, when James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of the double helix in all its elegant simplicity, science has been seduced into supposing that the inscrutable complexities of biology might ultimately be made know- able and explicable at the most fundamental level of the genetic instructions strung out along those two intertwining strands of DNA. The first is germline therapy, or editing the genome at the earliest embryonic stage so that, throughout life, the corrected gene will be replicated every time the cells of the body divide. In the closing chapters, Cobb turns his attention to CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a relatively new tool of genetic manipulation that is much more powerful than previous innovations. [Extracted from the article]