Fixing genes won’t fix us

Methadone Mile is a stretch of road along Massachusetts Avenue that begins in the South End and stretches north to the Charles River. On the other side of the river is Cambridge. For the past few years, I lived far north on this road in a $600-a-month room in a house with red paint peeling from its front clapboards. I was employed as a data scientist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, walking that Avenue each morning and afternoon through people in various stages of despondence, some fallen on the sidewalk, to one of my offices at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Cambridge installed a half-million-dollar toilet near Mass. Ave in Harvard Square a year and a half ago, but that was to keep troubled people out of cafes. The big money is going toward a much different approach to longstanding social and public-health problems. Not far away, the really big, beautiful structures keep sprouting out of the ground, including Novartis’ recently completed $600 million campus, and the neighboring $1.4 billion Broad Institute with its 11 floors of...