Masters of our Future: Genetic Tweaking with Mitochondrial Donation

The need for control is as strong in humans as the need for love and the need for an occupation. Reconciling our need for control with a world that insists on wrestling it from us lets existential crises of all kinds flourish, and flushes the great nebulous forces of conspiracy, paranoia and religion into the world. Let it be real or not: I need control. As the future moves towards us it promises us nothing in the way of love security or guaranteed occupation: but it does promise us greater control. There is no better example of humanity’s current, mid-evolutionary powers of control than the recent breakthroughs in mitochondrial donation. By the time you read this, the UK Government may well have ratified the call to take this from the purview of the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority and begin making it publicly accessible.

While Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels might have predicted Mars’ two moons, and while Jules Verne might have written of splashdown capsules, solar sails and electric submarines before any were even invented, none of...