The Power and Potential of Gene Tuning

After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides what our genes do—takes a bit of explaining. I find that thinking about the genome and epigenome in terms of music and sound-mixing can be helpful here.

We experience all sorts of music as we go through life, from Bach and Brahms to Laufey and Lizzo. It is remarkable that you can do so many different things musically from just a few basic components. You have a defined set of notes, which can be played separately or together in an enormous number of combinations and time signatures. Those notes can be played at different volumes—some louder, some softer. And finally, those same notes can have different textures. The note of A as played on a violin sounds very different when played by a distorted, death-metal guitar. Each has the same number of vibrations per unit time, but...