Unnatural Selection

Any day now, the Rockville-based Celera Genomics Group and the National Institutes of Health will announce that they have achieved a feat unique in all of history, one that will alter the destiny of all humanity for all time to come: the decoding of the entire human genome, the 3 billion or so units of DNA in every cell in the human body--the code of human life in all its variety.

The effort of thousands of people and the expenditure of billions of dollars have gone into the making of this epochal moment, but when it occurs it will belong above all others to James Watson--first director of the federal government’s Human Genome Project, the pioneering biochemist whose work uncovering the double-helix structure of DNA made the project possible. Thus it is only fitting that Watson provide the invocation for any effort to understand the meaning of this miracle. Here, then, is James Watson on the awesome responsibility of assuming stewardship over the sacred stuff of life itself:

“Evolution can be just damn cruel, and to say that we’ve got...