The dawn of interventional genetics

When I was young, my parents gave me a book by Paula Taylor called The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog: A Book About Your Future, with the “Your” underlined for emphasis.1 In its pages were fanciful descriptions of things that even now are recognizable as classic science fiction tropes: hotels in space, floating cities, fusion power, robot housekeepers. In one of the chapters there was a section called “Genetic Engineering: Creating New Forms of Life.” I don’t think I took too seriously the picture of a cat-size rhinoceros, presumably created to be some child’s new best friend.