[N]o one has the guts to say it, [but] if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we? […] Evolution can be just damn cruel, and to say that we’ve got a perfect genome and there’s some sanctity [to it]? I’d like to know where that idea comes from, because it’s utter silliness.

James Watson, ‘The Road Ahead’, in Gregory Stock and John Campbell (eds.), Engineering the Human Germline: An Exploration of the Science and Ethics of Altering the Genes We Pass to Our Children, Oxford, 2000, pp. 77, 85