How to breed successfully, how to avoid disease, and how to live to a decent age are questions that have perplexed our ancestors throughout recorded time. As humans explored new lifestyles and habitats, each new challenge – whether it was agriculture, urban living, colonisation of new territories, domestication of animals, or industrialisation – could have notable rewards but was usually fraught with unpredictable physiological penalties. The history of our species is marked by technical solutions that have made these problems of human biology bearable. Some originated in common sense – the piped water and closed sewers of the nineteenth-century metropolis – and others in the application of science, but even these could sometimes produce less-than-satisfactory outcomes and, in some instances, disaster.

The idea of this book is to examine some of these adventures through the lens of twentieth-century biomedicine and to identify the risks and the rewards involved in each. During the first decade of the last century, crucial developments were afoot; philanthropists and eventually governments were recognising the importance of biomedical science and beginning to devise a financial infrastructure that could support its progress. This process gained an irresistible momentum after the Second World War, when the American government undertook unprecedented investment in the life sciences. Within three decades, profound insights into inheritance and cell biology gave us the powerful tools needed to establish a gene technology industry.