Introduction

The idea of modulating the human genome to fit human plans and desires is stuff for fertile imagination and intellectual creativity. Ingenuous creators of popular culture (writers, film makers, cartoonists, and others) exceed the genetic engineers in their inventiveness. Even though their monsters might still be enclosed in the plastic test tubes of imagination, and even if not all of their content is meant to be taken as a serious forecast of a future technology or a future society, it is still meant to be seen as a contribution to the assessment of the powers and dangers of genetic manipulation of human and non-human bodies and to the decisions to be undertaken in the present. Pop culture is part of an enlarged bioethical discourse. The monsters of fiction sometimes demonstrate an imminent monstrosity, not primarily of those affected by gene transfer, but of the geneticists who perform it, and of the powers that influence and control them.

Genetic fantasies depend on how the genome is intellectualized. Images and phobias of genetic modifications presuppose – or reveal – an implicit understanding of what genes mean for human existence. A story about genetic change must seize in some terms on what it is that should be changed and the consequences that an intervention will have for the lives of those affected. The manipulators and also the authors of the imagination need a causal account of the genome.