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Dr Max Perutz says: 'There are about one hundred million pairs of nucleotide bases distributed among forty-six chromosomes in a single human cell. How could we erase a specific gene from one particular chromosome, or add one to it, or repair a single pair of nucleotides? It hardly seems Professor Marshall W. Nierenberg, who played a vital role in the discovery of the genetic code, has a quite different opinion. 'I have no doubt that the difficulties can be overcome one day. The only question is when. I imagine that we shall succeed in programming cells with synthetic genetic information within the next twenty-five years.' Lastly Joshua Lederberg, Professor of Genetics at Stanford University in California, is convinced that we shall be able to manipulate all our hereditary factors within the next ten or twenty years. At all events, we have now realised that an insight into hereditary factors and their transformation is possible. And since we human beings know this, there is really no reason why an extraterrestrial intelligence that is familiar with space travel and consequently thousands of years ahead of us scientifically should not know it too. In their book You will live to see it, the physicist and mathematician Herman Kahn, Director of the Hudson Institute of New York, and Anthony J. Wiener, adviser to the American government and also a member of the Hudson Institute, quote the Washington Post for 31.10.66, which described the possible results of manipulating the genetic code: "Within ten or fifteen years a housewife will be able to go into a special store, look through a selection of packets like seed packets and choose her child by the label. Each packet will contain a one-day-old frozen embryo and on the label the buyer will be able to read the colour of hair and eyes, the size of body and IQ she can expect. There will also be a guarantee that the embryo has no hereditary defects. The woman will take the embryo of her choice to her doctor and have him implant it. Then it will grow in her body for nine months just like her own child.’ Such forecasts of the future are possible because the DNA contains genetic information for building the cells, as well as all the other hereditary factors. The DNA is a perfect 'punched card’ for the structure of all life. For it not only codifies the twenty amino acids, but also announces the beginning and end of a protein chain with 'start' and 'stop', like a punched card prepared for a modern accounting machine. And just as the central unit of an electronic calculator contains a control bit whose job is to check all the calculating operations, there is a constant check On the functioning of the DNA chains in the cells. James D. Watson, who investigated the structure of the DNA molecule so brilliantly at the age of twenty-four, has described the course of his work in his book The Double Helix. For the 900-word article in Nature, in which Watson described the bizarre spiral staircase shape of the DNA molecule, he and his fellow-workers received the Nobel Prize in 1962. Yet his book came within an ace of not possibilities that lie ahead. practicable to me.' being published. The board of the Harvard University Press opposed his frank way of describing