I want to understand those people. More than vegans, orthodox Catholics, progressive technocrats, conservatives, or queer activists, there is a gulf between me and them that makes it especially hard for me to imagine their interior lives, reasoning, and emotions. And last week, I was able to bridge that gap just a little bit.

The podcast Love+Radio features long, magnificently edited interviews with characters who speak insightfully about … well, almost every episode is a singular experience.

The most recent is “Doing the No No.” Its main subject, bio-artist Adam Zaretsky, is not one of these authoritarians. Rather, he is a member of my tribe, a “libertarian,” Stenner’s term for those who prize individualism, diversity, and difference. And he is the first person to evoke in me a gut desire for enforced sameness and suppressed diversity––a visceral reaction I cannot recall having before.

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At the edge of science, researchers are using a newfound ability to edit any gene to work toward wonders: sustainable biofuels, ridding the world of malaria, seeking cures for genetic diseases. Trans-genesis, the process of taking a gene from one organism, cutting it out, and pasting it into another, has advanced radically, with new precision that will revolutionize medicine. It could give rise to genetically enhanced soldiers or astronauts; it may allow whole nations to increase their IQs.

Its aesthetic ramifications are less discussed. Consider the embryos that Adam Zaretsky has tweaked in the course of his bio-art projects and the art classes he teaches. “To call a developing embryo that’s been altered a sculpture is meant to cause a kind of double-bind in people’s minds,” he said. “They’re like, ‘It’s not a sculpture, it’s a being, or growing to be a being.’ What I’m trying to get across is that the making of transgenic humans, or non-humans, is a somewhat invasive act, but also based on a particular aesthetic, at a particular time, in a particular state of mind.”

Never mind curing Alzheimer’s or understanding the universe.

“I’m not here to cure anything or make knowledge. I’m here to make enigma,” he said. “I’m trying to problematize the concept and de-science it so people can see it for what it is.”

Whether he is fully in earnest or speaking in part to provoke, I can’t unsee his vision. It begins with something that has already occurred to most of us. There will be expectant parents. They will go, as expectant parents now do, to genetic counseling sessions. But instead of merely being offered the ability to preempt a genetic disease or developmental disability, parents will be given the ability to choose enhancements—perfect pitch, say, or violet eyes, or a radically reduced possibility of becoming obese. Given options of that sort, some parents will opt in. “There are certain people who think that the human genome is sacrosanct—that it’s okay to engineer every other organism on earth except for humans, but humans have to do it the old-fashioned way, by luck, including losing through luck,” he said. “And there are other people who think we should go forward as fast as possible.”