Genetic editing to cure future generations of disease and mental disorders could rob the world of the creative geniuses who have transformed society, it has been claimed.

Next year, the first large trials will begin in the US and China to tweak the genes of patients suffering from cancer - a breakthrough which could herald a new era of genetic medicine in which any disorder could simply be snipped from the DNA.

But Dr Jim Kozubek, author of Modern Prometheus: Editing the Human Genome with Crispr-Cas9, said that the likes of Thomas Edison and Tennessee Williams would not exist in a future where depression, autism, schizophrenia or Asperger’s were eradicated.

Statistics have shown that writers are 10 times more like to be bipolar than the general population and poets 40 times.

“Thomas Edison was ‘addled’ and kicked out of school,” said Dr Kozubek, “Tennessee Williams, as a teenager on the boulevards of Paris felt afraid of ‘the process of thought’ and came within ‘a hairsbreadth of going quite mad’.

“Scientists tend to think of variations in life as problems to be solved, deviations and abnormalities outside of a normal curve.

“In reality, Darwin showed us that evolution does not progress toward an ideal concept or model, but rather is a work of tinkering toward adaptation in local niches.”