History is history now the gene genie is out of the bottle

Earlier this summer, the former Newcastle footballer Cheick Tiote died after suffering cardiac arrest on the pitch. He was just 30. The suspected cause – hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – is genetic. And it is this inherited condition that researchers this week announced they had the power to eliminate, after conducting trials in which they simply snipped out the gene responsible from the DNA of embryos.

Their announcement has caused excitement and concern in equal measure. Sure, it is not yet legal for embryos which have been genetically tweaked in this way to be implanted in mothers, but the direction of travel is clear. Time may soon be up for a host of inherited conditions.

But the power of genetics will transcend medicine. Gene editing has the capacity to shape what we look like, but also our mental characteristics. Attributes like increased intelligence result from a complex web of factors, not the excising of a single gene, but behavioural scientists are already able to induce symptoms of autism in macaques.

The scale of all this means that instead of asking, “what will genetics change in future?”, we should be asking “what will genetics not change?” Even our understanding of the past is being revolutionised.

Take, for instance, the online spat this week between the eminent classicist Mary Beard and the American philosopher and statistician Nicholas Taleb. Responding to criticism that a BBC picture portraying a black man in Roman Britain was ludicrously politically correct, Mary Beard noted: “There’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.” To which Taleb countered: “Where did the sub-saharan genes evaporate? Genes better statisticians than historian hearsay.” The argument raged, but the line of battle was clear: it is impossible to be a “proper historian” today without a grasp of genetic data. How else, the logic goes, can you even know what people looked like in the past, let alone what they did?

In this world, history as we currently know it is simply a twee, anecdotal imagination of the past. Archaeology and anthropology are already being transformed by genetic research, whether by plotting the connections between Neanderthals and early man or between Europeans and American Indians. Soon, our most fundamental stories about Homo sapiens’ emergence may have to be rewritten.

How far can this go? Gene editing is now being turned to new ways of chronicling the history not just of our species as a whole but of individual cells in our bodies. Just last month researchers announced they had edited living E Coli bacteria to record a video clip. In future, our own cells could log everything that happens to them, like the black box recorder on a plane.

One hundred years from now, the most important story historians will tell is how the genetic revolution changed not just medicine, but everything.