Scientists Feared DNA Editing Could Eventually Wipe out Future Geniuses from Ever Being Born

 New technology which allows medics to ensure children do not inherit diseases could also mean the likes of Thomas Edison, who invented the lightbulb, might never be seen again, according to Dr Jim Kozubek.



His claim comes as the US and China prepare to stage mass trials to edit the genes of cancer patients to ensure it is not passed down in their DNA.



However, Dr Kozubek, author of Modern Prometheus: Editing the Human Genome with Crispr-Cas9, said the breakthrough is not necessarily a good thing and could see future generations of geniuses wiped out.



Dr Kozubek said a world without depression, autism, schizophrenia or Asperger’s might also mean one without the likes of playwright Tennessee Williams, as figures show that writers are ten times more like to suffer from bipolar than the general population and poets are 40 times more likely to be diagnosed with it.



Dr Kozubek said: “Thomas Edison was ‘addled’ and kicked out of school. 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.