Andrew Robinson reviews five of the week’s best science picks.
Chinese characters have always unified China but isolated it from most of the rest of the world, because of their complexity. Yet, notes US-based sinologist Jing Tsu, “Every technology that has ever confronted the Chinese script, or challenged it, also had to bow before it.” Her stimulating book discusses the typewriter, telegraph, librarian’s catalogue and computer.
But “our technological ability to design the genomes of our children” — possible in 10–30 years, he estimates in this intriguing and disturbing book — “is set to far exceed our knowledge of the consequences.” His informal survey of geneticists revealed little agreement, even in broad outline, on what a common-variant human, created by removing rare, potentially harmful, variants, would look like.
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