My wife Betty and I have many friends who have nonstandard DNA -- they're what others might call crippled, or retarded, or nuts; sometimes all three. In the crowd in which my wife and I travel, genetic research is regarded with a wary eye, because "genetics" is damn close to "eugenics," and "eugenics" is a kissing cousin to Dr. Mengele, some of whose fiendish experiments were performed on the kind of people whose DNA gives expectant parents-to-be nightmares, people like our friends.

"When I was doing that work on bacteriophage DNA, I was motivated by the beauty of the mechanism," Betty said one day. She was wearing a faded Biodevastation T-shirt. "I never dreamed of doing work on human DNA -- or even on eukaryotic cells. I had no desire to go play God with human DNA, and I think the Human Genome Project is really scary. It's scary because we haven't figured out what all the implications are, and we're doing it just because we can do it. When the scientists built the atom bomb, perhaps they had no time to think about what they were unleashing. But we do have time to think. What's the rush? I think it's silly, and I want no part of it."

I should perhaps make abundantly clear that our children's conditions were not caused by Betty's laboratory work. Our son's disease was caused by the toxoplasmosis parasite, which is transmitted in cat feces. Betty never worked in a laboratory where toxoplasmosis was studied, and she is allergic to cats. Our hypothesis is that she contracted the disease from gardening, although she may have gotten it from undercooked meat, where the parasite can also be found. Jane's bipolar disorder, so far as anybody knows, is not strictly speaking a mutation; it is an inherited trait. The genetics of bipolar, however, are not very well understood. There are hints but no clear-cut answers.)

After digesting Betty's rant, I mention that Jeff Bizzaro is doing work on toxoplasmosis DNA. Maybe work like his will lead to treatments that would save children from suffering such as our son has endured. Maybe his research could lead to medicines to kill the organisms still inside him.

"Well, yes, there's that too," she said.

"Some interesting stuff on bipolar recently," I said.

"One cheer for the new eugenics."

For you see, Jakob's case is the easy one for us. We understand how we feel about toxoplasmosis, an invading organism that attacked our precious boy while he was still in the womb. We don't hate the organism for the "end result," of course: Our son is just fine the way he is, thank you very much. The fact that Jakob does not see very well and has poor coordination is about as significant to our relationship as the fact that I can't dunk a basketball or win a chess match against any reasonably proficient player. We hate toxoplasmosis and want it abolished from the earth only because of the pain and trauma it has caused our son, not because it has diminished him.

But how are we to feel about Jane's bipolar disorder? That's built into who she is, just as Down Syndrome is built into Pastor Robison's children. We're not going to pray that our daughter be reinvented on the fly. That is a disgusting thought. I would love to see her suffer less, however.

A world without people like Helen Keller, or like Jane and Jakob, would be an impoverished world indeed. May I never live to see it. But what kind of world can I expect to see? Whither are we tending? I have my own reading of the tea leaves, my own decoding of the genome, and I don't like what I see.

Let's stipulate that as an inevitable consequence of the deoxyribonucleic decryption by that dihelical duo Watson and Crick, humanity's eclipse has begun in earnest --incidentally catching our medieval theologies (and even Bill Bennett?) -- a tad off guard. In other words, because the DNA cat is out of the bag, we humans are doomed to be superseded by whatever we engender. For whatever reason, this is a prospect unsettling to many of us, and That Old Time Religion offers scant consolation to anybody who might care about the demise of Homo sapiens and who also has at least half a brain.

Let's further stipulate that, just as once-criminal pornography -- now disguised as consumer advertising -- is force-fed to children in public schools under corporate mandate, Hitlerian notions of what is and isn't human are, in 2003, fundamental, commonplace American consumerist dogma. In our culture, now more than ever, the beautiful are gods. And the disfigured, paralyzed, blind, deaf and mentally ill are at best an unavoidable nuisance, at worst an intolerable, "politically correct" burden on the rest of us decent folk. If you don't believe me, ask Rush Limbaugh. Or MTV.

Let's stipulate that here in Karl Rove's America, our moral universe is predicated on our economy, that our economy is predicated on consumerism, that consumerism is predicated on narcissism, and that the narcissist, the driver of our economy, is driven by the search for his or her own physical perfection and the derivative perfection of his or her own children, pets and other possessions.

Obviously this perfection obsession at the root of our culture is thoroughly enmeshed with sex, the DNA-driven urge each of us feels to find the perfect vector to propagate our own deoxyribonucleic heritage. We are biologically programmed to procreate, and, at that, to procreate with the best available evolutionary stock. In a capitalist system, that optimal evolutionary stock follows the money. In our world good looks and physical exceptionalism are supremely marketable commodities, as Michael Jordan can explain much better than I. Therefore America (along with its copycats) stands for nothing if not the moral imperative of its wealthiest, best-looking people to do a lot of fucking. I'm sure we can all agree on that.

As consumerism is our official state religion, and insofar as mucking about with DNA is clearly a religious or quasi-religious activity, it follows that the purpose of the billions of public dollars invested by the state in the Human Genome Project is to make perfect people. Or to be precise, the Human Genome Project furthers our demonstrated national values to the extent that it facilitates the creation of physically perfect people who buy lots of stuff.

That's why I predict that for all its incredible potential to cure ailments and alleviate suffering, the ultimate consequence of the Human Genome Project will be to promote the creation of people like the boy-band singer-dancer Justin Timberlake, who -- as I saw on an episode of the TV show "Punked" -- is stupid, shallow, humorless, inarticulate, good-looking, athletic, and really, really rich. He is the ideal American.

That's why a stated goal of our nationally funded research is to create devices that can sequence an individual genotype for under a thousand dollars. Such devices will help prospective parents with their all-important abortion decisions, just as the Internet helps them decide what car to buy or what restaurants to try. And of course they will help Mr. Ashcroft to keep tabs on all of us potential terrorists, and they will help the corporations help us decide what to do, purchase and think. I don't expect, however, that these machines will do much to find a way to kill toxoplasmosis spores hiding deep behind Jakob's blood-brain barrier. But maybe I'm just cynical.

As Betsy Anderson said, just because we've identified the genetic cause of a condition, that doesn't mean that we'll develop any therapeutic remedy for it. The more likely result, my nickel bet, is that we'll "deselect" the problematic genotypes and let the market make our choices for us, until Michael Jordans and Justin Timberlakes and their female counterparts are as common as the proverbial John and Jane Doe, God have mercy on us, and the mutants and substandards will be despised, persecuted and banished. Just because this is the stuff of dystopian science fiction doesn't mean it won't happen.

Oh, I'm wringing my hands raw, I am.

I wrote and published my novel "Acts of the Apostles" as a way to drive these preoccupations from my head. The inoculation worked for a while, but obviously it wasn't a cure. The book is a paranoid satirical techno-thriller about a really clever Iraqi biological weapons program, and about nanomachines that arrange human DNA. I like to think of it as "Michael Crichton meets Flannery O'Connor," but maybe it's more like "Tom Clancy meets Mad magazine." I'm not a very good judge of such things.

Sometimes, when the weather is nice, I carry a hand-lettered sign, a box of books and a pile of reviews to a little park across the street from the Whitehead Institute (and just down the block from MIT's nanotech lab), where there's a caravan of catering trucks purveying Mexican, Italian, Lebanese and Thai fast food. "Come check out my novel," I say to the people waiting on line. "Nanomachines. Neurobiology. Techno-paranoia. Ten bucks. Cheap."

Occasionally somebody will timidly approach, as if I had the plague or something, and ask for a flyer. I'll hand them a copy of a review from Slashdot or Kuro5hin or Salon.

"You got reviewed in Salon? I thought you were some kind of crackpot."

"Yes, I know," I say. "I am."

Recent Stories