‘Life as We Made It’ charts the past and future of genetic tinkering

With genetic engineering, humans have recently unleashed a surreal fantasia: pigs that excrete less environment-polluting phosphorus, ducklings hatched from chicken eggs, beagles that glow ruby red under ultraviolet light. Biotechnology poses unprecedented power and potential — but also follows a course thousands of years in the making.

In Life as We Made It, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro pieces together a palimpsest of human tinkering. From domesticating dogs to hybridizing endangered Florida panthers, people have been bending evolutionary trajectories for millennia. Modern-day technologies capable of swapping, altering and switching genes on and off inspire understandable unease, Shapiro writes. But they also offer opportunities to accelerate adaptation for the better — creating plague-resistant ferrets, for instance, or rendering disease-carrying mosquitoes sterile to reduce their numbers (SN: 5/14/21).

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