This week, A/Prof Eben Kirksey’s new book, The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans, is available in Australia through Black Inc. Books.

The book explores the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to understand what new technologies, such as CRISPR, will mean for the future of humans.

The future presented in The Mutant Project is not quite Gattaca, but with A/Prof Kirksey asking questions like “Who is gaining access to cutting-edge genetic medicine? And should parents be allowed to choose the genetic makeup of their children?”, it’s not far off.

Although the book opens at a scientific conference in Hong Kong, Kirksey’s book explores the gamut of human genome editing, or as Kirksey describes it, gene surgery or hacking. Speaking to not only doctors and scholars, Kirksey also speaks to chronically ill patients, hackers, and those that have been through DNA editing.

The book opens with a meeting between Dr Jiankui He, the doctor that produced the first “edited babies” using CRISPR technology, and Dr Jennifer Doudna, who developed the technology and, just last month, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside her colleague, for her work on the technology.

The book explores the ethical implications of a technology that can be imprecise, exorbitantly expensive and raises ethical questions around designing humans. A/Prof Kirksey consider questions of whose values are guiding gene-editing experiments and what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species? Who gets access to gene editing technologies? And, as countries loosen regulations around gene editing, whether we shape research agendas to promote an ethical and fair society.

A/Prof Eben Kirksey will be appearing at the Word for Word Festival on November 21 to launch The Mutant Project. Tickets are available here.