In recent decades, popular culture has been flooded by a remarkable number of claims that biologists have been putting forward and double checking against an ever-increasing amount of evidence (for example, about occasional discrepancies between the sexual identity of a baby’s brain and bodily makeup). Ever since the sheep Dolly was successfully cloned in 1996, many wondered about the possibility of having themselves cloned too, even though Dolly was apparently the only specimen out of a few hundred to be born alive – and it does not seem that such a troubling predicament has significantly changed so far. Getting one’s own genome sequenced is now very affordable, at least if the purpose is to learn about genetic makeup in terms of, say, Italian, British, or Japanese genes – and even Neanderthal or Denisovan ones for that matter. According to recent advertising, at the fraction of the cost of a dance class, a genetic test can reveal an innate talent for dancing inherited from any of the interested party’s ancestors – which would certainly be a good investment of time and money. These alleged new possibilities and problems continuously raised by genetics research bring to mind fictional narratives like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as real-life horror stories like the Shoah or the other genocides humankind has witnessed, suffered, and perpetrated throughout its remarkably successful but also quite troublesome history.
