Paul Atreides, the hero of Dune, discovers that he has been gifted with incredible, superhuman powers – such as precognition and omniscience.This is no accident.Paul is the result of painstaking genetic engineering and selective breeding over many generations by an organisation known as the Bene Gesserit.Advertisement

The question is: could you, in the real world, breed, or genetically edit, a ‘chosen one’?In November 2018, the world was shocked by news that the first gene-edited human babies had been born in China.According to He Jiankui, the rogue scientist behind the project, the twin girls’ genetic make-up had been tweaked to give them innate resistance to HIV – because their father was HIV-positive.This was done using a gene-editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9.This is essentially a genetic version of the search-and-replace in your word processor, which can scan a genome for a target chunk of genetic code and then replace it with a new custom sequence.He has since been sentenced to three years in prison for breaching Chinese laws that ban the application of gene editing to human embryos.