Imagine if you lived in a world where babies will be made to order? Go to a touch screen and dial in the features you want. Dial up the cuteness, dial down diseases and up the ante on laughter and happiness?
Now, if that seems like some re-hashing of a sci-fi movie, think again. Kamel Khalili of Temple University in Philadelphia is working round the clock to ensure this all becomes a reality. If you haven't heard of the term 'gene-therapy', you're living in the wrong century.
The ability to alter human genes in a way that can be passed onto offspring, called germline engineering, has long been possible.
But until recently the methods available to genetically modify animals were so inefficient and crude that no sane biologist would dream of using them on humans.
But technology has caught up with us. No more visits to the doctor to ask if your child will be susceptible to genetic faults and recessive genes.
Now the precision and efficiency of gene-therapy has reopened the debate about human germline engineering. But why does it?
The most compelling reason would be to prevent the inheritance of genetic diseases, yet this is already being done without gene editing.
Many of the variants controlling skin, hair and eye color have been identified, so in theory these kinds of cosmetic traits could be tweaked. But characteristics such as intelligence seem to be determined by hundreds of different gene variants, with each one having only a tiny effect.
This means we are a long way from engineering intelligence into children, even if gene editing were safe enough to attempt it, but give it time.