UNSHARED science is of little value. The whole scientific endeavour relies on ideas, methods and data being available to all. The words we use are vital to making sure that we are all on the same page and our ideas are conveyed accurately. But in my field of genetics, the language we use isn’t up to scratch. Terms in common usage present problems ranging from being scientifically confused or ambiguous, to being rooted in a racist history that echoes in our present.

Every scientific discipline has its own jargon used to summarise or label the complexity of the world. And as our genome is the richest data set we have ever tackled, it is no surprise that human genetics is particularly burdened with terms that strive to encapsulate our ancestry and the secrets of our behaviour, evolution and disease.

Genetics is also a field with a pernicious history. Its origins are inextricably entwined with the 18th-century invention of race, then using pigmentation and skull measurements to hierarchically taxonomise people. With that came scientific racism marshalled into the justification of slavery and subjugation, and the eugenics projects of the early 20th century followed not far behind.

Contemporary genetics has unequivocally demolished the attempts to use ancestry, anatomy and genetics to assert a biological basis for race. Although people around the world differ, the genetics underlying those differences doesn’t correspond to the racial classification that we use today. “Black” – meaning people of recent African descent – covers more than a billion people with more genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together. From a genetic point of view, it isn’t an informative term. Yet we use it. This is why we call race a “social construct” – race exists because we perceive it, but has no meaningful biological basis.

Nevertheless, the scientific language of the past resounds today. That is why I and colleagues in various fields of genetics are in these language conventions, which, we argue, don’t serve scientific insight and shackle us to the prejudices of history.

Some examples are widespread. Caucasian, for example, is a word used today in official forms, public discourse and in many academic papers. Does it mean white European? Does it include people from south Asia or North Africa? Different definitions have included these populations and others. Furthermore, it was originally coined to indicate the “beauty” and “superiority” of white Europeans. It has no place in science today.

Other examples are arguably less prejudicial, but equally unsound. Bantu is often used to broadly describe people from southern Africa with a shared linguistic heritage. Yet the diversity of dialects in more than 400 million people renders their grouping imprecise and not inherently meaningful. Even terms like “ethnicity” and “ancestry” have subtly different meanings when used in different fields and by different people.

In the genetics community, there is growing recognition that we have to change our language. The American Society of Human Genetics stated in 2018 that “the invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist”.

Humans are all of one species, but people from around the world are different, and genetics reflects those regional adaptations and different evolutionary journeys. Grouping people is a necessary part of understanding similarities and differences in our DNA.

Our intention isn’t to police language, but to prompt it to evolve. Some genetics terms should be consigned to the dustbin; others will require thought and discussion. Our hope is to spark a conversation for changing to a lexicon that better serves our understanding of human diversity, and simultaneously frees us from a troubling history.

KAKAPOS are fat New Zealand ground parrots that have stared into the abyss of extinction for decades. Conservationists have laboured to raise numbers from the moribund low 50s to a still ultra-critical 160 or so today.

Once a species becomes so depleted, however, a lack of genetic diversity can hinder its long-term salvation. A geneticist once told me of a crazy idea that might save the kakapo. He said that there are more stuffed kakapos in European museums than there are living birds. If we could extract DNA from those dead parrots, from a time when their numbers were large, we could genetically engineer the living birds to mimic the once healthy species by changing single letters of genetic code.

There are a lot of “ifs” here, but the modification of DNA itself – even at the level of precision this mad scheme would require – is eminently possible, thanks to a technology known by the acronym CRISPR. Ten years ago, identifying, characterising and modifying a gene then getting it back into an organism was a process that took weeks, months or years. With CRISPR you can perform the same process in days.

Incredibly, it looks as though CRISPR will live up to its hype, transforming every aspect of biology as genetic engineering did from the 1970s on. Tweaking individual letters of genetic code, it takes just hours to finely edit what evolution fashioned over billions of years. All aspects of the science of life are within CRISPR’s reach: disease, conservation, synthetic cellular manufacture.

CRISPR’s complex origins as a gene editing tool can reasonably be credited to a few key players: Jennifer Doudna is one of them. With her former colleague Samuel Sternberg, she has written a detailed account of the story so far. It may well end up being compared with the book that inspired a 12-year old Doudna in the first place: James Watson’s The Double Helix.

But while Watson’s iconic account of his and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA is dramatic and myth-making, bitchy and sexist, A Crack in Creation is thoughtful and thorough. Packed with amazing female scientists, it is thrilling, generous and no less personal. It’s a good tale of how science works, tracing all the meandering paths that lead to discovery: meetings, chance encounters, ceaseless discussions, and the endless beavering of lab life.

“Concern about genetically modifying people may once have seemed overheated. That’s about to change”

A Crack in Creation is quite technical at times, and a touch bogged down with the clinical specifics of the many diseases that CRISPR may one day fix. The journey from the days of gene therapy to the first human CRISPR studies in China is no amble, either. Following these early Chinese studies, Doudna recommended an instant moratorium on human CRISPR experimentation. Similar moratoriums were called for in the first days of genetic engineering in the 1970s, and in recent years, following the experimental modification of virulent flu viruses.

Public concern about the genetic modification of people may have seemed overheated while we lacked the scientific chops to do anything significant. But that is about to change: CRISPR is powerful and potentially scary. Doudna’s own ethical position comes into focus in the final chapter. It’s a nuanced account, but she definitely inclines towards excising conditions like cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease from the human germ line.

A Crack in Creation touches the surface of these issues. It doesn’t delve deep, but one book cannot do everything. Genetics has been in perpetual revolution for several decades now. Since the 1990s, when the Human Genome Project ground into action, there have been so many advances in our understanding of genetics and our ability to manipulate DNA that it’s hard to keep up. Doudna accounts for the many cracks in creation in the 21st century: developing RNAi, where genes can be silenced with tiny bits of ingested genetic code; the building of giant chromosomes to help us clone larger genes; and the manipulation of stem cells. All of these achievements resulted in Nobel prizes – Doudna’s must surely come soon.

We need scientifically informed public conversations about what we should do next with these powers, and Doudna’s book is a good place to begin. The first gene engineers of the 1970s framed their discoveries by actively engaging with the ethical, legal and political ramifications of genetic engineering. So must we. “As I write this,” says Doudna, “the world around us is being revolutionized by CRISPR, whether we’re ready for it or not.” So strap in and get up to speed, because these days, the science of modifying life moves pretty fast.

This article appeared in print under the headline “This changes everything”