I must admit I was never much good at biology at school- but the one area in which I was always fasinated by was genetics. Starting of with that weird monk guy Mendel doing illict experiments with peas, the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick (who seemed to have been only about 22 at the time) and who won the Nobel Prize, despite the fact that most of the work had been done by a woman Rosalind Franklin (the DNA bits which lead men to cheat is obviously not just sex related). And on to today we have that most amazing thing the Human Genome Project which has mapped the entire DNA make up of a human- enabling us to tell which bits lead to servere illnesses in later life, personlity traits etc. Well it was with this in mind that I had last month a most interesting conversation with Mari Shallhe, Professor of Applied Genetics at the University of Oxford. It seems that science has reached a point now that we can modify human egg and sperm cells, removing DNA bits which have a negative impact and  accentuating those bit which lead to a more positive outcome  What really interested me, however, was the fact that they were trialling these new techniques on musicians. She told me for example, they had tracked down a brillant and beautiful sax player-  whose main  flaw was that she was very unreliable- they had removed the unreliable bit from the DNA and added the DNA of a fanastically reliable but a pig ugly and talentless oboe player. They are awaiting the results.  This was reletively simple she said- more difficult was their attempt to combine the vocal power of an opera singer with the abilty of a top flatuist to circular breath and thus producing a opera singer who could sing the whole of Wagner without ever having to stop for a breath. It seems the possibilities for our industry are endless- no more relying on the vagaries of natural selection- we can create our own perfect acts.- insead of rows of publicity, you would have rows of test tubes with the required DNA. A Brave New World!

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