Gun of God — David Cudlip

Thomas Courmaine, a geneticist and a card-carrying idealist, is banished to Africa; this, for his own well-being. There, he is intrigued by age-old bush medicine, and his stars are about to shine when he stumbles upon the long-sought solution to the riddle of gene therapy. Watershed stuff, to say the least, paving the way for eradicating thousands of diseases…on the cheap. With gene therapy freely available, people will rarely get ill. Thus, who needs drugs? Or doctors and hospitals? With trillions of dollars at stake, and taking no chances, the pharma-industry offers Courmaine an alliance. If only he'll play ball. When he refuses, they take aim, with full intentions of thwarting his quest of bringing free health care to the vast numbers needing it. One battle begets the next. Courmaine's discovery makes it relatively simple to quickly edit and even re-edit one's DNA. The gun of the future soon fires. A new era explodes, and the race is on to see who can become faster, brighter, more beautiful...and thus what began as a magical panacea now looms as a full-fledged curse. Are we to remain as humans, letting Nature do what Nature does in her own way and in her own time; or do we artificially keep transforming ourselves into what we were never meant to be? Where and how does this whirligig end? Can the Genie ever be returned to its bottle? Courmaine must cope with irony at its very apex: to save humanity's essence can he somehow undo the great things he has done for us? Yet should he?