We have the technology to potentially add a 47th chromosome, to compound as it were, a new human entity. The implications are enormously consequential.
C.S. Lewis warned about our final mastery over nature, and the inevitable drift into a future world where knowledge about the old world completely vanishes, where what once was, irretrievably transforms into something else:
… We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: The first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety … The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.[1]