Aghast at what she had done, Pandora peered into the box to see one last small beautiful thing lying on the bottom: hope. She slammed the box shut and so we have, despite our problems, hope that things can and will be better in the future.

In the last 100 years we have opened more than one Pandora's box, to our cost. To take just one example: legal abortion, to save women from dying in botched backyard operations, expanded its range exponentially to a peak in 1996 of 99,100. Yet since that year the number of abortions carried out in Australia has halved. In 2017, 47,265 abortions were carried out.  

Perhaps the fact that routine ultrasounds show that a foetus is demonstrably developing into a little person clarifies what abortion really is. Now one may dare to hope that abortion will become what it was originally meant to be, an extreme option in a life-threatening situation only.

Dare one hope that some similar exposé of what we are doing in gene technology will lower the lid on that Pandora's box, a lid gaping wide right now? 

Alarm bells rang when I learned in 1999 that Iceland's government had sold the genetic code of its entire population (then 270,000) to a biotechnical company, Roche Holding AG, for $200 million. For this sum the company has access to the genetic, medical and genealogical information of all Icelanders. The fact that Icelanders are a genetically homogenous people made their information reliable data to work with from a biotechnical point of view.  

Whether it was ethical to use people's genetic data for commercial purposes was never seriously considered, let alone the inevitable appearance of individuals who would take research outside set parameters for their own purposes. 

This maverick entrepreneurism has happened in the field of sex determination for unborn infants, resulting in wildly unbalanced male/female population ratios in both China and India, where the historic and economical preference is for boys not girls.

It has happened with the incidence of Down Syndrome among live births in all countries where pre-natal screening tests and genetic counselling are available. The numbers of babies born with Down Syndrome are falling – in Iceland by almost 100 percent, in France by 77 percent, Denmark 98 percent, the US 67 percent. Even in Australia numbers are falling markedly. All this at a time when people with Down Syndrome are achieving more, contributing more to their communities than at any other time in history.

So, do you believe that, when a biotechnician tells you can access your full polygenic score for a nominated sum, this, ultimately, will be for your own good and not for the lining of his/her pockets? 

As it is possible to test for inherited disease (thalassaemia or possible breast cancer, for instance) so, we are told, it will be possible to test for potentials such as obesity, bi-polarism, bullying, leadership, even scholarship, by as early as 2030. 

This Pandora's box is the most lethal yet!