"Smaller babies, easier births, lower rate of maternal mortality?"

"An interesting guess. You may be surprised to learn that mothers with the knockout gene have easier pregnancy and parturition than the wild type. Anyone else?"

"The mind and the body draw from the same source," says the black woman. "As one waxes, the other wanes. All things in balance."

"Conservation of resources is the main reason, yes. One more, one more."

It looks like no one else is going to answer. Morgan is only passingly familiar with developmental biology, but one obvious guess is that sarcomeres don't always align perfectly on the first try and need myostatin to break down and reform.

"Do the muscles not grow correctly?"

"Correct. The deviation is subtle, but this bull is not quite as strong as a wild type bull with equivalent muscle mass would be. Genes do not code for traits, they code for proteins. Genes form regulatory networks that give cells their identity; phenotype traits emerge from this process after multiple levels of abstraction. MSTN knockouts cannot regulate their production of muscle tissue, which in the ancestral environment with limited access to food is a death sentence. They are also prone to ventricular hypertrophy and dysregulated blood pressure, since their cardiac and smooth muscles are equally overdeveloped, and modern technology cannot answer this challenge so easily.

"Transgenes are guaranteed to start chain reactions that touch organs and systems beyond the one you intended. Mutant phenotypes from a single gene are especially prone to this, as the single gene in question is almost always a transcription factor, responsible for many other genes. Regulatory networks exist in a local optimum – they can be improved upon, but not trivially."

He points at Elliot Mantle.

"This returns to the problem of nootropics. The brain is the most complicated organ, and intelligence its most complicated aspect. How can one drug enhance intelligence? One molecule alone, improving the functioning of such a well-oiled machine? Where such things exist, you must ask yourself: why has evolution failed to make this same discovery?"

"It didn't discover Vyvanse."

"For those who are not familiar, Vyvanse is a variant amphetamine drug invented to better comply with asinine restrictions on stimulant use. It is not a nootropic in the classical sense, but Dr. Mantle is partially correct: it does boost test scores. It is also less addictive than Sapho and less neurotoxic than NZT-48, which means it has a certain… popularity."

The bucket helmet remains motionless, but everyone can hear the sneer beneath the mask.

"Amphetamines enhance concentration by altering the reward system with dopamine and norepinephrine. The boost to executive function is limited by the number of neurotransmitter receptors in the mesolimbic pathway, among other things – high doses of strong amphetamines cause euphoria. Furthermore, the reward system is not especially brittle, but neither is it infinitely malleable. Deleterious side effects take decades to manifest, too long to be relevant for the average medical student looking to pass their next exam, but more effective nootropics undermine correspondingly more important regions of the cerebral cortex."

Blah blah blah drugs are bad, m'kay? Hopefully there's a booth in this joint where she can buy Sapho – if this guy feels the need to warn them about how addictive it is, it's going in the jungle juice at the next house party.

"There are a huge number of possible targets to consider in this space. I will lay out a few more to whet your appetites, in roughly ascending order of complexity. By show of hands, how many of you are from worlds where humans sporadically exhibit supernatural powers?"

Most of the audience raises their hands, Morgan and Semirhage included.

"And is the supernatural known to run in families?"

Most people still have their hands up. Morgan dithers for a bit before lowering hers – some genetic phenomena have been classed as anomalous but most humanoid SCPs are just people with outrageously bad luck.

"Not unusual at all. It was this precise observation that first piqued my interest in esoteric genetics. I had the good fortune of stumbling upon a relatively straightforward instance."

He clicks to the next slide, a human karyogram with several different loci circled in red.

"The X-gene, so named because of its location on the q arm of the X chromosome, is found in the genome of a small number of humans, apparently independent of geographic location or ethnicity. In most human X chromosomes it is not merely silent, it is absent. Expression of the X-gene was shown to be near-perfectly correlated with potent supernatural abilities. When I first obtained a sample of mutant DNA as an undergraduate student, I extracted the X-gene and established an E. coli bioreactor to secure a steady supply of the protein. At the time, I was convinced that the protein was the source of those superhuman abilities. Now, why was I mistaken?"

"Protein got misfolded by the E. coli."

"It needs magic to become a magic protein."

"The X-gene only works when paired with the Y-gene?"

"Red herring!"

"There is no Y-gene. Female Homo sapiens superior exist, although skewed inactivation means there are about twice as many males. 'Why' is an open question."

He goes back to the muscular cow slide.

"Like MSTN, the X-gene codes for a transcription factor. The mutant phenotype comes from millions of genes scattered across thousands of genomes – all with an identical promoter region. It is unclear who first discovered this fact, as there was no seminal paper published on the subject. The earliest use of this knowledge was likely the anonymous individual who released 492 winged monkeys in Central Park six months after my first failed experiment, as they were later found to have been created using DNA from Warren Worthington III.

"With that in mind, I acquired a tissue sample from Scott Summers and isolated the nineteen other genes responsible for his powers. Then…"

All right, moment of truth: what crime against nature did this man commit?

He skips ahead again. On the projector is a photograph of a dark-furred lab rat with glowing red eyes, being held and stroked behind the ears by a person wearing a white coat. It looks remarkably self-satisfied, for a lab rat.

"Twenty transgenes are sufficient to convert the eyeball into a dye laser. The basal layer of the sclera is mirrored below the retina, turning the interior into a concentric resonating cavity. The optic nerve is adapted into a laser pump; the vitreous humor serves as the gain medium. The cornea is partially reflective, which impairs vision somewhat but acts as a beamsplitter for the output. This rat, in addition to being perfectly healthy, can produce kilowatt 640 nm laser beams from each eye."

… what an unfortunately adorable crime against nature.

Semirhage's English is not strong enough to follow this discussion. It does not sound like he forcibly linked the rat to the One Power, despite the glowing eyes. In fact, it sounds like the glowing eyes may have been the entire point? She'll have to ask what a 'dye laser' is some other time.

"This research not only contributed to our ability to turn living cells into lasers, but to our ability to create mutant clones. The rat was born with no congenital defects and passed all of her medical examinations with flying colors—"

— until she figured out how to slice through the latch on her cage and scared his roommate into killing her with a desk lamp while she raided the pantry, rest in peace Nyarro—

"— which paved the way for more ambitious work. The Cyclops genes are among the easiest to transfect into other mammals. Jean Grey has on the order of 32,000 total genes, close to four billion base pairs. Charles Xavier's more modest 29,000 genes are interspersed through thousands of plasmids, a type of circular DNA that exists independently inside the nucleus which would ordinarily be detected and destroyed by the immune system. It's a wonder neither of them are infertile…"

He shakes his head. It's always tempting to get into mutant chimerism and mitochondrial DNA, but he only has half an hour for this talk.

"Regardless, there is a pitfall in esoteric genetics that I would be remiss to not bring to your attention. It is of particular danger to unsophisticated practitioners, unless they are forewarned."

These people have 25% more DNA than the average human and weren't stillborn? They have children?

"Mendelian traits in humans are mostly of interest because they cause disease. Nevertheless, the ease of identifying the characteristic 1:3 inheritance pattern makes it straightforward to check whether a supernatural trait is truly caused by a single gene. Sex-linked traits are even easier. If you believe a supernatural trait to be caused by a single gene, and that gene is not a transcription factor, and you can find no other grounded explanation for the trait, attempting to tinker with that gene may be dangerous.

"This is because, as one of you so astutely informed the class, 'it needs magic to become a magic protein.' There are two possible explanations. In the first, another genomic engineer has designed a simple allele lock to regulate access to an external magic supply. They may not take kindly to you interfering with their work. In the second, a natural phenomenon you do not adequately understand is acting on a material you have large quantities of in the same building as you. Rectify your understanding before proceeding."

Mad scientists rarely heed warning unless spelled out in dire terms, so he'll do his best to make this one stick.

If only people were born with this intuition, instead of having to learn it the hard way.

"The frontier beyond plagiarizing other scientists is plagiarizing evolution. Unlike your peers, the blind idiot god has spent billions of years refining its work. Also unlike your peers, its genomes are path-dependent and have an abysmal signal-to-noise ratio. I will say this until it sinks in: genes do not code for traits. For the most part they do not code for anything. If you wish to add the torpedo ray's electric organ or the elephant's prehensile trunk to an unrelated organism, it cannot be done by cutting out the 'electric gene' or the 'trunk gene' and injecting it into the zygote on your desk. Those genes do not exist."

He pauses briefly.

"Of course, it can be done. Let me show you how."