She couldn’t wait to tell Olivia that Digitas had acquired a controlling interest in the start-up founded by Olivia’s old nemesis, Professor Sir William Moorhead. YouGenetics was a medical company based on data harvested by several generations of graduates working under his guidance. The correlations, however small, between thousands and thousands of genetic variations, deletions, duplications and mutations and the propensity for and the outcomes of hundreds of the world’s most popular diseases were locked in the data banks of YouGenetics, and might well remain locked there since they had given rise to so few useful treatments. The science might be limited, but Lucy knew that the company could make money. Moorhead had been too lofty to feed the endless public fascination with genetic ancestry. Lucy was not so prudish. It was not at all clear how a person’s ability to pay her mortgage or love her children would be enhanced by the discovery that one per cent of her genes were Haplogroup R-DF27, or that she was descended from Genghis Khan (a startlingly common fate, showing that if the true purpose of human existence was to disseminate genetic material, raping and pillaging was the way to go), but there was a market for it. She intended to offer an especially expensive version of this pointless surrender of data, making a huge fuss about the genealogy of the company itself, founded by the paterfamilias of antique genetics. With this new income, she could reform the company and make it cutting edge.

It was great that Olivia was having her book published soon, but she would be lucky to sell six hundred copies and get a review in Current Biology. Lucy wanted to help change things on a larger scale. Only last night a colleague had been telling her about the seeds from cotton plants that had been attacked by beetles, giving rise to a new generation of plants more resistant to beetle attack. Basing the development of seeds on epigenetically acquired characteristics would be a revolution in agriculture, using nature’s own defences rather than the violent crossbreeding of standard genetic modification. GM had produced few successes and met with enormous resistance. Monsanto, too enterprising to rest on its laurels after Agent Orange, had gone on to formulate ‘terminator’ seeds, but their popularity had never extended beyond the company’s own boardroom and had ended up being banned.