I once asked my boss if we shouldn’t be out helping the poor and the sick, rather than searching for the meaning of a dot inside a bug that was almost too small to see.

‘The poor and the sick will always be with us,’ he said, ‘but we will change the way people think about the world.’

He had a point, I suppose. But when I looked around me and saw a lab full of people muttering recondite gene-speak under their breath like prayers, it all began to seem very strange.