His claim comes as the US and China prepare to stage mass trials to edit the genes of cancer patients to ensure it is not passed down in their DNA.
However, Dr Kozubek, author of Modern Prometheus: Editing the Human Genome with Crispr-Cas9, said the breakthrough is not necessarily a good thing and could see future generations of geniuses wiped out.
Dr Kozubek said: “Thomas Edison was ‘addled’ and kicked out of school. Tennessee Williams, as a teenager on the boulevards of Paris felt afraid of ‘the process of thought’ and came within ‘a hairsbreadth of going quite mad’.
“Scientists tend to think of variations in life as problems to be solved, deviations and abnormalities outside of a normal curve.