ON THURSDAY of last week, in what will no doubt prove to be the most influential "rough draft" in the course of human history, Celera Genomics announced that it had completed a preliminary map of a single person's genome. Learning how to read from genetic's book of life has been a slow process for most of the past hundred years: from Mendel's isolated pea-pod experiments, to Crick and Watson's double helix. But last week was a watershed by any measure, and behind it lies a flood of new knowledge and innovation. As the public and private sectors scramble to fill in the blanks of Celera's rough draft and expand on the more intriguing passages, a startling new understanding of life's source code is bound to emerge. We will all become a little closer to the family of machines -- information processors transcribing the organic code of DNA. Our bodies are, in Richard Dawkins's memorable phrase, a gene's way of making other genes. We are gene-replication machines all of us.

Like all the great scientific and technological revolutions of the past, the genetic revolution will transform society in ways that are unimaginable to us now. But allow us to make a few armchair predictions.

Prediction #1: Genes will prove to be even more powerful than we imagined them to be. This development will have both philosophical and commercial consequences. Decoding the genome will endow us with an empirically grounded understanding of our common humanity, but it will also allow us to buy and sell segments of that humanity on the open market. Sci-fi authors have been concocting tales of genetic black markets and "skin jobs" for decades, but even those extremist visions may not have prepared us for the confluence of gene splicing and eBay. As Jeff Howe reports in his essay, "Copyrighting the Book of Life," the marketplace for DNA will present immense ethical complications. The forces unleashed by the genome will also ripple across other domains: Biotech is already having a major impact on the agribusiness, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor industries. And, as FEED's Steven Johnson explains in his essay, "Play It as It Learns," even video games are jumping on the genetic bandwagon.

Prediction #2: The relationship between genes and gene expression will prove to be even more complicated than we imagine it to be. If we are all machines running a more-or-less common source code, that doesn't mean our experience of the world is solely dictated by our genes. The great preponderance of the human genome is "junk DNA," or molecular noise, and countless other sequences never get transcribed over the course of an individual life. Your genes are activated by events in the external world, by the activity of other genes, or by your own free will. As Matt Ridley explains in his piece, "The Influence of Anxiety," the genes that code for the stress hormone, cortisol, are deeply influenced by your social status -- which means that the best way to regulate the "stress gene" may well be to get a promotion. There is no hard determinism in the world of modern genetics: Our genes shape us, and we shape them in turn.

There is one more prediction worth making, and it concerns the way the genetic revolution will be analyzed in the coming years. As more and more of our source code comes to light, we predict that most progressive or left-leaning critics and commentators -- the sort of folks you might otherwise see writing at FEED, for instance -- will devote the great bulk of their time to fulfilling Prediction #2, and will ignore the profound implications of Prediction #1. We will hear a chorus of "it's more complicated than that" every time a strand of DNA is linked to a personality trait like intelligence or status seeking. In isolation, those protests are important ones, and essential for keeping the genetic revolution in perspective. But at a certain point, the left is going to have to confront the evidence that there is a biological grounding for human nature, that there are significant genetic differences between the sexes that go far beyond the reproductive organs, and that social conditioning is only a part of who we are. We have already caught glimpses of the long arm of the genome in twin studies, but as Clay Shirky argues in his inaugural column, "After Darwin," the decoding of the human genome is going to shine a klieg light on the influence of DNA. If the left limits itself exclusively to documenting the limits of our genetic code, it will be like riding out the hurricane under a beach umbrella, as one Depression-era critic said of Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night.

Progressive commentators like to denounce the tyranny of genetic determinism, but you can make the argument that its opposite -- social determinism -- is even more oppressive. Hearing that your personality and appetites and frailties derive from your genes may not always be the best news in the world, but is it any more infringing on human liberty than hearing that you are simply the product of your environment? Your genes belong to you, at least -- unlike the environment, which is by definition not you. If we have to choose, and thankfully we don't, we'd be just as happy to put our chips with our genes as with society itself. Of course, it may grow increasingly difficult to tell which genes are our genes after all, as genetic therapy shifts from a fringe, experimental science to a cosmetic afterthought. As Casey Walker powerfully argues in her Deep Read, "The Fall of the Wild," embarking on that genetic revolution without some earnest debate is bound to change our very definition of life itself.

Speaking of debate, we've also opened up a special Loop discussion for this issue. We encourage you to share your own thoughts on the genetic revolution and its implications there. For those of you who want to take this entire issue on a camping trip, or don't feel like printing out each page separately, we've also included a version of the issue in Rich Text Format, which you can download here.

-- Steven Johnson, Amanda Griscom, and Hillary Rosner