Perhaps it will. But I find there is something devastating about the idea of throwing off all our physical links to past generations. Physical inheritance is a big part of what defines us and makes us feel connected; it contributes to that sense of belonging the human animal generally craves. Even for people who find their way into a family by adoption and receive all the love and acceptance they can hold, there will still almost always be a thirst for some type of connection with biological ancestors. For the most fortunate adoptees, their parents are not threatened by this curiosity; they actively encourage and cultivate the child's interest in "where they came from," be it individuals, countries, or cultures. It is a basic need, now widely recognized, which develops as soon as we're old enough to know that a stork didn't pluck us from a cabbage patch. Instead, the cells we are made of came straight from the cells that made up two other people who may or may not be a lot like us!

Through our genes, the past is woven into our very tissue. We are chromosome sets stitched together like one of my great-grandmother’s quilts: a thousand pieces the size of a postage stamp painstakingly attached one to another to another in orderly rainbow-hued rows. Blue for blue eyes and big sky, red for the dirt, purple for pansies in window-boxes, white for the wedding dresses, baby clothes and casket linings.

Thanks to my great-grandmother – the deft quilter – and her grandmothers and their grandmothers all the way back, the body I inherited is built for certain things. It’s built for holding babies on the hip, crying and having the shoulders cried on, eating okra and cornbread and things other people find disgusting. It’s made for hugging (squishy), wearing capris (short legs) and hats (bad hair) and for skin care companies to make a fortune off of. There are a million things I’d change about it and a few I wouldn’t. It’s just what I got; it’s my place in the chain, my chapter in the story.

The story I come from is one of precious unimportance. My ancestors worked with their hands, grubbing for every dime just to stay afloat in a lower-middle-class sea of weary laborers. They were tobacco, cotton and dairy farmers whose women sweated, burned and hauled rocks right along side them. You’d think with DNA that tough, I wouldn’t know the meaning of lazy. But I have no trouble napping my life away; I seem to have been made for catnaps and days void of industry. Not everything is hereditary, people.

Case in point, I also come from a story of religious fervour. On one branch of my tree hang fiery Scotch-Irish ministers who set out to reform the New World and on the other branch, stocky English circuit-preachers whose wives pried their frozen boots from the stirrups when they finally wandered home. Long lines of faithfulness, camp meetings, prayer meetings, baptisms, fundamentalism, radicalism, and spiritual revolution swirl in my blood. So what explains my ambivalence? No, that’s not the word. I just crave spiritual quiet. Not noise. Not intensity. I want the bedrock underneath but not the rapids splashing above.

Therefore while I am a physical product of thousands of combinations of genetic material over thousands of years, I am not just this. Get rid of the inherited ailments and non-surgically enhance my dad-given nose and I’ll still be me. Easily embarrassed, sometimes brave, glass-half-full me. I doubt I’ll ever be educated enough about the genome issue to staunchly support either side of the debate. But maybe I don’t want to be. Because for now, I can hold out hope for a happy medium in which our future selves have the capacity to delicately mend the human quilt without unraveling all of its threads.