"Here's Gregory Stock, the UCLA professor and outspoken proponent of this engineering, explaining how it will work: 'People will be inclined to give their children those skills and traits that align with their own temperament and lifestyles. An optimist may feel so good about his optimism and energy that he wants more of it for his child. A concert pianist may see music as so integral to life that she wants to give her daughter greater talent than her own. A devout individual may want his child to be even more religious and resistant to temptation.' In other words, having managed, in many ways against the odds, to create a context (optimism, devotion, artistry) for their lives, parents will be able to pass it on. But what a poisoned gift. Scientists — 'neurotheologians' someone has called them — have pinpointed the regions of the parietal lobe that quiet down when Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks pray. Perhaps before long we will be able to amplify the reaction. As a result the minister's son may be even more pious than he is — but if he has any brain left to himself, he will question that piety at the deepest level, wonder constantly whether it means anything or if it's so much (literal) brainwashing. And if he doesn't question it, if the gene transplant takes so deeply that he turns into anchorite monk living deeply in the desert, then his faith is utterly meaningless, far more meaningless than the one his medieval ancestor inherited by birthright. It would be a faith literally beyond questioning, and hence no faith at all. He would be, for all intents and purposes, a robot."