Very few books actually change the world - The Bible, The Koran and Jim Davidson's Bumper Book of Filthy Sonnets are but three.

But this week sees the completion of The Book Of Life, the map of the human genome. The code behind all human life.

Comprising three billion sequenced letters which would take up 750,000 pages of A4, it's definitely more readable than any of Geri Halliwells autobiographies, but it's never going to be a summer blockbuster.

So now we have the Haynes manual for human DNA we can flip open the hood and have a good fiddle about. We can isolate genes involved with diseases such as leukaemia, diabetes and eczema.

Or we can muck about with the whole thing to create whatever types of human that we want. Smarter people, healthier people, more attractive people and people who do the dishes when they're told.

A recent Court of Appeal ruling has meant that parents are now able to select an embryo by 'tissuetyping', in order to ensure a baby with the same bone-marrow match as another critically ill child.

But the Human Fertility and Embryo Authority still deny permission to those parents who want to choose the sex of their offspring.

So how far away are we from the "designer baby"?

The State We're In managed to intercept a form now available to couples from the NHS - which, you'll agree, makes for shocking reading...

Our child should be born with:

• Brown hair

• Blonde hair

• Black hair

• Anything but ginger

Special features our child should have include:

• A Roman nose

• A dimpled chin

• A natural mohawk

• The ability to do that really cool trick where you curl your tongue back in

He/she must be immune to:

• Chicken pox

• Diphtheria

• Advertising

• Really hot curries

We would like the birth to be:

• Natural

• Induced

• Caesarean

• Between 4.00 and 4.15pm on a Wednesday afternoon

We would like our male baby to have the following attributes (choose max 4):

• Wayne Rooney's dexterity

• Brad Pitt's pecs

• Stephen Hawkings' mind

• Pierce Brosnan's voice

• Stephen Fry's brain

• Shakespeare's grasp of language

• Elvis' eyes

• Francis Rossi's jeans

• Geri Halliwell's publicist

And finally as part of choosing Easy Select Design-a-Child please send me one of the following free gifts:

• A rattle

• A toy car

• A teddy bear

• A modelling contract for 2019 plus a rocket science kit