A vague, almost blank cast of amusement came over his face at renewed interest in genetics; while delicacy on this issue was hardly uncommon, it was always a little ridiculous - and, coming from Tony, flat-out strange. ... Which probably meant it should be less humorous than premonitory. We're being delicate, I guess. He didn't mind - it just put the odds that he could actually be helpful down a few percentage points. He'd never thought of himself as someone adept at anything that needed tiptoeing around.
But all the same he leaned back in his chair almost gratefully, shoving his glasses up into his hair and rubbing the back of his wrist against his eye for a moment. "Sure. As long as it's not about Objective C." He could see the imprints of it on the backs of his eyelids; he'd probably dream about it. No matter where you were, it seemed, from the lowliest card-punching undergraduate busywork to the cushiest position in your best friend's flush company, the tedious minutiae followed. The next technological revolution would really have to involve getting the hell away from the programmable computer. He looked across at Tony again with a careful smile. "Or what I'm doing to get some excitement in my life. Go ahead."
Mutation had been pretty forward in his mind of late, for obvious reasons, but there was something ultimately unsatisfying about that kind of inquiry, especially when considering the ethical concerns involved in any attempt at reestablishing the status quo. Not that those changes didn't reveal interesting and useful information about the content and potential of the human genome, but accidents were almost always less compelling than intentional experimentation. Given a choice, he would much rather have engineered forward than backward.