It’s easy to mock 1950s Britain.

America had shiny Cadilliacs and ice-cream parlours and the birth of rock’n'roll (yes alright, I’m basing my entire knowledge of ’50s America on “Back To The Future”). But what did Britain have? Post-war austerity, buttoned-up morality, grey food and bad architecture.

Oh, and we also had The Bomb.

When we think about nuclear peril, it’s the Cold War during the Regan era that really dominates the imagination. Nuclear war - it’s just so ’80s. Mutually Assured Destruction, films like “War Games” (anyone else remember it?) and fiery mushroom clouds destroying yuppies in shoulder-pads.

But the nuclear story is rooted in the immediate aftermath of WW2. And it’s instructive to look at the level of debate in the country at that time. We’d just emerged from a war that cost millions of lives. The Bomb seemed to be the weapon to end all conflicts - and it was ours. And taken as a whole, nuclear technology was exciting. Quite apart from military applications, atom-splitting promised cheap energy in abundance. Rocket ships to the moon would be powered along by nuclear engines. Nuclear physics represented man’s harnessing of elemental forces, through the application of his intellect. We had become Masters of the Universe. But where was the public debate?

The new Channel 4 show I’ve been doing some work on concerns a new “nuclear age”. But this show isn’t about mushroom clouds and atomic reactors. It’s about the nucleus of a cell, which is the place you find the cell’s DNA.

The nucleus of the cell is where many people think the 21st Century’s big scientific leaps will be made. Markus Schoenberg makes the case for this argument very persuasively. We live in a democracy - that means we have a legitimate stake in deciding how we want society to evolve. Which technologies we should invest in; which technologies we should regulate to prevent social harm.

Some of the ethical questions posed by future genetic research will, I think, be biggies. As with nuclear energy, genetic technology will have the capacity to bring great benefits and to cause great harm, depending on how it is used. Hopefully shows like RoutesGame will begin to equip a new generation to tackle these questions when they arise.