On Innovation Capacity and the Ineliminability of Process

Some people imagine: using gene editing to create a child, then inputting Einstein’s consciousness into that child, and the child will become Einstein.

This fantasy overlooks a most fundamental truth —

Innovation capacity is not a piece of code, not a set of neural connections, nor a static package of data that can be copied and transferred.

Innovation capacity is acquired through effort — it is a process of hard work. It consists of countless moments of confusion, trial and error, frustration, persistence, and breakthrough. Every breakthrough consumes energy and leaves an irreversible trace in time. True creativity is inherent in this historical process; it is not an end‑state that can be stripped away and transplanted elsewhere.

Gene editing tries to skip this process and directly obtain the result — this is self‑contradictory: without process, there is no genuine innovation.

Trying to stand on the mountaintop without climbing the mountain, to become a virtuoso without practicing the instrument, to possess Einstein’s mind without a lifetime of thinking — what you get is nothing but a protein robot, a mere shell that will never produce original work.

This is not only technologically impossible — it is logically absurd.