Have you read Fukuyama's book on transhumanism? (http://www.amazon.com/Our-Posthuman-Future-Biotechnology-ebook/dp/B000OI1AE8)

From the excerpt, I see that the characters seem to blame organized political religiosity for subduing biotech research. That's only half the story of what happened.

The truth is (that you can see from Fukuyama, who sat on President Bush's council on Bioethics) is that biotech threatens enlightenment values of egalitarianism just as much as it threatens certain religious conceptions of life. This is why it has been suppressed by the regulatory state. Fukuyama and others marshaled whatever argument they could find, including religious pandering, to justify this suppression of scientific research.

Their actions will be indirectly responsible for countless preventable deaths and the delay of the development of many important potential technologies.

The liberal tradition wears the pants in the West, and religious leaders follow their secular egalitarian masters, not the other way around. This is the only point I'd like to make; otherwise it appears to be an interesting premise for a novel.