10 ms·

Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality?

52 points by diwank 13y ago

jdmitch 13y ago
Despite laws meant to prevent genetic discrimination, the world of Gattaca is a highly stratified one with two distinct classes: the valids—who have the right genes, the most prestigious jobs and the highest quality of life—and the in-valids, who were conceived in the typical fashion and are relegated to menial work and relative poverty. Eugenics also risks creating a genetically homogenous population that is far more vulnerable to disease and freak deleterious mutations than a diverse one. Isn't their significant evidence that more diverse gene pools, even unexpected combinations of genes are usually more adapted in several ways, because of heterosis [0]. It seems foolish that this one new factor would make eugenics any more successful than its last phase of popular. Not to mention it the deeply-held 'moral repugnance'[1] aspect. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis [1] http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repugnance.pdf?sequence=6 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repu...
- pfortuny 13y ago
  There is some history to be learned from the genetic variability problem of Ireland's potatoes in the XIX Century. Apart from other -more serious- problems, obviously, but genetic similarity is not necessarily a good thing.
  - temujin 13y ago
    Variation can be deliberately increased, not just decreased. And PGD creates an incentive for the former: the greater the difference between your own and your partner's DNA, the greater the expected benefit from informed selection.
  - JVIDEL 13y ago
    I was just going to mention that: given economies of scale custom babies will probably share a lot of identical prefab genetic blocks for every specification since it would be far cheaper than engineering every trait from scratch. At that point there would be enough GM humans walking around that a virus might evolve to attack only them, and it would spread like wildfire among the population given the lack of genetic variation, the only exception being old regular humans and maybe a few of those with parents wealthy enough to get them tailor-made without any of the preexisting "parts" that the majority uses.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  The often overlooked part of Gattaca is that the unmeasured qualities of the hero allowed him to overcome the restrictions of the society. It starts off with a picture of hell, and then shows him overcoming it.
- comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
  Heterosis just means there are twice as many factors to worry over. If it becomes too faddish to pick the exact same two genetic codings for a particular gene or select away every gene not on a preferred list, we still lose and immense amount of variability within a generation. The ultimate end is not even to simply pick the contents of the 46 chromosomes. It is medically plausible to purposefully create human chimeras -- basically it when fraternal twins happen to combine to become one fetus. ("We have selected these 46 chromosomes for the neural material, and these other 46 for the skeletal-muscular system. Looks like we have a few fetuses where the combination took to the right locations. We destroyed many eggs, but it is all worth it so your son can be the best, right?")
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Lots of reasons to leave randomness in, from a societal viewpoint. But nobody will stand up and say "screw over my kid so society benefits". We're all mostly selfish, exquisitely selfish when it comes to kids, we will all want our child to be the one that is guaranteed to come out useful and productive.
  - gutnor 13y ago
    That's exactly the pitch of the doctor in Gattaca. The world is harsh and unforgiving, genetic is only a tiny fraction of all the possible problems, why would you not give your kid the best chances with the things you can control ?
comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
Yes, I think it will happen. There is a market for this stuff, and, in time, when and why to say N-O will become less and less obvious. There are problems with genetic selection. But I think the larger problem will be the personal toll of new found ways of negatively assessing ourselves, and pointlessly diagnosing our inevitable sundry personal weaknesses as medical syndromes.
blowski 13y ago
One reason why it might _not_ happen - lack of demand. Clearly I have a very small sample so it's merely an anecdote, but I haven't met anybody that wants this for themselves, even if they think other people will want it. I know some people will want it, but it would need to be near universal for something like Gattaca to become reality.
- mchusma 13y ago
  Hmmm...my wife and I are trying right now and we would 100% want it. Not for sex, eye color, or hair color, but essentially everything else I would want if given the option.
- Apocryphon 13y ago
  I'd think gene therapies for people who discover that they're predisposed to diseases after DNA screening would have greater demand. There's a lot more people currently alive than being born. Each generation cares about its own survival more than future ones.
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Doesn't everybody do a chromosome check now? Lots of people (most people) want it and do it, or something like it. Its currently limited only by what is affordable.
  - Jgrubb 13y ago
    Probably outing myself as the hippy around here, but my wife and I opted out for all 3 of our kids. The entire traditional / medical / western / whatever you want to call it model of childbirth in New Jersey is very much about making you acutely aware of the things that you should be afraid of during the pregnancy. All of these things are detectable with a litany of very expensive tests! And you will be lectured and browbeaten to hell and back if you decline, so I imagine that factors heavily into the popularity of chromosome tests these days.
    - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
carsongross 13y ago
Can someone give me a non-religious moral reason not to pursue this?
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Cruelty, class system, racism, heck most of the moral reasons are non-religious.
  - DalekBaldwin 13y ago
    We'll still have those things either way.
    - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
      But now we automate it, and only for the rich.
      - DalekBaldwin 13y ago
        Some might consider your model of malevolence in human affairs to be oversimplified.
        JoeAltmaier 13y ago
        Bumper sticker!
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    Can you elaborate? I can imagine the class system argument (though I'd like to hear it, because it is interesting and not that straightforward), but what about the others? The race of the child is alredy determined by my choice - if I marry a person of my race, then our kid will be the same; and if I desire a child of race X, then I can go and have lots of kids with someone of that race. And what is the cruelty difference between not making a frozen egg into a baby because of its genes, and not making a frozen egg into a baby because you decided you don't want more kids?
cliveowen 13y ago
I know this might sound bad but I actually think the reality portrayed in Gattaca is not that bad. I mean, if you put aside the discrimination faced by that part of the population born the natural way, you have a society where almost everyone is healthy and will live longer than previously possible, and is of great contribution to the community. I think that's our future and it doesn't scare me that much, what actually scares me are the endless genetic mutations that result in a wide array of tumors and untreatable diseases.
- adeptus 13y ago
  One of the problems is that it will create an environment where individuals are strongly encouraged and pressured into pursuing a particular type of career or avoid XYZ other activities. Reminds me of the stereotypical asian parent forcing their children to become lawyers or doctors, when the individual would much rather pursue sports, arts or something else entirely. One of the most critical aspects of success is motivation and desire to accomplish X. When everyone around you is saying you should do Y because of your genetic makeup it could lead to a lot more dissatisfied human beings.
  - cliveowen 13y ago
    This is a great point, it would definitely reshape society as we know it, and maybe for the worse. We can only speculate, but I sure hope that if there'll be a way to pick the healthiest embryo and have a child that will live longer than otherwise possible, we won't let some prejudices and morality issues stand in our way to a better, healthier society.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    This is an interesting avenue to explore - one thing is features that are general improvements (say, not having some deadly disease); but there are many features that would facilitate specialization - helping you in one way while hurting in another. A mild example in Gattaca is the six-fingered pianist - which in essence means that 'being a pianist' has to be chosen by others before you are able to think and decide. And there are obviously horrible possibilities of specialization, like deliberately creating conscience-less embryos for military needs or autism-squared embryos for specialized uses (as suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune, for example).
andrewcooke 13y ago
vaguely related - i recently read margaret atwood's oryx and crake, which is another dystopian biotech future, and i rather enjoyed it. she's pretty cynical (and quite amusing at times) and while you can pick holes in many of her arguments the overall jaundiced view of stupid selfish humans screwing themselves over is pretty convincing. (weirdly, some of what she predicted - about 10 years ago now - seems to be coming more true in software. you can't help but think of google when you read descriptions of the biotech corporations, with their compounds designed to isolate superior employees ;o).
- Apocryphon 13y ago
  A dystopian novel about some hip Silicon Valley company finding the secret sauce to objectively rank human beings with software, because of the difficulty in hiring good programmers, is just too painfully apt to imagine.
gmuslera 13y ago
Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more than genetics, unless you get visibly impaired by some genetic problem. For the by far big majority of people those are the factors that should be taken into account, not the base material, but how you grow up, what you learn, how you are. Of course, if you have enough money to genetically design your children, probably have enough money to feed and raise them right, give them access to the best education, and probably have time to be with them, and is that what will make the difference, not so much to have the best of the best genes. But even without the designer genes, nor growing in a rich family normal people still have the potential to be great in whatever they do. But is not designing the problem, is being discrimined later by people with access to your genetic info (something not very private as we leave traces of it everywhere), if that impairs your access to education or work, that will affect what you are too. Just labeling those that discriminate based on genetics as aryan race fans could put those practices in a negative enough light to avoid it to spread.
- Daniel_Newby 13y ago
  > Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more than genetics, ... To what extent you have been outsmarted by robots is determined mostly by genetics. But if slum-dwellers were given basic income and a negative income tax, it would be impossible to farm them for votes, so they have been indoctrinated to believe that they are smarter than robots and have been cheated out of jobs. This keeps them voting for the next handout, keeping the welfare bureaucracy and its "leaders" in power. We are living in a vicious genetic dystopia today. Naturally you will read not a word of this in Scientific American. They are hyper-leftist and cannot imagine a future of automated prosperity without their kind to centrally plan it. (One of the reasons they continue to moonbat against Reagan to this day was his vast expansion of the negative income tax.)
noonespecial 13y ago
Huh. I always thought Gattaca was a commentary on what we already have. It seemed to me an allegory about poor minorities making it into the rich upper class. The genetically engineered angle seemed like a small plot device, not a central feature. If we take health and wealth of the typical first worlder and compare it with that of the average third worlder, it already looks pretty Gattaca to me.
- Fargren 13y ago
  Good science fiction is almost always about the present, not the future. As Ursula Le Guin put in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness[1] "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. (...)Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying." [1]Full text here: http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/science-fiction-isnt-about-the-future-or-the-past/ http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15...
  - bradleyland 13y ago
    Sometimes it's about both. When I watched Gattaca, I was really impressed with how well they tied together a broad social commentary on the present with a more literal warning about the impending future.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      It's about both because they are often the same thing. How we deal with the present informs us how we may react to the future, and how we view hypothetical future situations tells us something about our present, often by drawing parallels that point out the ways in which our assumed (often inherited) beliefs are often in opposition with our stated, rational beliefs. It's always boggled my mind that some authors have such little regard for science fiction. In my opinion, it's one of the most powerful contexts you can use, when done well.
negamax 13y ago
My favourite line from the movie Vincent: You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.
applecore 13y ago
> If the past is irrelevant, then we are equally irrelevant to the people living in 2113. They don’t care what we think about morality, public policy, fashion, economics, or anything else. It doesn’t matter what we “decide” about designer babies or anything else. It’s their world. They will view us with contempt. Or with pity. Get used to it. http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24266 http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24266
josefresco 13y ago
Forget the custom-baby angle, did anyone catch this little nugget? " Their tests cannot recognize every possible shade, but they are specific enough to distinguish between brown, blue and mottled brown-blue eyes, as well as brown, black, blonde and red hair. Such studies are intended to help solve crimes, but clinicians at fertility clinics could easily adapt the strategies for PGD. " Sounds like a lot sooner (now?) law enforcement will be able to determine a lot more about a potential suspect with just DNA. Or am I not reading that correctly?
- tocomment 13y ago
  23andme got my eye color wrong so it must not be perfected just yet.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  That's exactly what the're saying - law enforcement has had that ability (DNA -> likelihoods of visual properties, not 100% accurate of course) for some time already, and they can use it on embryos as well.
devx 13y ago
I wonder if say 50 years from now, we'll be like those religious conservatives who don't want to let women do whatever they want with their bodies (mainly talking about abortion here). Will we also be the ones demanding that the new generations have no right to design their children, while they'd argue that we should just "mind our own business" and that it's not government's place to decide how to effectively "create" their own children. I think this century will see a lot of interesting changes, and not just technological, but also societal. Can we design our own children? Can we marry robots? Can we change our gender? Should the government be able to monitor our thoughts to protect us from terrorism? Will we still have the nonsense "war on terror" even 50 years from now, or will we end all "war on abstracts" by then, just like we are about to end the war on drugs? A lot of new questions will need a lot of new answers as new technologies start making all sorts of new things possible.
- protomyth 13y ago
  I don't see this as anywhere near the same argument as abortion and I think trying to tie it into the abortion debate will not be helpful or truthful for anyone.
hyperion2010 13y ago
The 'science' in Gattaca is just an excuse for segregating human beings based on some arbitrary criteria. As others have pointed out this is nothing new. What is extremely irritating is that people actually think that genetics works the way it is portrayed in the film. This is patently false. Yes, some portion of what an organism is is determined by the primary sequence of its DNA. It turns out that the contribution of primary sequence alone is quite small. Look at all the naive genome wide association data sets that have revealed that primary DNA sequences are in most cases very poor predictors of phenotype. This should't be surprising to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of evolution and the interaction between ecology and development. Yes, this is classic nurture vs nature stuff. The fact that people want to claim that science could actually give us a universal, deterministic and predictive answer about the future should quickly alert us that the principles on which they are basing their predictions is not science and not predictive, but instead an ideology based on prejudice rather than evidence.
- Apocryphon 13y ago
  'Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There -are- no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals.' - Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics"
tokenadult 13y ago
The eye-color part of the article must not be factually correct, unless there have been some very recent developments in understanding genetic influence on eye color. Craig Venter, the first human being to have his genome sequenced, pointed out in interviews[1] that even after the sequencing, no one could tell for sure from the sequence that he has blue eyes. Just in the last day, an article following up on last week's American Society of Human Genetics conference[2] pointed out that genetic studies have continually overpromised and underdelivered, and there are still many very basic issues of human genetics that are embedded in deep uncertainty. As the article kindly submitted here points out, people are already demanding designer babies. They used to try to get those by looking for sperm donations from the Nobel laureate sperm bank,[3] but that project had disappointing results, and the sperm bank is no longer in operation. Researchers on human genetics I know locally (who analyze the data from the Minnesota Twin Families Study) use a photograph of two identical (monozygotic) twins from Germany[4] (from a different source, I think the original medical journal source, rather than the blog I link to here) to show that although genes are certainly very influential on human development, environment, including differing choices of lifestyle, matters too. [1] http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2007/09/11/craig-venter-discusses-his-genome http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2007/09/11/cra... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genome/2013/10/human_genetics_successes_and_failures_ashg_stories_of_disease_genes.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genom... [3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156 [4] http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-ewald/ http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-e...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

52 points by diwank 13y ago

Despite laws meant to prevent genetic discrimination, the world of Gattaca is a highly stratified one with two distinct classes: the valids—who have the right genes, the most prestigious jobs and the highest quality of life—and the in-valids, who were conceived in the typical fashion and are relegated to menial work and relative poverty. Eugenics also risks creating a genetically homogenous population that is far more vulnerable to disease and freak deleterious mutations than a diverse one. Isn't their significant evidence that more diverse gene pools, even unexpected combinations of genes are usually more adapted in several ways, because of heterosis [0]. It seems foolish that this one new factor would make eugenics any more successful than its last phase of popular. Not to mention it the deeply-held 'moral repugnance'[1] aspect. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis [1] http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repugnance.pdf?sequence=6 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repu...

pfortuny 13y ago
There is some history to be learned from the genetic variability problem of Ireland's potatoes in the XIX Century. Apart from other -more serious- problems, obviously, but genetic similarity is not necessarily a good thing.
- temujin 13y ago
  Variation can be deliberately increased, not just decreased. And PGD creates an incentive for the former: the greater the difference between your own and your partner's DNA, the greater the expected benefit from informed selection.
- JVIDEL 13y ago
  I was just going to mention that: given economies of scale custom babies will probably share a lot of identical prefab genetic blocks for every specification since it would be far cheaper than engineering every trait from scratch. At that point there would be enough GM humans walking around that a virus might evolve to attack only them, and it would spread like wildfire among the population given the lack of genetic variation, the only exception being old regular humans and maybe a few of those with parents wealthy enough to get them tailor-made without any of the preexisting "parts" that the majority uses.
maxerickson 13y ago
The often overlooked part of Gattaca is that the unmeasured qualities of the hero allowed him to overcome the restrictions of the society. It starts off with a picture of hell, and then shows him overcoming it.
comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
Heterosis just means there are twice as many factors to worry over. If it becomes too faddish to pick the exact same two genetic codings for a particular gene or select away every gene not on a preferred list, we still lose and immense amount of variability within a generation. The ultimate end is not even to simply pick the contents of the 46 chromosomes. It is medically plausible to purposefully create human chimeras -- basically it when fraternal twins happen to combine to become one fetus. ("We have selected these 46 chromosomes for the neural material, and these other 46 for the skeletal-muscular system. Looks like we have a few fetuses where the combination took to the right locations. We destroyed many eggs, but it is all worth it so your son can be the best, right?")
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Lots of reasons to leave randomness in, from a societal viewpoint. But nobody will stand up and say "screw over my kid so society benefits". We're all mostly selfish, exquisitely selfish when it comes to kids, we will all want our child to be the one that is guaranteed to come out useful and productive.
- gutnor 13y ago
  That's exactly the pitch of the doctor in Gattaca. The world is harsh and unforgiving, genetic is only a tiny fraction of all the possible problems, why would you not give your kid the best chances with the things you can control ?

comrade_ogilvy 13y ago

Yes, I think it will happen. There is a market for this stuff, and, in time, when and why to say N-O will become less and less obvious. There are problems with genetic selection. But I think the larger problem will be the personal toll of new found ways of negatively assessing ourselves, and pointlessly diagnosing our inevitable sundry personal weaknesses as medical syndromes.

blowski 13y ago

One reason why it might _not_ happen - lack of demand. Clearly I have a very small sample so it's merely an anecdote, but I haven't met anybody that wants this for themselves, even if they think other people will want it. I know some people will want it, but it would need to be near universal for something like Gattaca to become reality.

mchusma 13y ago
Hmmm...my wife and I are trying right now and we would 100% want it. Not for sex, eye color, or hair color, but essentially everything else I would want if given the option.
Apocryphon 13y ago
I'd think gene therapies for people who discover that they're predisposed to diseases after DNA screening would have greater demand. There's a lot more people currently alive than being born. Each generation cares about its own survival more than future ones.
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Doesn't everybody do a chromosome check now? Lots of people (most people) want it and do it, or something like it. Its currently limited only by what is affordable.
- Jgrubb 13y ago
  Probably outing myself as the hippy around here, but my wife and I opted out for all 3 of our kids. The entire traditional / medical / western / whatever you want to call it model of childbirth in New Jersey is very much about making you acutely aware of the things that you should be afraid of during the pregnancy. All of these things are detectable with a litany of very expensive tests! And you will be lectured and browbeaten to hell and back if you decline, so I imagine that factors heavily into the popularity of chromosome tests these days.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago

carsongross 13y ago

Can someone give me a non-religious moral reason not to pursue this?

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Cruelty, class system, racism, heck most of the moral reasons are non-religious.
- DalekBaldwin 13y ago
  We'll still have those things either way.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    But now we automate it, and only for the rich.
    - DalekBaldwin 13y ago
      Some might consider your model of malevolence in human affairs to be oversimplified.
      - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
        Bumper sticker!
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Can you elaborate? I can imagine the class system argument (though I'd like to hear it, because it is interesting and not that straightforward), but what about the others? The race of the child is alredy determined by my choice - if I marry a person of my race, then our kid will be the same; and if I desire a child of race X, then I can go and have lots of kids with someone of that race. And what is the cruelty difference between not making a frozen egg into a baby because of its genes, and not making a frozen egg into a baby because you decided you don't want more kids?

cliveowen 13y ago

I know this might sound bad but I actually think the reality portrayed in Gattaca is not that bad. I mean, if you put aside the discrimination faced by that part of the population born the natural way, you have a society where almost everyone is healthy and will live longer than previously possible, and is of great contribution to the community. I think that's our future and it doesn't scare me that much, what actually scares me are the endless genetic mutations that result in a wide array of tumors and untreatable diseases.

adeptus 13y ago
One of the problems is that it will create an environment where individuals are strongly encouraged and pressured into pursuing a particular type of career or avoid XYZ other activities. Reminds me of the stereotypical asian parent forcing their children to become lawyers or doctors, when the individual would much rather pursue sports, arts or something else entirely. One of the most critical aspects of success is motivation and desire to accomplish X. When everyone around you is saying you should do Y because of your genetic makeup it could lead to a lot more dissatisfied human beings.
- cliveowen 13y ago
  This is a great point, it would definitely reshape society as we know it, and maybe for the worse. We can only speculate, but I sure hope that if there'll be a way to pick the healthiest embryo and have a child that will live longer than otherwise possible, we won't let some prejudices and morality issues stand in our way to a better, healthier society.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  This is an interesting avenue to explore - one thing is features that are general improvements (say, not having some deadly disease); but there are many features that would facilitate specialization - helping you in one way while hurting in another. A mild example in Gattaca is the six-fingered pianist - which in essence means that 'being a pianist' has to be chosen by others before you are able to think and decide. And there are obviously horrible possibilities of specialization, like deliberately creating conscience-less embryos for military needs or autism-squared embryos for specialized uses (as suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune, for example).

andrewcooke 13y ago

vaguely related - i recently read margaret atwood's oryx and crake, which is another dystopian biotech future, and i rather enjoyed it. she's pretty cynical (and quite amusing at times) and while you can pick holes in many of her arguments the overall jaundiced view of stupid selfish humans screwing themselves over is pretty convincing. (weirdly, some of what she predicted - about 10 years ago now - seems to be coming more true in software. you can't help but think of google when you read descriptions of the biotech corporations, with their compounds designed to isolate superior employees ;o).

Apocryphon 13y ago
A dystopian novel about some hip Silicon Valley company finding the secret sauce to objectively rank human beings with software, because of the difficulty in hiring good programmers, is just too painfully apt to imagine.

gmuslera 13y ago

Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more than genetics, unless you get visibly impaired by some genetic problem. For the by far big majority of people those are the factors that should be taken into account, not the base material, but how you grow up, what you learn, how you are. Of course, if you have enough money to genetically design your children, probably have enough money to feed and raise them right, give them access to the best education, and probably have time to be with them, and is that what will make the difference, not so much to have the best of the best genes. But even without the designer genes, nor growing in a rich family normal people still have the potential to be great in whatever they do. But is not designing the problem, is being discrimined later by people with access to your genetic info (something not very private as we leave traces of it everywhere), if that impairs your access to education or work, that will affect what you are too. Just labeling those that discriminate based on genetics as aryan race fans could put those practices in a negative enough light to avoid it to spread.

Daniel_Newby 13y ago
> Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more than genetics, ... To what extent you have been outsmarted by robots is determined mostly by genetics. But if slum-dwellers were given basic income and a negative income tax, it would be impossible to farm them for votes, so they have been indoctrinated to believe that they are smarter than robots and have been cheated out of jobs. This keeps them voting for the next handout, keeping the welfare bureaucracy and its "leaders" in power. We are living in a vicious genetic dystopia today. Naturally you will read not a word of this in Scientific American. They are hyper-leftist and cannot imagine a future of automated prosperity without their kind to centrally plan it. (One of the reasons they continue to moonbat against Reagan to this day was his vast expansion of the negative income tax.)

noonespecial 13y ago

Huh. I always thought Gattaca was a commentary on what we already have. It seemed to me an allegory about poor minorities making it into the rich upper class. The genetically engineered angle seemed like a small plot device, not a central feature. If we take health and wealth of the typical first worlder and compare it with that of the average third worlder, it already looks pretty Gattaca to me.

Fargren 13y ago
Good science fiction is almost always about the present, not the future. As Ursula Le Guin put in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness[1] "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. (...)Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying." [1]Full text here: http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/science-fiction-isnt-about-the-future-or-the-past/ http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15...
- bradleyland 13y ago
  Sometimes it's about both. When I watched Gattaca, I was really impressed with how well they tied together a broad social commentary on the present with a more literal warning about the impending future.
  - kbenson 13y ago
    It's about both because they are often the same thing. How we deal with the present informs us how we may react to the future, and how we view hypothetical future situations tells us something about our present, often by drawing parallels that point out the ways in which our assumed (often inherited) beliefs are often in opposition with our stated, rational beliefs. It's always boggled my mind that some authors have such little regard for science fiction. In my opinion, it's one of the most powerful contexts you can use, when done well.

negamax 13y ago

My favourite line from the movie Vincent: You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.

applecore 13y ago

> If the past is irrelevant, then we are equally irrelevant to the people living in 2113. They don’t care what we think about morality, public policy, fashion, economics, or anything else. It doesn’t matter what we “decide” about designer babies or anything else. It’s their world. They will view us with contempt. Or with pity. Get used to it. http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24266 http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24266

josefresco 13y ago

Forget the custom-baby angle, did anyone catch this little nugget? " Their tests cannot recognize every possible shade, but they are specific enough to distinguish between brown, blue and mottled brown-blue eyes, as well as brown, black, blonde and red hair. Such studies are intended to help solve crimes, but clinicians at fertility clinics could easily adapt the strategies for PGD. " Sounds like a lot sooner (now?) law enforcement will be able to determine a lot more about a potential suspect with just DNA. Or am I not reading that correctly?

tocomment 13y ago
23andme got my eye color wrong so it must not be perfected just yet.
PeterisP 13y ago
That's exactly what the're saying - law enforcement has had that ability (DNA -> likelihoods of visual properties, not 100% accurate of course) for some time already, and they can use it on embryos as well.

devx 13y ago

I wonder if say 50 years from now, we'll be like those religious conservatives who don't want to let women do whatever they want with their bodies (mainly talking about abortion here). Will we also be the ones demanding that the new generations have no right to design their children, while they'd argue that we should just "mind our own business" and that it's not government's place to decide how to effectively "create" their own children. I think this century will see a lot of interesting changes, and not just technological, but also societal. Can we design our own children? Can we marry robots? Can we change our gender? Should the government be able to monitor our thoughts to protect us from terrorism? Will we still have the nonsense "war on terror" even 50 years from now, or will we end all "war on abstracts" by then, just like we are about to end the war on drugs? A lot of new questions will need a lot of new answers as new technologies start making all sorts of new things possible.

protomyth 13y ago
I don't see this as anywhere near the same argument as abortion and I think trying to tie it into the abortion debate will not be helpful or truthful for anyone.

hyperion2010 13y ago

The 'science' in Gattaca is just an excuse for segregating human beings based on some arbitrary criteria. As others have pointed out this is nothing new. What is extremely irritating is that people actually think that genetics works the way it is portrayed in the film. This is patently false. Yes, some portion of what an organism is is determined by the primary sequence of its DNA. It turns out that the contribution of primary sequence alone is quite small. Look at all the naive genome wide association data sets that have revealed that primary DNA sequences are in most cases very poor predictors of phenotype. This should't be surprising to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of evolution and the interaction between ecology and development. Yes, this is classic nurture vs nature stuff. The fact that people want to claim that science could actually give us a universal, deterministic and predictive answer about the future should quickly alert us that the principles on which they are basing their predictions is not science and not predictive, but instead an ideology based on prejudice rather than evidence.

Apocryphon 13y ago
'Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There -are- no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals.' - Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics"

tokenadult 13y ago

The eye-color part of the article must not be factually correct, unless there have been some very recent developments in understanding genetic influence on eye color. Craig Venter, the first human being to have his genome sequenced, pointed out in interviews[1] that even after the sequencing, no one could tell for sure from the sequence that he has blue eyes. Just in the last day, an article following up on last week's American Society of Human Genetics conference[2] pointed out that genetic studies have continually overpromised and underdelivered, and there are still many very basic issues of human genetics that are embedded in deep uncertainty. As the article kindly submitted here points out, people are already demanding designer babies. They used to try to get those by looking for sperm donations from the Nobel laureate sperm bank,[3] but that project had disappointing results, and the sperm bank is no longer in operation. Researchers on human genetics I know locally (who analyze the data from the Minnesota Twin Families Study) use a photograph of two identical (monozygotic) twins from Germany[4] (from a different source, I think the original medical journal source, rather than the blog I link to here) to show that although genes are certainly very influential on human development, environment, including differing choices of lifestyle, matters too. [1] http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2007/09/11/craig-venter-discusses-his-genome http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2007/09/11/cra... [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genome/2013/10/human_genetics_successes_and_failures_ashg_stories_of_disease_genes.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genom... [3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156 [4] http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-ewald/ http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-e...

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