4 ms·

Gattaca - Hollywood Gets It Exactly Right

16 points by rfreytag 17y ago

rfreytag 17y ago
Gattaca - a favorite of mine. A future made by hacking the human genome creates a society that the protagonist hacks with pure will.
jacquesm 17y ago
I think Gattaca has to be one of the very best predictive near SF movies. From multi-touch user interfaces to immense speedups in the analysis of genetic data and the social changes that would bring with it. Plenty of people - smart ones at that - still disagree with that opinion though, I wonder why. Even if the exact situation is hard to predict these things are for me undeniably part of our future: - genetic screening for employees It's simple, there may be laws against it, there will be plenty of resistance, but in the end it will probably be allowed. Someone will use the 'think of the victims' argument. After a particularly bad 'employee going postal' episode and it will be argued that this could have been prevented with proper screening. Or it may start with certain high profile jobs only, and then slowly become acceptable practice elsewhere. - genetic screening of children Genomic optimization, or whatever you want to call it will be driven by alignment of two desires, first the desire or parents to have a 'perfect' child, second by society as a whole to improve life-span and to decrease the cost of medical care. - ever more reliance on genetics in forensics There is already quite a trend under way here, every year many more people are convicted because of genetic evidence, just like with fingerprints originally genetic evidence is by some considered to be infallible, but it has already been proven that that is not the case: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=lab-creates-fake-dna-evidence-2009-08-18 http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/pos... As for the tech in the movie it is almost but not quite here. There is a company in Switzerland that I had some brief contact with about a year ago that claims they can sequence a whole genome in under 10 days using a clever technique where they break up the DNA strings in much smaller segments than 'normal' (a few hundred basepairs, where 'normal' was more like 4000-10000 bp) and then analyze them in an on-chip laboratory. The output of this process is an endless stream of jpegs of fluorescent segments that are then analyzed by a pipeline of clustered computers that piece together the original sequence by first pulling the short subsequences out of the jpegs, then matching up the overlaps. Because of the shorter sequences the chemical step gets much shorter (< 1 hour) but the computational complexity of the problem gets much worse. As computers get faster and are able to use ever shorter sequences without losing track of what goes where (the lower limit is somewhere around a few hundred base-pairs I believe) we'll probably see time on the order of a day within a decade. The http://genomics.xprize.org/ http://genomics.xprize.org/ bets that someone will be able to do 100 genomes in 10 days. The reason why that does not equate to a runtime of 1/10th of a day is because the process is heavily pipelined, so a lab throwing all its current resources at the problem for a single genome could already beat that number but that would not mean any significant improvement in technology. To have a sustained output of one completed genome every 2.4 hours would be a pretty major breakthrough. An all out effort would be limited by these steps that have to be run in sequence: - the breaking up - amplification - photography - analysis - reassembly Disclaimer: I'm not at all a professional in this field (though some days I wished I was!), just an interested lay person, chances are that some of the above is wrong or already outdated.
- gaius 17y ago
  genetic screening of children Out of curiousity, where are you? In most of Europe, eugenics is deeply taboo.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Yes, in Europe, Netherlands. I know it is taboo, but ignoring the possibility that it will happen anyway also seems to be taboo. We're edging slowly in that direction. The drive for this stuff to happen is there, maybe they'll do it illegally, rich people only, maybe it will be 'special cases only' at first but somehow I expect it to creep in under the radar. Personally I think it is a bad development, I'm not sure if google books results work but here is one to a book called 'backdoor to eugenics': http://books.google.com/books?id=48t9i33bMqMC&dq=backdoor+to+eugenics&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=nuKcSvagItPd-QaOzcUj&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=48t9i33bMqMC&dq=backdoo... And that's not even beginning to address the potential consequences of meddling with machinery that you do not fully understand.
    - lionhearted 17y ago
      > Personally I think it is a bad development If I may ask, why do you think so? My family has a history of bad knees. Like, a third of my family over age 30 have had significant knee injuries. I had one at age 22. My girlfriend's family has a slight history of heart troubles. My family has no such heart problems. Her family has no such knee problems. If there was a way to ensure any children we had would take its general cardio systems from my bloodlines, and joints from her bloodlines - sign me up. I have better eyesight, whereas she has perfect skin. I have broad shoulders and a strong frame, whereas she has a cheetah's metabolism. If I could ensure my children got the best traits of both of us, I'd do it happily and pay a lot for it. It seems like a fantastic thing to me, and the idea of it is pretty exciting. Thoughts on why it might lead to bad places?
      - gaius 17y ago
        Eliminating medical problems ought to raise no objections, but "broad shoulders and perfect skin" is surely an aesthetic preference only. It's not far from there to "my wife has blonde hair and I have blue eyes..."
hvs 17y ago
Gattaca is a great movie -- one of my favorites -- but genetics is not predestination. The environment plays a huge role in the development of children and many diseases are not genetic in nature at all. Many other diseases and conditions are a combination of genetics and environment. Are we in danger of creating a society of a "genetic upper class"? Sure, as long as there are people willing to buy into the idea that genetics determines our future there will be people that want to exploit that for their own personal gain. But that is why it will continue to be our duty to defend the dignity of human beings and use science to improve the lot of all of us, not to exclude some in favor of others based on some pseudo-scientific eugenicist fantasy.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  You are very right, but the fact of the matter is that money will probably be the deciding factor in who gets access to this kind of technology and who does not. It's not as though our current status of 'defending' the rights of the people in tight spots on this planet gives us much hope that in the future we will suddenly become a completely different race in this respect. History is littered with the corpses of those who were taken advantage of, I fail to see how the future will somehow be magically different.
  - run4yourlives 17y ago
    One cannot simply focus on the corpses without also seeing the wars that caused them. I would hope that there are a noble few that choose to stand up to such a development.
  - hvs 17y ago
    History also shows that people are often willing to stand up to great evil and oppose it. I don't disagree that humans have been pretty awful in the past and will continue to be in the future. We are not on some Hegelian march towards a preordained future. The decisions we make will decide whether we live in a good society or a dystopia.
- cousin_it 17y ago
  Well, what if genetics were predestination? Would it be okay to judge/exclude somebody based on Minority Report-type information about them, as opposed to Gattaca-type information? Is there a difference? I wonder what people here think.
fiaz 17y ago
One of the best moments in movie history is the swimming scene at the end [I should add, if you have not seen the movie and are doing a startup, do yourself a favor and watch the movie and do NOT click on the link!]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNRvRecE1Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNRvRecE1Y
greggraham 17y ago
Gattaca is a well-done movie in general. My wife liked it, and she prefers art films and usually does not like science fiction.
run4yourlives 17y ago
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door. Oh, how we've forgotten where we have come from.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus
radu_floricica 17y ago
I haven't read the article. Sorry, nytimes tends to be a bit thin on new information. That said, Gattaca is unpractical for two very practical reasons: First, environment matters at least as much as genetics. Second, the Heisenberg Principle: knowing about a genetic predisposition will change it. Who do you think has a bigger chance of having diabetes: somebody who was tested at birth to have a 35% chance, or somebody with 10%? In the real world and with reasonably cheap medicine it's the second. With a 1/3 chance, not only will you have regular checkups, but you'll watch your diet and most likely take preventive medicine. Actually I think this is a still virgin aria which may develop a lot with genetic testing: get early treatment so as _not_ to get a certain disease.
- lrm242 17y ago
  Funny that, you don't read this particular article, you simply watch and listen to it.
wkdown 17y ago
I'd really enjoy seeing a reimagining of 'Gattaca'

16 points by rfreytag 17y ago

Gattaca - a favorite of mine. A future made by hacking the human genome creates a society that the protagonist hacks with pure will.

jacquesm 17y ago

I think Gattaca has to be one of the very best predictive near SF movies. From multi-touch user interfaces to immense speedups in the analysis of genetic data and the social changes that would bring with it. Plenty of people - smart ones at that - still disagree with that opinion though, I wonder why. Even if the exact situation is hard to predict these things are for me undeniably part of our future: - genetic screening for employees It's simple, there may be laws against it, there will be plenty of resistance, but in the end it will probably be allowed. Someone will use the 'think of the victims' argument. After a particularly bad 'employee going postal' episode and it will be argued that this could have been prevented with proper screening. Or it may start with certain high profile jobs only, and then slowly become acceptable practice elsewhere. - genetic screening of children Genomic optimization, or whatever you want to call it will be driven by alignment of two desires, first the desire or parents to have a 'perfect' child, second by society as a whole to improve life-span and to decrease the cost of medical care. - ever more reliance on genetics in forensics There is already quite a trend under way here, every year many more people are convicted because of genetic evidence, just like with fingerprints originally genetic evidence is by some considered to be infallible, but it has already been proven that that is not the case: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=lab-creates-fake-dna-evidence-2009-08-18 http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/pos... As for the tech in the movie it is almost but not quite here. There is a company in Switzerland that I had some brief contact with about a year ago that claims they can sequence a whole genome in under 10 days using a clever technique where they break up the DNA strings in much smaller segments than 'normal' (a few hundred basepairs, where 'normal' was more like 4000-10000 bp) and then analyze them in an on-chip laboratory. The output of this process is an endless stream of jpegs of fluorescent segments that are then analyzed by a pipeline of clustered computers that piece together the original sequence by first pulling the short subsequences out of the jpegs, then matching up the overlaps. Because of the shorter sequences the chemical step gets much shorter (< 1 hour) but the computational complexity of the problem gets much worse. As computers get faster and are able to use ever shorter sequences without losing track of what goes where (the lower limit is somewhere around a few hundred base-pairs I believe) we'll probably see time on the order of a day within a decade. The http://genomics.xprize.org/ http://genomics.xprize.org/ bets that someone will be able to do 100 genomes in 10 days. The reason why that does not equate to a runtime of 1/10th of a day is because the process is heavily pipelined, so a lab throwing all its current resources at the problem for a single genome could already beat that number but that would not mean any significant improvement in technology. To have a sustained output of one completed genome every 2.4 hours would be a pretty major breakthrough. An all out effort would be limited by these steps that have to be run in sequence: - the breaking up - amplification - photography - analysis - reassembly Disclaimer: I'm not at all a professional in this field (though some days I wished I was!), just an interested lay person, chances are that some of the above is wrong or already outdated.

gaius 17y ago
genetic screening of children Out of curiousity, where are you? In most of Europe, eugenics is deeply taboo.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Yes, in Europe, Netherlands. I know it is taboo, but ignoring the possibility that it will happen anyway also seems to be taboo. We're edging slowly in that direction. The drive for this stuff to happen is there, maybe they'll do it illegally, rich people only, maybe it will be 'special cases only' at first but somehow I expect it to creep in under the radar. Personally I think it is a bad development, I'm not sure if google books results work but here is one to a book called 'backdoor to eugenics': http://books.google.com/books?id=48t9i33bMqMC&dq=backdoor+to+eugenics&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=nuKcSvagItPd-QaOzcUj&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=48t9i33bMqMC&dq=backdoo... And that's not even beginning to address the potential consequences of meddling with machinery that you do not fully understand.
  - lionhearted 17y ago
    > Personally I think it is a bad development If I may ask, why do you think so? My family has a history of bad knees. Like, a third of my family over age 30 have had significant knee injuries. I had one at age 22. My girlfriend's family has a slight history of heart troubles. My family has no such heart problems. Her family has no such knee problems. If there was a way to ensure any children we had would take its general cardio systems from my bloodlines, and joints from her bloodlines - sign me up. I have better eyesight, whereas she has perfect skin. I have broad shoulders and a strong frame, whereas she has a cheetah's metabolism. If I could ensure my children got the best traits of both of us, I'd do it happily and pay a lot for it. It seems like a fantastic thing to me, and the idea of it is pretty exciting. Thoughts on why it might lead to bad places?
    - gaius 17y ago
      Eliminating medical problems ought to raise no objections, but "broad shoulders and perfect skin" is surely an aesthetic preference only. It's not far from there to "my wife has blonde hair and I have blue eyes..."

hvs 17y ago

Gattaca is a great movie -- one of my favorites -- but genetics is not predestination. The environment plays a huge role in the development of children and many diseases are not genetic in nature at all. Many other diseases and conditions are a combination of genetics and environment. Are we in danger of creating a society of a "genetic upper class"? Sure, as long as there are people willing to buy into the idea that genetics determines our future there will be people that want to exploit that for their own personal gain. But that is why it will continue to be our duty to defend the dignity of human beings and use science to improve the lot of all of us, not to exclude some in favor of others based on some pseudo-scientific eugenicist fantasy.

jacquesm 17y ago
You are very right, but the fact of the matter is that money will probably be the deciding factor in who gets access to this kind of technology and who does not. It's not as though our current status of 'defending' the rights of the people in tight spots on this planet gives us much hope that in the future we will suddenly become a completely different race in this respect. History is littered with the corpses of those who were taken advantage of, I fail to see how the future will somehow be magically different.
- run4yourlives 17y ago
  One cannot simply focus on the corpses without also seeing the wars that caused them. I would hope that there are a noble few that choose to stand up to such a development.
- hvs 17y ago
  History also shows that people are often willing to stand up to great evil and oppose it. I don't disagree that humans have been pretty awful in the past and will continue to be in the future. We are not on some Hegelian march towards a preordained future. The decisions we make will decide whether we live in a good society or a dystopia.
cousin_it 17y ago
Well, what if genetics were predestination? Would it be okay to judge/exclude somebody based on Minority Report-type information about them, as opposed to Gattaca-type information? Is there a difference? I wonder what people here think.

fiaz 17y ago

One of the best moments in movie history is the swimming scene at the end [I should add, if you have not seen the movie and are doing a startup, do yourself a favor and watch the movie and do NOT click on the link!]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNRvRecE1Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNRvRecE1Y

greggraham 17y ago

Gattaca is a well-done movie in general. My wife liked it, and she prefers art films and usually does not like science fiction.

run4yourlives 17y ago

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door. Oh, how we've forgotten where we have come from.

jacquesm 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus

radu_floricica 17y ago

I haven't read the article. Sorry, nytimes tends to be a bit thin on new information. That said, Gattaca is unpractical for two very practical reasons: First, environment matters at least as much as genetics. Second, the Heisenberg Principle: knowing about a genetic predisposition will change it. Who do you think has a bigger chance of having diabetes: somebody who was tested at birth to have a 35% chance, or somebody with 10%? In the real world and with reasonably cheap medicine it's the second. With a 1/3 chance, not only will you have regular checkups, but you'll watch your diet and most likely take preventive medicine. Actually I think this is a still virgin aria which may develop a lot with genetic testing: get early treatment so as _not_ to get a certain disease.

lrm242 17y ago
Funny that, you don't read this particular article, you simply watch and listen to it.

wkdown 17y ago

I'd really enjoy seeing a reimagining of 'Gattaca'