GATTACA

After taking the final, the essay question I wrote about caused me to recall my memories of watching GATTACA. The question relating to biological and technological reproduction is extremely relevant to the plot of GATTACA. The movie takes place in a futuristic world, where there are two types of people: normal people and genetically enhanced people. In this world, parents are able to choose the traits that they want their children to inherit, essentially creating perfect human beings. The movie sort of blurs the line between these two types of reproduction. The children being born are most certainly not robots, but the way in which they are born is not natural. That brings about the question of how to qualify these people. They are human in one sense, but not really human in another. Flaws are part of what makes us human, but in GATTACA many people do not have flaws. The creation of these flawless human beings creates segregation in the population. This relates to the overall conversation we have been having in class and the main question I’ve been asking myself: Is it worth it to pursue advancements in technology/genetics that may pose catastrophic potential dangers? Obviously there are benefits, which can be seen in GATTACA. When parents are able to pick the genes of their descendants, there is no risk of disease. Eradicating disease is the main goal of the entire medical research field. GATTACA also exposes the risks of these kind of advancements. If you could choose the genetic makeup of your children, why wouldn’t you make them smarter and more athletically gifted? This would create a divide between those who are genetically enhanced and those who are genetically inferior. There would be no societal purpose for those who are not genetically superior, because their productivity would not be maximized. Regular humans would be no more useful than animals, which may ultimately lead to their extinction. The implementation of this new technology would completely wipe out the process of natural selection, because there is nothing natural about it. Still, this might be less risky than creating robots to do our jobs for us, because at least there is no chance of a non-human takeover, even though the argument could be made that an enhanced human is not necessarily human. The movie is just science fiction, but at the rate we are progressing, the day where this kind of science is possible may be in the very near future.