The movie, GATTACA (a name containing only the letters of the four bases in DNA) depicts a future dystopia in which science and technology are used to reduce human potential to statistical probabilities and oppress those few who might break out of that reductive paradigm to achieve greater ends. With this premise, the movie offers a critique of the applications of biotechnologies that might suggest a limit to human potential for some while pressuring others to live up to their genetic potentials or risk becoming social failures.
While I think that the movie is good food for thought about the potential harms of emerging biotechnologies, I also think that humans are already dealing with the same themes that the movie presents, albeit with differing social pressures. For instance, how many people are limited to achieve their full potentials because of economic disparity between the classes?
Moreover, while the movie may elicit a sense of injustice for the characters who are born without pre-natal genetic counseling, it also portrays a world in which terrible suffering due to painful physical ailments (such as Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia) has been eliminated. What remains in this world is a group of relatively healthy people who are facing psychological pressures from society that have little to do with the actual advances that science has allowed, for these people are dealing with social dynamics that have always existed: power, privilege, and the “haves” versus the “have nots”.
Which brings me to a question: would I want to live in such a world? Maybe.
My first job out of college was as a special education teacher in Lewisville ISD. There, I taught elementary school aged children who had severe cognitive and physical “deficits”. Two of my students were terminally ill: one was dying of painful neuromuscular disorder and the other was dying of a severe seizure disorder. However, several of my students had congenital disorders that caused severe cognitive impairments, but not physical pain or suffering.
In a world like GATTACA, perhaps children like my students would never have been allowed to be born. But also, perhaps in a world like GATTACA, there would have been treatments available to cure the genetic disorders that these children suffered from. In the case of my two terminally ill children, I think that such a cure could only be a good thing. However, I have reservations about “curing” my students with cognitive “impairments.”
I think cases like the ones I have presented raise the question of what is considered “disease” or “disorder” and what is simply a “difference”. In a world like GATTACA, there seems to be no distinction between these things, as children born “tall” are preferred to “short” children, and “clear-sighted” children are preferred to “myopic” children. It would seem that parents are still concerned with their children getting ahead, and since major diseases seem to have been eliminated, they must rely on personal preferences to give their children “advantages”. Is that really so bad? Is it really so different from what goes on now?
I’ll close with this thought: paragons of human excellence have been around for many thousands of years. Achilles and Odysseus come to mind. These heroes are “god-like” and “cunning” in ways that granted them a certain kind of immortality that few people are given, and they, too, were blessed and/or cursed by an accident of birth. How is it any different for the characters in GATTACA?