CRISPR and other tools aren’t science fiction anymore. If the wealthy get there first, what happens to everyone else?
The plot of the film Gattaca explores this, the idea of what society looks like when there’s a class of genetically engineered, “superior” people, vs. the naturally born, “inferior” class.
Is that the movie where (sorry for the bad synopsis) the guy vacuums his work desk because he wants to go to space?
Tbh, I think GATTACA barely touched the topic. It focussed so much on the brothers’ rivalry that you could strip out the genetic engineering part and it’d barely change the movie
Yeah it’s a cool movie but the message of systemic disadvantages don’t matter if you try hard enough is a little questionable at best.
The issue wasn’t “try hard enough”. It was how systematic disenfranchisement hobbles people far more than their genetics.
Once you brand someone as “lesser”, their actual capacity is irrelevant. They won’t be given the opportunity to succeed (much less to fail and try again) while the presumed-superior cohort is offered advantage after advantage in order to prove they are better.
At the end it came down to him going for the launch despite knowing he’d likely get caught and the doctor letting him through despite knowing who he is, because his son was also not engineered, I think the message was people of the under class coming together to fight the system rather than just working hard
I don’t think that was the message at all.
The end message is that the doctor knew all along, and was helping him from the beginning. It didn’t matter how much work he put in, how hard he tried. How much he lied or cheated or “overcame his limitation”, at the end of the day he would have never succeeded without help from a fellow human.
Doing it all himself had started to make him prideful to some degree. And realizing that, in the background, he didn’t do it all himself was a last kick of humility to (ironically) ground the character before he leaves the ground forever.
He knew all along? I guess I didn’t pick up on that. I thought it was just at the very end.
I can see how that might change the message of the film somewhat.
It’s not expressly said. But that’s my take on it from a few different clues. For starters, he wasnt’ surprised by the invalid reading. Also the story that he tells about his son not being “all that was promised” came early in the film, with the doctor saying “who knows what he can achieve” like a wink or a nudge almost.
Whaaat? You mean you can’t overcome a heart defect with a bit more grit?
I really can’t imagine what China is doing…
Trump is directly undermining national safety by abandoning higher education, college visas for foreigners, scientific studies etc.
15 years ago we knew exactly what China was doing. Now? Good luck
He is in many many ways. Thats what i mean with China.
That movie is 9/10. The ending is absolutely beautiful.
Spoilers!
I HAVE SPOILED NOTHING.
Okay, but the moral of the story was that “superior” people weren’t actually superior. They were just racist.
The protagonist outwits and outperforms them all.
Seems like a pretty bad execution of the concept, then.
That’s the joke tbh.
In some cases there were absolute superior though. Like the pianist with 12 fingers.
The actual moral of the story was that it’s not worth it. Being a bit better at some random shit like swimming, playing piano or piloting a rocket is not good enough to sacrifice the rest.
Like the pianist with 12 fingers.
Having twelve fingers isn’t what makes you good at playing the piano.
Being a bit better at some random shit like swimming, playing piano or piloting a rocket is not good enough to sacrifice the rest.
There’s an underlying question in the story that amounts to “if you’ve made Earth such a great place, why is everyone trying to leave?”
The plan to colonize Titan is, at its root, a eugenics fantasy.
Having twelve fingers isn’t what makes you good at playing the piano.
The movie literally says that the piece cannot be played without 12 fingers.
The plan to colonize Titan is, at its root, a eugenics fantasy.
the movie doesn’t say anything about “colonizing titan”, in fact the mission doesn’t even state what’s the purpose other than to get to titan which has never been done before - it symbolizes ultimate frontier that in the eyes of eugenicists would require a perfect human to be achieved and yet the guy that ends up outcompeting everyone is a not genetically modified and achieves this through sheer skill and determination.
There’s an underlying question in the story that amounts to “if you’ve made Earth such a great place, why is everyone trying to leave?”
You’re misinterpreting the ending. Vincent always felt rejected by the world for being a natural but ends up feeling bittersweet for leaving as he found Irene and Jerome who proved to him that earth is very much capable of loving him. Not “everyone is trying to leave earth”, just Vincent really and even then he heavily diminishes his desire.
I love Gattaca and really don’t understand your beef with it. It’s a beautiful story but awfully insightful too that aged perfectly even to this day! In fact, I’ll watch it again tonight :)
Not seen Gattaca, but a multi-tier, genetically structured society is the basis of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is well worth a read.
Same for H. G. Wells- The Time Machine book in the part where the traveler meets the Morlocks and the Eloi.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine
EDIT: Got my authors mixed up, it wasn’t Jules Verne.
H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, not Verne.
My bad, dunno how I could confuse my authors
Both are very early science fiction pioneers, I can see how they could get mixed up. 🤷♂️
The Beggars Trilogy by Nancy Kress touches on this as well, but is more focused on the issues with superintelligence rather than just gene alteration, although, because people are vain, the preference for things like hair, skin and symmetry also exist in the story’s world. Oh yeah, and the coolest concept from this trilogy is a thing called “sleeplessness”, where people can alter there genes to remove the biological need to sleep, allowing people to be able to be productive for as many hours as they desire.
Great movie, excellent performances
As someone suffering from a terrible genetic disease that will kill me soon, any amount of preventing these diseases under any circumstances gets a thumbs up from me.
Sadly, the most probable cloning related future would be Gattaca
^(edit typo)
Yeah, I think we should probably allow the technology that will prevent people being born with these diseases first, and then worry about how we’re going to deal with the other stuff. This technology isn’t going to be possible to hold back indefinitely anyway.
As others have said, go see Gattaca. It’s completely about this topic and very interesting.
Awesome movie.
spoiler
An incredibly powerful scene. I still think about it regularly when thinking about human limitations.
They don’t need genetic engineering to have advantage over everyone else tbf.
Yah they already have inherited wealth and privilege, will it make ANY difference for the rest of us if their kids don’t get the diseases that they can afford to treat anyway?
Lets say they do make ubermensch super-babies and create peak physical perfection… it will take generations before that creates enough of a class-divide that it will be noticable and by then, enough of them will have fucked around and bred with the common-folk that the edges of that divide are also going to get fuzzier and fuzzier. The world is full of rich people who mingle everywhere and are allowed to impregnate who they want and nobody cares.
The only way you get the science-fiction dystopia with beautiful rich monsters with super powers versus the plucky gang of resistance fighters who are rough around the edges but have hearts of gold, is if you separate the wealthy elite out and make them live on Mars or something.
Here’s a scarier thought, if they can fine tune this shit enough they’ll probably just clone themselves and pull a ship of Theseus on themselves. Removing the only remaining equalizer between them and the rest of humanity.
The rich fucks at the top want to become gods. They won’t call it that but that’s the end game for the ones with the most hand on the wheel.
I’ll be dead, humanity is fucked as i see it but things could change i guess.
Humanity has been fucked many times before. Humans migrated out of Africa TWICE. We have been nearly wiped out several times. Maybe this will be the last time. Maybe Humans will migrate out of Africa a third time…
Reference provided, but not read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations
This has been a thing for at least a few years. Luckily last I checked (pre pandemic) it hasn’t taken off bc
- Eugenics reminds people of Nazis and is bad
- Genetic diversity might be the only thing that saves us in another pandemic. Kind of like how strains of bananas all go extinct at once if they’re genetic clones.
So probably too dangerous to actually take off any time soon. Iirc a Chinese scientist tried it and got sent to jail, seems to be a pretty universal thing
I wonder how that kid is doing. I would love to hear an update. It was bad and all but I am still curious.
It’s twins actually, Lulu and Nana. The gene editing might have increased their cognitive function.
I don’t know why, but I cannot bring myself to condemn the editing.
This happens in a smaller way with access to prenatal testing and abortions. Parents with access to those things are at least able to detect and avoid the more debilitating birth defect, while parents without access are more likely to have a child with a severe birth defect. If they’re already struggling materially, that can sometimes guarantee that both the parents and child will have no upward mobility.
This already happens with social factors that affect physical development like access to nutrition and a permanent place to live.
Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress. A scifi that deals with the creation of classes based on whether you can afford to buy your children good genes. Politicians are charismatic, ruthless and good looking, because they are bred for politics. In this world people without genemods are sorta out of luck, without any of the tools or enhancements rich genemod people have.
Or, check out GATTACA, good movie.
I’m compelled to mention every time GATTACA is mentioned, that the title is made up of the amino acids* that comprise our DNA: A,T,C,G
*nucleic acids
I’ve never studied anything about genetics or DNA, but I didn’t know that until the first time I showed my then girlfriend (now wife). Once the general premise became clear, she said something like “I should have guessed, since the title is made with A,T,C,G.”
You know I never noticed that but that’s a nice subtle reference.
Nucleic acids
Damn, u right.
Can’t wait for them to make their kids super smart and then their kids call them idiots.
Because they will be smarter haha
Despite being nearly 100 years old, Brave New World (1931), written by Aldous Huxley, covers the idea of class-based genetic engineering and genetics based class definition, as one of its core themes.
Planet of the Rich, where the apes are billionaires and everyone else is… pretty much the same.
Are you just now discovering that eugenics is bad?
The tech in itself isn’t inherently bad, it could solve a lot of issues for a lot of people. The problem is in equal access.
Which is generally the problem with eugenics. No one is arguing that avoiding downs syndrome is a bad thing.
And even then, editing out unwanted mutations can still stifle society as a whole and may be morally the wrong choice. For example, what about eradicating autism due to the immense pain these individuals receive due to our society? Is it better to change our society to accommodate people afflicted with it or wipe out the genes responsible for it if it is easier? And if we choose the latter, where is the cutoff point? Can we even tell when we crossed that line, where our drive to improve ourselves ended being done out of mercy and began to be about creating the model citizen?
We’re still overdue for a eugenics war and WW3 before Star Trek timeline.
We’re getting the movie Gattaca IRL before Half-Life 3 and GTA 6 smdh
everytime i see “smdh” i think “shake my dick hard” for some reason.
Can’t unsee now, thanks
Libertarians not even building Rapture yet and they’re going full Gattaca? How gauche.
