Hello, Gattaca


We've taken the next step towards instituting Gattaca

Gattaca is one of my favorite sci-fi movies. It doesn't have any glamourous special effects or weird aliens, it simply poses a very intelligent moral dilemma - are human beings more than the sum of their genes? In other words, are we simply computers made out of meat, who run in the grooves that were predestined by our genes? Or are we capable of transcending the hand that nature has dealt us? The reason I love it so much is it ends up giving a compelling case for the soul, because we are in fact more than our genetic material.

Gattaca is set in "the near future", when parents have forgone having children through natural conception, and turn instead to in vitro fertilization so that they can genetically engineer their children. They do this by picking out the embryos that happen to have any genetic disease, and then "fixing" a gene here or their on the ones they choose. As one of the doctors in Gattaca says "Its still the two of you.... just the best of the two of you."

This is where fiction is now crossing paths with reality. We are entering "the near future". Parents have begun choosing embryos based on genetic tests to see if they have any predisposition to contracting a disease. In other words, they see if their child has gene A which would indicate a high risk for disease B; if they see gene A, they discard that child and use one without gene A. (h/t WorldMagBlog)

But the list of diseases worth discarding a human for is growing rapidly. Once it was more serious diseases like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia, but it has now grown to things like colon cancer - a disease that the child may never contract and which, if contracted, would likely be treatable if caught early. These parents, rather than inform the child that they may have a heightened chance of a disease and should be tested, have decided to destroy the child instead.

Why do I say "child" instead of "embryo"? Because there is nothing different between that embryo and a child other than its size, its development, its location or its level of dependency (also known as the SLED test - h/t Stand To Reason) and all 4 of those would disqualify my daughter just as much as the embryo. Once an embryo has formed, it has a unique set of genetic material that represents a new human being entering the world. If its not valuable, then none of us are. (Unless we base our value on something malleable, like size: I'm worth more than my daughter because she's smaller than me, yet I'm worth nothing compared to Shaq. I could make a more sophisticated argument on this, but thats outside the scope of this post).

But I think this is stupid for another reason entirely - we aren't as knowledgeable as we think. Hubris comes naturally to humans and when we play God, we pretend we have His omniscience as well. This article raised the fear (as Gattaca did) that such practices could lead to a two-class society in which the wealthy have made their gene pool more "pure". But what happens when the market of nature corrects? How do we know that genes which we have currently singled out for causing unwanted things (which could be diseases or could simply be preferences like eye color) won't later be a key genetic immunity? Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, nature reproduces the way it does for a reason. My dad informed me it is called "Hybrid Vigor" - nature scatters genetic traits through reproduction so that things that effect one trait don't destroy an entire population.

Lastly, I think the practice leads to false securities. The opening sentence itself illustrates this perfectly:
"As Chad Kingsbury watches his daughter playing in the sandbox behind their suburban Chicago house, the thought that has flashed through his mind a million times in her two years of life comes again: Chloe will never be sick." (bold mine). Unfortunately, Chloe will likely be sick plenty in her life, and eventually will die and no genetic magic tricks are going to change that. Kids get sick. They get hurt. As a father it pains me to no end to know I can't keep my daughter from being hurt, but that's how life works.

Posted: Mon - September 4, 2006 at 05:46 PM | | | | | | |

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