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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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/ 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.
To calculate something like "60% heart failure chance" right after birth doesn't seem to possible to me. Too much depends on environment, bad luck and habits. That "60%" would have a deviation of 50 or something and be nearly useless. That said the basic idea will certainly come true. Some things are at least partly genetic and medicine will probably be able to test this at some point. In vitro fertilization is probably where it's used first.
You really nailed the entire movies premise with this it seems. The main character isn't "suited" for his desire, but pursues it anyway, and overcomes his genetic labeling.
Gattaca is a place that exists because your environment, luck, and habits are all controlled to some extent. Imagine a rat in a cage - stimulated to exercise, rest, learn, eat, exactly what you want, when you want. You can eliminate nearly all of the variables if you wish. Think of Gattaca in this way and Ethan Hawks character is a "Neo". Great movie!
The most unrealistic part of Gattaca is how confident they are in their DNA-based projections. Like in Gattaca they can determine you are unsuited for a particular career based on your DNA.
But we are nowhere near determining someone's potential intelligence based on their DNA. I think most scientists believe that is impossible - DNA does not determine your intelligence with that much detail.
I do think that soon it will be cheap and easy to sequence your own genome. There is great hope for personalizing medicine, treatments tuned to you that are twice as effective. But genetic screening will not take on the role it does in Gattaca. A genetic screen will not give you better information than a 1-hour interview.
(I'm not a professional in this field but I did get a master's in computational biology, working on genome sequencing.)
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':
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?
I figure there is a lot of stuff going on that we haven't got a clue about yet and by selecting for some traits that are clearly visible to us we may be inadvertently introducing major trouble down the line.
I fully sympathize with those who would like to get rid of hereditary diseases, pretty much every family has their share of them, but you have to ask yourself if you think it is wise to second-guess evolution before having fully grokked the mechanisms and datastructures at work here.
As long as we refer to the majority of our DNA as 'junk' we have a long way to go in this respect.
You are exactly the person I had in mind when I wrote above that parents would like to have 'perfect' children.
by selecting for some traits that are clearly visible to us we may be inadvertently introducing major trouble down the line
Do you have any reason to believe we will be introducing more trouble down the line than if we'd continued procreating in the usual fashion? I don't see any actual argument. Genetic techniques can even be globally beneficial in the long run by counterbalancing the dysgenic effect of modern medicine that helps genetically disadvantaged people survive and procreate.
I'm afraid you've got me there, this is speculative in nature, only time will tell.
Let me try another angle then, to me evolution is not about individuals, individuals are merely the current vessels holding a single copy (with possibly some local variations if you want to be very precise) of the status quo in contemporary genetics as perceived by that individual.
Sexual reproduction is in the majority of the cases the way in which this genetic material gets mixed and slowly, over generations these changes + mutations introducing new variation have converged on the diversity that you can observe around you.
To find the 'keys to the kingdom', to get 'root' on this system is of course a very powerful tool, but if you don't know exactly how powerful a tool is or how it works you would be wise to meddle with it as little as possible until you do have that knowledge.
Keep in mind that we will be selecting for phenotype only, what's going on under the hood is a question that your great-great-grandchildren might be able to answer, and if our luck of the draw runs against us it is possible that we introduce some effect that will only become apparent to them, we'll be long dead by then.
Those effects could be worse than the things we are trying to cure today, and I'm merely cautioning to be careful about unintended side effects of over enthusiastic modifications to our 'imperfect' genome.
It has served us well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt until we have solid proof that we are not going to create a larger problem.
That depends how far we go with this, once the technology is there to mix in 'healthy' genes with deleterious ones the door is immediately open to add genes from a 'library' as well.
Say a couple want children, but they want a red-haired girl, even though their genetic combinations make that an impossibility (just for the sake of an example I took something from the 'cosmetics' department, not from the disease department) you could conceivably splice in the genes to make that happen.
The problem here is that even though the resulting phenotype may be the desired one that there could be any number of interactions between the 'undesired' genes and the rest of the genome to keep the genome as a whole stable across generations.
It will take a long time before we will know if that's the case or not.
to keep the genome as a whole stable across generations
Why would you want that, if every generation has the option of designing their children anyway? And they can always revert to a backup genotype from 2000 if there's no other recourse.
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..."
That's absolute true, but like plastic surgery, cosmetic genetics will be a byproduct of genetics for medical reasons.
I fail to see how you can only have the one without the other, you can just wait for 'designer eye colours' and other fashionable items such as the ultimate breast implant (simply encode for that perfect breast size) and so on...
Exactly, if people want this enough, they'll go to another country for the service. And if so many people start going abroad, their influence might spread through Europe. If that continues, a critical mass might be reached where eugenics becomes less taboo and more accepted. There are a lots of "if"s there, but it's possible.
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!]:
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.
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.