How Prophetic Was Gattaca?

[Valin]

Quillette

George Schifini

July 8 2019

Dystopian science fiction films often have the veneer of plausibility. For example, the premise of an overpopulated world (Soylent Green), or a deep freeze earth (The Day After Tomorrow), or an infertility epidemic (Children of Men), generate voyeuristic horror but rarely possess the credibility to elicit anxiety of a real world, highly probable outcome. The 1997 film Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, is an exception. Technology has now caught up with Niccol’s dystopian vision of a society where every member is categorized and determined by their genetic origin. Last year a Chinese bioengineer announced the germline editing and live birth of twin girls using CRISPR technology.

In the world of Gattaca, preimplantation screening and genetic engineering have generated a culture of discrimination based on genomic scores. The story’s hero, Vincent (Ethan Hawke), has the bad luck of being conceived the old-fashioned way, his genome left to the crapshoot of meiosis. His genome is read to his parents at birth: neurological condition: 60 percent; probability of manic depression: 42 percent; probability of heart disease: 99 percent: life expectancy: 30.2 years. In this brave new world, Vincent is labeled an “In-Valid,” a human not genetically selected, screened, and engineered—a second-class minority, which prohibits any chance of him fulfilling his ambition of becoming an astronaut. The only job available for his kind is janitor. Not deterred by his genomic handicap, Vincent strikes a deal with Jerome (Jude Law), a “Valid” of impeccable pedigree, but now a paraplegic because of an accident. Vincent impersonates Jerome using his biological specimens—blood, urine, and hair—to deceive the ubiquitous DNA-scanning devices. With his new DNA fingerprint, Vincent becomes an astronaut-in-training and is days away from his dream of space flight when the murder of an executive threatens to expose his identity.

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The film’s hold on the popular imagination was confirmed again by two recently published books: Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are by Robert Plomin and Innate: How the Wiring of our Brains Shapes Who We Are by Kevin Mitchell. Both books examine the genetic influence on variation in different psychological traits between individuals and both discuss whether a Gattaca-like dystopia is in our future. The society depicted in the film treats genes as deterministic, an idea that both Plomin and Mitchell are at pains to distance themselves from, and, curiously, that is the theme of the film too: “After all, there is no gene for fate,” says Vincent.

According to Mitchell, the manner in which genes go about building an organism is in part affected by what engineers call noise. There is a randomness to neural development, subjecting the process to tiny random perturbation. Identical twins share the same DNA but are not completely identical. Even the two sides of our bodies, based on the same plan but executed independently, reveal slight differences. Mitchell’s claim is that much of what is labeled environmental “is intrinsic to each person, arising from inherent randomness in the process of brain development.” Plomin, for his part, repeatedly uses the word “probabilistic” to describe the effect of our genome on our destiny, contrasting this with “deterministic.”

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