Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Off-The-Peg Offspring in the Genetic Supermarket

Colin Gavaghan asks how seriously we should take Gattaca’s dread of genetic screening.

Viewed solely on its cinematic merits, few are likely to evaluate Andrew Niccol’s film Gattaca as great art. As a vehicle for stimulating debate about serious social and moral issues, however, it shows up well against Independence Day, Jurassic Park, and most other attempts to translate science fiction onto the big screen. Relying heavily on less than subtle imagery (the staircase which the paraplegic Jude Law must struggle to ascend is sculpted in the likeness of a DNA molecule) it paints a vision of a dystopian future in which prospective parents can obtain genetic profiles of their in vitro embryos and, based on that information, decide which to implant. In effect, they will be able to choose – to some extent – the kind of children they will have.

Unlike most cinema sci-fi, the technology of Gattaca is not speculative or fanciful – pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has been with us for the last ten years.

…