Gattaca - Hollywood Gets It Exactly Right

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/08/24/movies/1247463964029/critics-picks-gattaca.html?ex=1266984000&en=afc67845206a333d&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=VI-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M112-ROS-0909-PH&WT.mc_ev=click

by rfreytag • 17 years ago

16 34 17 years ago

video.nytimes.com

rfreytag• 17 years ago

Gattaca - a favorite of mine. A future made by hacking the human genome creates a society that the protagonist hacks with pure will.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

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:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/pos...

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.

gaius2• 17 years ago

genetic screening of children

Out of curiousity, where are you? In most of Europe, eugenics is deeply taboo.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

Yes, in Europe, Netherlands.

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':

http://books.google.com/books?id=48t9i33bMqMC&dq=backdoo...

And that's not even beginning to address the potential consequences of meddling with machinery that you do not fully understand.

anamax• 17 years ago

> In most of Europe, eugenics is deeply taboo.

That's true now, but these things can change very quickly. (For example, that taboo is relatively recent.)

beza1e1• 17 years ago

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.

thismat• 17 years ago

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.

ticktock2• 17 years ago

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!

der_ketzer• 17 years ago

I don't think screening would be very succesfull, few posts after this there's one about a lab creating fake DNA http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797657

Ras_• 17 years ago

Sadly, 1984 likewise seems to have predicted many current things.

lacker• 17 years ago

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.)

hvs2• 17 years ago

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.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

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.

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

One cannot simply focus on the corpses without also seeing the wars that caused them.

I would hope that there are a noble few that choose to stand up to such a development.

hvs2• 17 years ago

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.

cousin_it4• 17 years ago

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.

fiaz• 17 years ago

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!]:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNRvRecE1Y

greggraham• 17 years ago

Gattaca is a well-done movie in general. My wife liked it, and she prefers art films and usually does not like science fiction.

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Oh, how we've forgotten where we have come from.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

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.

lrm242• 17 years ago

Funny that, you don't read this particular article, you simply watch and listen to it.

wkdown• 17 years ago

I'd really enjoy seeing a reimagining of 'Gattaca'

Gattaca - Hollywood Gets It Exactly Right

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