GATTACA: A past future of biological control

Article topic: 
GATTACA

I not only think that we will tamper with nature. I think Mother Nature wants us to” is one of the opening quotations of GATTACA. Its author, the American psychiatrist and bioethicist, Willard Gaylin, is inviting us to consider the possibility that evolution is not the only engineer of our nature – human beings have always played a part in this process. Perhaps we have always been artificial. After all, human societies were more than places of habitation; they were immense living machines that intervened in life processes. GATTACA is the vision of bad society, a living machine that places its faith in science where artificiality has become the highest form of being human. Only the ignorant and the foolish would place their faith in ‘nature’, in the so called genetic lottery of life.

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GATTACA is a film about a technocratic order founded upon techniques of selecting and screening human beings. The means of accomplishing this order is through technologies that allow the human gaze to reach into the molecular ‘essence’ of the human. The DNA sequence is a code that reveals the truth about the quality of human life, which can be distributed in an optimal manner according to a simple binary distinction: ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’. The problem with this film is that its dystopian imagination seems to work when the science is emptied of content. Michael Clark (2005) alludes to this when he notes in his review that genetics is “portrayed as not so much a science as an all-pervasive ideology”. I agree that genetics is treated merely as a surface for intervention. The human sequence of DNA is portrayed as an immutable code from which probabilities of traits are effortlessly detected and calculated. However, I do not think ‘ideology’ is the best way of understanding the use of genetics in this film. Rather than pursuing ideals of perfection, it is the efficiency of controlling biological error that makes this film an interesting study of biological politics.

The most efficient technique of controlling life is to intervene at the point of conception. There are two modes of reproduction portrayed in the film: pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and natural reproduction (referred to as “faith birth”). The controlled birth removes the chance-event of biological error from occurring by selecting desirable traits – beauty, strength, intelligence, gender, etc. – from healthy embryos. In this “neo-eugenic” dystopia, individual choices and expert decisions are mediated by biological norms of perfection (though I would argue perfection can only be technically grasped by eliminating imperfection). These themes of prenatal engineering resonate with contemporary ethical debates and controversies about the prevention of monogenic disorders, the removal of disabilities (e.g. deafness) and the selection of sex (e.g. family balancing). In western societies these technologies have been restricted in their impact, often reserved for termination of major malformations rather selection based on personal aspirations. At present, there are no overarching strategies of racial improvement or “designer babies” because reproductive choice is constrained by an ethic of autonomy, which is at the heart of advanced liberal democracies. Nor is it technically or scientifically feasible to make these procedures routine on a large scale.

Another technique for controlling life is to intervene at the moment of birth. This is powerfully illustrated in the film during the scene of Vincent’s birth. Newborn screening is portrayed as a simple “heel prick test” capable of predicting a whole raft of undesirable traits such as manic depression, Attention Deficit Disorder and heart disorder. To the amazement of the parents, probabilities are calculated and disclosed in real-time, as if the information was entirely predictive and required no further interpretation. The cruel price for choosing a natural birth is to learn that their child will have a life expectancy of “30.2 years”. In the film, controlling the living at the point of birth does not seek to eliminate life but to exclude it from elite society. Genetic testing serves the basis of creating a division of labour based entirely on biological norms. Contemporary practices of genetic screening and testing are only reserved for treatable medical conditions or for recessive conditions that have serious reproductive consequences. Some practices do in fact resemble a form of eugenics, for instance, screening programmes in Cyprus seek to identify and eliminate cystic fibrosis from the population. Marriage counselling is also used as a strategy of preventing Tay Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews. However, the development of large-scale strategies for preventing, eliminating or predicting life is again constrained by liberal principles of autonomy and by limitations in our understanding of complex genetic conditions and traits.

It is interesting to note that GATTACA was written several years before the first draft of the human genome was completed. This was a time of great optimism about new genetic technologies. Many expected that the Human Genome Project would reveal the underlying basis of all traits and disease. However, when the map was finally published, scientists found far fewer genes than they expected. The relatively modest amount of 20,000 genes (twice the number of a fruit fly!) was too few to make up a ‘parts list’ for building human beings. It implied that there is no ‘gene for’ common traits or conditions. Craig Venter and colleagues concluded that the sequence of the human genome cannot be understood using reductionist methods but by embracing models of complexity. The hidden complexity contained within the genome is all the more reason why the search for clinically useful biomarkers for common diseases remains elusive. Like most human phenotypes, common diseases are ‘complex’ because they are characterised by nonlinear interactions with multiple susceptibility loci, which are further modulated by environmental factors such as prenatal conditions, diet, lifestyle, stress, etc. Sir Michael Owen once wrote that predicting common complex conditions, like those depicted in the film, would be like trying to predict weather. We may never be able to be predict the outcome of life before it is lived because life is not a self-contained unity, but a dynamic, opened-ended process.

We should praise science fiction as a device for imagining these technical dystopias, but we should also caution against its use in conjuring demons of science and technology. GATTACA serves as a better reminder of why our present is so different to this fantasy of biological control. The wholesale management of population through genetic technologies is incompatible with the politics of liberal societies because the economy of healthcare intervention is based entirely on maximising the quality of life rather than eliminating or excluding it.

Dr Michael Arribas Ayllon is a lecturer at Cardiff School of Social Sciences.

More articles on the same film

GATTACA and genetic discrimination in employment – much ado about nothing?

GATTACA, premiered in 1997 and shown recently at a sciSCREEN event at Cardiff University (http://www.cardiffsciscreen.co.uk/film/gattaca), depicts the world in not-too-distant future, in which genetic discrimination, segregation, and liberal eugenics are the unintended consequence of genetic screening technologies meant to assist human reproduction.