CRISPR and other tools aren’t science fiction anymore. If the wealthy get there first, what happens to everyone else?
They don’t need genetic engineering to have advantage over everyone else tbf.
This happens in a smaller way with access to prenatal testing and abortions. Parents with access to those things are at least able to detect and avoid the more debilitating birth defect, while parents without access are more likely to have a child with a severe birth defect. If they’re already struggling materially, that can sometimes guarantee that both the parents and child will have no upward mobility.
I don’t think it’s the eugenic stuff that’s gonna take off, but fixing future developmental problems.
The questions reminds me of Brave New World.
They have bigger problems
This has been a thing for at least a few years. Luckily last I checked (pre pandemic) it hasn’t taken off bc
- Eugenics reminds people of Nazis and is bad
- Genetic diversity might be the only thing that saves us in another pandemic. Kind of like how strains of bananas all go extinct at once if they’re genetic clones.
So probably too dangerous to actually take off any time soon. Iirc a Chinese scientist tried it and got sent to jail, seems to be a pretty universal thing
I wonder how that kid is doing. I would love to hear an update. It was bad and all but I am still curious.
This already happens with social factors that affect physical development like access to nutrition and a permanent place to live.
The will find a way to be even more inbred than they already are
I think we all end up like the Asgards from SG-1 without the ability to transfer our consciousness to a new body.
Extinct via hubris. Obviously this assumes we do something about runaway global heating.
gattaca, and the cloning show with arnold in
“Your child will still be yours. Simply the best of you.”
the 6th day
Are you just now discovering that eugenics is bad?
The tech in itself isn’t inherently bad, it could solve a lot of issues for a lot of people. The problem is in equal access.
Which is generally the problem with eugenics. No one is arguing that avoiding downs syndrome is a bad thing.
And even then, editing out unwanted mutations can still stifle society as a whole and may be morally the wrong choice. For example, what about eradicating autism due to the immense pain these individuals receive due to our society? Is it better to change our society to accommodate people afflicted with it or wipe out the genes responsible for it if it is easier? And if we choose the latter, where is the cutoff point? Can we even tell when we crossed that line, where our drive to improve ourselves ended being done out of mercy and began to be about creating the model citizen?
It’s a new class of DARWIN humans, since such manipulated beings usually have shorter life expectation.
As someone suffering from a terrible genetic disease that will kill me soon, any amount of preventing these diseases under any circumstances gets a thumbs up from me.
Sadly, the most probable cloning related future would be Gattaca
^(edit typo)
Yeah, I think we should probably allow the technology that will prevent people being born with these diseases first, and then worry about how we’re going to deal with the other stuff. This technology isn’t going to be possible to hold back indefinitely anyway.
There is already a separate class of rich people
The thing you are afraid of is already happening
Rich people and their kids get world class health care, including helicopter flights to hospitals for life saving surgery. The rest of us die in the waiting room.
Rich people and their kids never have to work a day in their lives. We all have to work until we die.
Rich people and their kids get to enjoy luxury, fulfillment, gratification and a style of living that we cannot possibly imagine. We have to pirate movies because we can’t afford to see them in theaters.
The plot of the film Gattaca explores this, the idea of what society looks like when there’s a class of genetically engineered, “superior” people, vs. the naturally born, “inferior” class.
came to say this is basically the premise of gattaca.
Not seen Gattaca, but a multi-tier, genetically structured society is the basis of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is well worth a read.
Worth noting, it’s a pretty short book so don’t sleep on it.
Is that the movie about (sorry for the bad synopsis) Where the guy vacuums his work desk because he wants to go to space?
That is correct
Thank you. I just wanted to make sure I remembered the right movie.
I now challenge anyone who haven’t seen it to deduce the rest of the plot, based only on my description.
Washing yourself in the shower, difficulty level “going to space”
Jude Law, something something treadmill
Gigolo Joe?
That movie is 9/10. The ending is absolutely beautiful.
Spoilers!
I HAVE SPOILED NOTHING.
If you insist:
spoiler
Jude Law is in it
The Beggars Trilogy by Nancy Kress touches on this as well, but is more focused on the issues with superintelligence rather than just gene alteration, although, because people are vain, the preference for things like hair, skin and symmetry also exist in the story’s world. Oh yeah, and the coolest concept from this trilogy is a thing called “sleeplessness”, where people can alter there genes to remove the biological need to sleep, allowing people to be able to be productive for as many hours as they desire.
Tbh, I think GATTACA barely touched the topic. It focussed so much on the brothers’ rivalry that you could strip out the genetic engineering part and it’d barely change the movie
Yeah it’s a cool movie but the message of systemic disadvantages don’t matter if you try hard enough is a little questionable at best.
I mean… It was showing the extreme lengths he had to go through, the risks he has to take, just to compete for the same opportunities.
The issue wasn’t “try hard enough”. It was how systematic disenfranchisement hobbles people far more than their genetics.
Once you brand someone as “lesser”, their actual capacity is irrelevant. They won’t be given the opportunity to succeed (much less to fail and try again) while the presumed-superior cohort is offered advantage after advantage in order to prove they are better.
I think it’s trying to show we are more than just our genetics, there’s a lot of nurture/environment/action that affects outcomes. The protagonist had drive, determination, exercised and worked for the dream. Most eugenic people didn’t have the same drive and took life for granted, so he could outperform them.
Its complicated in its portrayal, for sure. It comes off at a glance like “just signam grindset bro,” but really the protagonist had to lie, cheat and steal his way to his dream, while also being an absolute fatalist while pushing his body near to death. Even then, he still needed to convince a doctor to fake his results at the end. That’s not a pro “grindset” or “you can overcome” message really. It shows how absolutely fucked you are if you aren’t born into advantage, how weighted everything is against you.
The movie would have hit harder if he got to the end and got caught and denied his dream. Just end with him in prison, staring out a window up at the stars.
Agree but people only want to watch happy endings.
… did you watch Gattaca? Also it was kind of a flop so… you are in large company.
Spoilers for a movie that is almost 30 years old I guess
spoiler
Vincent’s brother is more or less mentally broken and likely to face career problems if people ever investigate what actually happened with the investigation… possibly because the astronaut died en route to Jupiter or whatever. Vincent himself is likely on a suicide trip. Jude Law’s character ACTUALLY commits suicide.
Gattaca’s ending is not a happy one. It is exactly what was said during the swimming scene. It is about putting your everything into an endeavor with no care for self preservation or “the swim back”. Which… very questionable understanding of genetics aside (very clear they were on the same sauce that Kojima was…), kind of is the “bootstraps” mentality distilled to a suicide run. Some people can succeed just by virtue of their birth and upbringing. Others more or less need to kill themselves to even have a chance. And… a lot of those people never even make it to the chance, let alone have a way to appreciate it.
For the kinds of class based gene editing we are likely to see, it kinda isn’t. More attractive, bigger boobs, better predisposition to fitness, etc. That is all surmountable.
Where it falls apart are “goofy” looking people likely Michael Phelps who are straight up genetic freaks. But those aren’t the kinds of genes the rich want… For themselves.
I mean, I would expect the first thing they would want to edit would be things like intelligence, level of optimisim/happiness, ability to be a social butterfly, ability to delay gratification and stick to long term goals, etc. In addition to being smokin’ hot, of course.
I really can’t imagine what China is doing…
Trump is directly undermining national safety by abandoning higher education, college visas for foreigners, scientific studies etc.
15 years ago we knew exactly what China was doing. Now? Good luck
He is in many many ways. Thats what i mean with China.
…did you respond to the wrong comment?
I mean with CRISPR…
Chinese researchers publish in the same international journals everyone does, I don’t think they are using CRISPR any differently than anyone this side of the pacific is.
The verdict said the three defendants had not obtained qualification as doctors, pursued fame and profits, deliberately violated Chinese regulations on scientific research, and crossed an ethical line in both scientific research and medicine, according to Xinhua. It also said they had fabricated ethical review documents.
It’s illegal.
They follow the law?
I doubt any more or less than people here do
Okay, but the moral of the story was that “superior” people weren’t actually superior. They were just racist.
The protagonist outwits and outperforms them all.
In some cases there were absolute superior though. Like the pianist with 12 fingers.
The actual moral of the story was that it’s not worth it. Being a bit better at some random shit like swimming, playing piano or piloting a rocket is not good enough to sacrifice the rest.
Like the pianist with 12 fingers.
Having twelve fingers isn’t what makes you good at playing the piano.
Being a bit better at some random shit like swimming, playing piano or piloting a rocket is not good enough to sacrifice the rest.
There’s an underlying question in the story that amounts to “if you’ve made Earth such a great place, why is everyone trying to leave?”
The plan to colonize Titan is, at its root, a eugenics fantasy.
Having twelve fingers isn’t what makes you good at playing the piano.
The movie literally says that the piece cannot be played without 12 fingers.
The plan to colonize Titan is, at its root, a eugenics fantasy.
the movie doesn’t say anything about “colonizing titan”, in fact the mission doesn’t even state what’s the purpose other than to get to titan which has never been done before - it symbolizes ultimate frontier that in the eyes of eugenicists would require a perfect human to be achieved and yet the guy that ends up outcompeting everyone is a not genetically modified and achieves this through sheer skill and determination.
There’s an underlying question in the story that amounts to “if you’ve made Earth such a great place, why is everyone trying to leave?”
You’re misinterpreting the ending. Vincent always felt rejected by the world for being a natural but ends up feeling bittersweet for leaving as he found Irene and Jerome who proved to him that earth is very much capable of loving him. Not “everyone is trying to leave earth”, just Vincent really and even then he heavily diminishes his desire.
I love Gattaca and really don’t understand your beef with it. It’s a beautiful story but awfully insightful too that aged perfectly even to this day! In fact, I’ll watch it again tonight :)
Seems like a pretty bad execution of the concept, then.
That’s the joke tbh.
Same for H. G. Wells- The Time Machine book in the part where the traveler meets the Morlocks and the Eloi.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine
EDIT: Got my authors mixed up, it wasn’t Jules Verne.
H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, not Verne.
My bad, dunno how I could confuse my authors
Both are very early science fiction pioneers, I can see how they could get mixed up. 🤷♂️
Great movie, excellent performances
