Saturday, January 14, 2012

A DNA Sequencer Cheap Enough For (Some) Doctors' Offices

Half of what was happening in Gattaca. Not even the interesting half.

Messing with genes was the logical response to the first half, though, which was gene discrimination. Or did you not notice that the main character was smart enough and driven enough to become a rocket engineer, but because of a chance of a flaw in other areas was relegated to menial labor.

It's not just that they wouldn't let him be an astronaut, either. They wouldn't even hire him as an engineer at all, as a "bad risk." And his love-life was implied to have suffered as well, with the matchmaking sequencers on every street corner....

The movie was about the horrors of discrimination, and the virtue of overcoming them, not gene manipulation, which is not a necessary precondition to gene discrimination. Regardless, I think it was probably supposed to be an allegory to present-day race discrimination, but with a narrative trick to make the character white, so white people wouldn't have any preconceived notions getting in the way of the message, rather than a direct prediction of the future, however prescient it may appear to have been.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/BEdzi8FOdb0/a-dna-sequencer-cheap-enough-for-some-doctors-offices

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