The movie Gattaca directed by Andrew Niccol is about “a genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel”. During the process (to become as same as Jerome Morrow, the superior), Vincent goes through lots of different operations, including physical and genetic operations. As we watched it and saw the operations and the doctors in the beginning of the movie, we connected happenings to the things we learned in our Behavioral Biology course.
In the beginning of the movie, when Vincent born, his doctor draw blood of him and immediately told his parents how long he will live, what will be his strengths, what will be his weakness, how long will he live, which profession he will be etc. He was a faith children (a child which has no well arranged genes). When the doctors were looking at that blood drop, they didn’t count environmental factors. They made all those comments without the environment he will be raised. One of the topics we discussed in class was the relationship between genes and environment. Genes are not effectively only by themselves. Environment also has an important effect on what we are going to become and look like. In the movie Gattaca, the importance of relationship between genes and environment is ignored.
Most of the people in Gattaca were not faith children. Their genes were selected and they had every good and functional genes their parents wanted and doctors gave. It makes them perfect and perfection is what makes evolution unnecessary. When a new type of disease comes out, the babies born in that time will have a gene, which will make them not effect from it. Humans will have no chance to evaluate since a gene that will work against that illness would already be created and started to give it to newborn children. As we discussed in class, evolution will continue as long as change continues. In the movie Gattaca, humans can develop a gene according to their needs and wants. The human made gene can be given to a newborn child and as a result, this would stop evolution since there will be no need for it.
The relationship between genes and environment and evolution are what I connected directly with the movie Gattaca. Both topics had my attention more than any other topics we discussed in class since there are most of proofs to show how these works. When I realized both things are not included in the movie and have no chance to happen, I decided to write my essay about them. It would be interesting to live in such a society like the one in Gattaca and observe a world without any evolution and sickness. I have no idea if it would perfect to live in such a place with technology but I’m pretty sure it would be horrible to be in need for technology that much.
Sources:
- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/?ref_=nv_sr_2
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