Themes Of Gattaca

Gattaca Imagine that we live in a society where you can have a genetically perfect child merely by telling your local geneticist what you want the child to look like, how tall they will be, how smart, how strong, or even how “endowed” they will be. Kind of like ordering the biggest and best burrito you could make from Chipotle. Oh, not to mention that you could make them devoid of genetic diseases or even genetic predispositions such as, cancer, heart disease, mental illness, etc. Now that you are thinking about how great that is, throw this into the mix. What if one’s career, education, social status, economic status, love life, and practically entire life was determined by the genes that your parents picked for you. Gattaca does a beautiful

First, bioethics is basically what it sounds like; bio-, short for biology, which is the study of living things; and ethics being what is right or wrong related to a certain subject. So bioethics pretty much is what is right or wrong about a certain subject in biology. In this case the certain subject is genetics, such as genetic testing and genetic engineering. In the world of Gattaca the bioethics are often strange and backwards. For example, in the movie it states that it is unlawful to hire or not hire someone based on their genetic profile. But no company follows that rule, and one way or another they will find a way to get a sample to test to take an illegal look at ones genes. This by our society’s standards, and even somewhat by Gattaca’s societal standard, is very unethical. It has taken discrimination all the way down to the genetic level. This level of discrimination makes it to where one’s own genetics are a disability. Not to say that genetic testing, or even genetic engineering, is inherently bad. In Gattaca it is very common to have one’s child genetically engineered before conception. In our society this is a very controversial subject. On one hand, one could potentially make their children immune to most diseases, smart, strong, good-looking, and etc. But on the other hand the question arises, is it ethical: morally, biologically, socially, or whatever, to essentially decide what the child will be or who they will be before they are even conceived? Considering that this film was made in 1997, its use of genetic testing and engineering is very