• Gattaca dystopia: future, present or the past?

    It’s hard to work out if the 1997 movie Gattaca presents a vision of triumph or failure of humanity. It presents a dystopian future which echoes the dystopian elements of our present and past. In this future, people are judged solely by their genetic scorecard.  Those whose parents do not engineer them for success before birth are marked out as an underclass fit only for menial tasks.   Those who try to cross the genetic border are ‘de-generates’ and ‘invalids’ – a criminal other. The “genoism” (discrimination) that arises from the use of genes to judge human worth, echoes the race science of Nazism and early 20th century eugenics in…