Gattaca Essay

Describe the advantages and disadvantages of living in a world such as that depicted in GATTACA. Secondly, imagine that you live in this world. Describe how you envisage your life, including the good and bad. Include the kinds of issues that people living in this world would have to deal with everyday.

The film Gattaca is based on the theme of a eugenic society in which science and medicine are imperative in the running of the world. Medicine in this movie has the ability to genetically engineer humans before they are born. The geneticist selects the best genes from the mother and father to create a near close to perfect child, which most of the time is born with no diseases or flaws. The appearance of the child can also be selected and sometimes geneticists take it upon themselves to make the child as close as possible to their ideological views on perfection. However, this film presents to society a major ethical dilemma involving the morals and ethics associated with
The advantages of living in such a world are primarily based upon the medical and scientific advancements in this society. The spread of sex linked diseases including muscular dystrophy and colour deficiency would be significantly reduced if genetic engineering was available. Geneticists would have the ability to ensure that the child of a carrier would not be born with the disease. This could potentially save the lives of thousands of baby boys as most sex linked diseases are specific to males. The spread of AIDs in babies could also be considerably reduced, if geneticists had the ability to select the best genes from parents and create the almost perfect child. The most important advantage of living in a world such as Gattaca would be that babies could be born without any diseases, which in essence has the possibility of saving hundreds of thousands of people around the