

Gattaca - Hollywood Gets It Exactly Right - rfreytag
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/08/24/movies/1247463964029/critics-picks-gattaca.html?ex=1266984000&en=afc67845206a333d&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=VI-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M112-ROS-0909-PH&WT.mc_ev=click

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jacquesm
I think Gattaca has to be one of the very best predictive near SF movies.

From multi-touch user interfaces to immense speedups in the analysis of
genetic data and the social changes that would bring with it.

Plenty of people - smart ones at that - still disagree with that opinion
though, I wonder why.

Even if the exact situation is hard to predict these things are for me
undeniably part of our future:

\- genetic screening for employees

It's simple, there may be laws against it, there will be plenty of resistance,
but in the end it will probably be allowed. Someone will use the 'think of the
victims' argument. After a particularly bad 'employee going postal' episode
and it will be argued that this could have been prevented with proper
screening. Or it may start with certain high profile jobs only, and then
slowly become acceptable practice elsewhere.

\- genetic screening of children

Genomic optimization, or whatever you want to call it will be driven by
alignment of two desires, first the desire or parents to have a 'perfect'
child, second by society as a whole to improve life-span and to decrease the
cost of medical care.

\- ever more reliance on genetics in forensics

There is already quite a trend under way here, every year many more people are
convicted because of genetic evidence, just like with fingerprints originally
genetic evidence is by some considered to be infallible, but it has already
been proven that that is not the case:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-
science/pos...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-
science/post.cfm?id=lab-creates-fake-dna-evidence-2009-08-18)

As for the tech in the movie it is almost but not quite here. There is a
company in Switzerland that I had some brief contact with about a year ago
that claims they can sequence a whole genome in under 10 days using a clever
technique where they break up the DNA strings in much smaller segments than
'normal' (a few hundred basepairs, where 'normal' was more like 4000-10000 bp)
and then analyze them in an on-chip laboratory.

The output of this process is an endless stream of jpegs of fluorescent
segments that are then analyzed by a pipeline of clustered computers that
piece together the original sequence by first pulling the short subsequences
out of the jpegs, then matching up the overlaps.

Because of the shorter sequences the chemical step gets much shorter (< 1
hour) but the computational complexity of the problem gets much worse.

As computers get faster and are able to use ever shorter sequences without
losing track of what goes where (the lower limit is somewhere around a few
hundred base-pairs I believe) we'll probably see time on the order of a day
within a decade.

The <http://genomics.xprize.org/> bets that someone will be able to do 100
genomes in 10 days. The reason why that does not equate to a runtime of 1/10th
of a day is because the process is heavily pipelined, so a lab throwing all
its current resources at the problem for a single genome could already beat
that number but that would not mean any significant improvement in technology.

To have a sustained output of one completed genome every 2.4 hours would be a
pretty major breakthrough.

An all out effort would be limited by these steps that have to be run in
sequence:

\- the breaking up \- amplification \- photography \- analysis \- reassembly

Disclaimer: I'm not at all a professional in this field (though some days I
wished I was!), just an interested lay person, chances are that some of the
above is wrong or already outdated.

~~~
beza1e1
To calculate something like "60% heart failure chance" right after birth
doesn't seem to possible to me. Too much depends on environment, bad luck and
habits. That "60%" would have a deviation of 50 or something and be nearly
useless. That said the basic idea will certainly come true. Some things are at
least partly genetic and medicine will probably be able to test this at some
point. In vitro fertilization is probably where it's used first.

~~~
thismat
You really nailed the entire movies premise with this it seems. The main
character isn't "suited" for his desire, but pursues it anyway, and overcomes
his genetic labeling.

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hvs
Gattaca is a great movie -- one of my favorites -- but genetics is not
predestination. The environment plays a huge role in the development of
children and many diseases are not genetic in nature at all. Many other
diseases and conditions are a combination of genetics and environment.

Are we in danger of creating a society of a "genetic upper class"? Sure, as
long as there are people willing to buy into the idea that genetics determines
our future there will be people that want to exploit that for their own
personal gain. But that is why it will continue to be our duty to defend the
dignity of human beings and use science to improve the lot of all of us, not
to exclude some in favor of others based on some pseudo-scientific eugenicist
fantasy.

~~~
jacquesm
You are very right, but the fact of the matter is that money will probably be
the deciding factor in who gets access to this kind of technology and who does
not.

It's not as though our current status of 'defending' the rights of the people
in tight spots on this planet gives us much hope that in the future we will
suddenly become a completely different race in this respect. History is
littered with the corpses of those who were taken advantage of, I fail to see
how the future will somehow be magically different.

~~~
hvs
History also shows that people are often willing to stand up to great evil and
oppose it. I don't disagree that humans have been pretty awful in the past and
will continue to be in the future. We are not on some Hegelian march towards a
preordained future. The decisions we make will decide whether we live in a
good society or a dystopia.

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rfreytag
Gattaca - a favorite of mine. A future made by hacking the human genome
creates a society that the protagonist hacks with pure will.

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fiaz
One of the best moments in movie history is the swimming scene at the end [I
should add, if you have not seen the movie and are doing a startup, do
yourself a favor and watch the movie and do NOT click on the link!]:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNRvRecE1Y>

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run4yourlives
_Give me your tired, your poor,_

 _Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,_

 _The wretched refuse of your teeming shore._

 _Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:_

 _I lift my lamp beside the golden door._

Oh, how we've forgotten where we have come from.

~~~
jacquesm
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus>

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radu_floricica
I haven't read the article. Sorry, nytimes tends to be a bit thin on new
information.

That said, Gattaca is unpractical for two very practical reasons:

First, environment matters at least as much as genetics.

Second, the Heisenberg Principle: knowing about a genetic predisposition will
change it. Who do you think has a bigger chance of having diabetes: somebody
who was tested at birth to have a 35% chance, or somebody with 10%? In the
real world and with reasonably cheap medicine it's the second. With a 1/3
chance, not only will you have regular checkups, but you'll watch your diet
and most likely take preventive medicine.

Actually I think this is a still virgin aria which may develop a lot with
genetic testing: get early treatment so as _not_ to get a certain disease.

~~~
lrm242
Funny that, you don't read this particular article, you simply watch and
listen to it.

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greggraham
Gattaca is a well-done movie in general. My wife liked it, and she prefers art
films and usually does not like science fiction.

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wkdown
I'd really enjoy seeing a reimagining of 'Gattaca'

