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Unforgettable Scenes From Gattaca's Dystopian World | Voyage

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Researching her family history, Sigrid Falkenstein found her aunt's name - Anna Lehnkering - on a list of 30,000 people who were murdered by the Nazis as part of the Aktion T4 project in the year 1940/1941. This spurred Sigrid on to find out more both about her Aunt and Aktion T4, the Nazi programme for sterilising and murdering those with mental or physical disabilities.

Who, if not us, would be the most appropriate to give you back your identity and name, and therefore some of your dignity?

You can download the PDF version of Anna Lehnkering's life story here Anna Lehnkering's bilingual life story
Researching her family history, Sigrid Falkenstein found her aunt's name - Anna Lehnkering - on a list of 30,000 people who were murdered by the Nazis as part of the Aktion T4 project in the year 1940/1941. This spurred Sigrid on to find out more both about her Aunt and Aktion T4, the Nazi programme for sterilising and murdering those with mental or physical disabilities.

Sigrid used family photographs and memories alongside archives to reconstruct Anna's life story to ensure that she lives on even after she was murdered as a victim of Nazi Persecution.

Anna was born in the Ruhr Area of Germany on 2 August 1915 to Heinrich Friedrich Hermann Lehnkering and his wife Anna Johanna Helene. Anna had three brothers and the family ran a pub.

When she was four years old Anna became very restless, had night time tremors and some nervous episodes. Family life took a turn for the worse. Life after World War One was hard, and Anna's father turned to drink to drown his sorrows. He died in December 1921 of cirrhosis of the liver. In 1922 Anna's mother married again and shortly afterwards she gave birth to a baby boy.

Anna did not have an easy time at school and she often had to repeat the school year. One doctor described her as good natured and obedient. At the end of February 1929, a school report noted that Anna's attendance was inconsistent because of illness and as a result her knowledge was inadequate. Anna loved playing with children and wanted to help in a nursery when she was older. She was a big help to her mother, cleaning, making the beds, and running errands. Anna was religious and enjoyed going to church, particularly as she met with other disabled girls, with whom she felt very comfortable.

In 1931, two years after her schooling had ended, Anna went to a children's institute for mentally disabled children. When Sigrid was researching more about Anna's ill health, she discovered that there had been family rumours that her father's dependence on alcohol was a possible cause of Anna's nervousness. Sigrid wondered whether Anna herself was aware of this and how it might have affected her relationship with her father. Sigrid's father also recalled that Anna was dropped by a neighbour when she was a baby and that may have contributed to her illness. Anna's disability was not identified in any of the files that Sigrid found but for Sigrid, the cause of Anna's illness was not important; she was more concerned with finding out about Anna's life and why her family had kept silent about Anna.

In December 1934, age 19 Anna was called before a court to determine if she should be sterilised. Her mother accompanied her and the court decided that Anna should be sterilised. Sigrid believes that Anna did not know what was going to happen to her; there is a photo of Anna standing in front of the hospital where she was forcibly sterilised, and she is smiling.

One and a half years after being sterilised, Anna was admitted to hospital suffering from kidney disease. The doctor persuaded Anna's mother that she needed to be institutionalised as they would be able to offer the care that Anna needed. In December 1936 Anna was taken to a so-called healing and care home. Anna underwent further diagnoses and tests of her intelligence, with mathematical questions as well as general knowledge. Despite not being able to build a picture of day to day life in the home, Sigrid's research demonstrated that those in the care home were mistreated and often starved.

While researching, Sigrid was informed that Anna died on 23 April 1940; not only was this the incorrect date, but the word 'died' belittles the fact that Anna was murdered. Anna was 24 years old when she was transported, along with 300 women and 157 men to Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre, in southern Germany. It is estimated that 10,654 mentally and physically disabled people were murdered in gas chambers at Grafeneck in 1940. Grafeneck was one of six centres, and it is estimated that at least 250,000 disabled people were murdered under the Nazi regime.

Anna's mother received a letter to say that Anna died of peritonitis - an inflammation of the tissue lining the stomach - on 23 April. Sigrid's research led her to believe that Anna was murdered on the day she arrived in Grafeneck, 7 March. Sigrid hoped Anna did not suspect what was going to happen to her, and therefore her last hours were not full of fear and panic.

Sigrid compiled her research into a series of letters to Anna, restoring the identity that the Nazis tried to take from her. These letters form a book about Anna, integrating her life story into a wider historical context, creating an exemplary family history. This book, together with Sigrid's website and a Stolperstein, memorial stone, ensures that Anna is not forgotten, and that she still lives on today.

This resource has been produced with support and help from Sigrid Falkenstein for which we are very grateful.
For more information:

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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | Anna Lehnkering

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Researching her family history, Sigrid Falkenstein found her aunt's name - Anna Lehnkering - on a list of 30,000 people who were murdered by the Nazis as part of the Aktion T4 project in the year 1940/1941.

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Ethan Hawke answers question about GATTACA at Cinema Arts

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Why 'Gattaca's Main Character Is the Underdog You Can't Help Rooting For

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Some of the most memorable films focus on a protagonist that is an underdog. We love to root for a main character that has to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to accomplish their goal. Movies set within an Orwellian dystopian atmosphere are the perfect place to find such heroes.

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On Oct. 24, 1997, Columbia Pictures unveiled Andrew Niccol's sci-fi thriller Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, in theaters. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below.
In the near future, racial, sexual and social discrimination will be out - that's the good news.

In the near future, genetic evaluation will rule - that's the bad news in this cautionary glimpse into a future time when your genetic code will be your resume.

Stylishly scoped with ice-blue hues and smartly visualized with a forbiddingly cold design, Gattaca is an intelligently-conceived sci-fi chiller starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. Sony will find strong appeal among college students. Unfortunately, like many of this species, the characters are an icy-veined and largely unemotional species that ultimately squander this provocative premise, reducing it to the status of visual essay rather than full-blooded human story.

Splicing together notions of a master race and the generic story form of man's arrogance in messing with divine planning, screenwriter and director Andrew Niccol has concocted a zesty story potion.

Catalyzing the yarn is the rivalry of two brothers, Vincent (Hawke) and Anton (Loren Dean). Vincent's future is limited, based on his inferior genetic code, while Anton's is dazzling. Indeed, in this futuristic society, one's future is determined seconds after birth, when a single blood sample can foretell everything from IQ to approximate time and cause of death. It's a predetermined world, where those with inferior genetics are referred to as "de-generates," classified as invalids, and, essentially, sentenced to a life of low-level drudgery.

What of the human spirit, what of hope? That is the beguiling core of Niccol's drama. In his scenario, Vincent dreams of being a deep-space navigator but with his makeup it will never come to be. But there are ways get around this unalterable fact; happily, there is a black market for the right genetic stuff. Vincent deals to get the essence of a brilliant young man, Jerome (Jude Law) who has been crippled in an accident.

With the help of Jerome's perfection genes, Vincent takes on Jerome's identity, winning the navigational job he has long sought.

While Niccol's theme is a winning one, and his premise perceptively brainy, Gattaca is of inferior stock in its narrative backbone. Once past its razzle-dazzle procedurals of Vincent getting a new genetic identity, it degenerates into a mid-section of lethargic tedium: essentially, the second half of the film is mired in the flat dramatic dynamic question of whether or not Vincent/Jerome will be found out.

Unfortunately, given his stoic, almost autonomic nature, we don't really care. While Niccol makes calculated and perfunctory expositional references to "hope," there is no passion in the characterizations. You'd have to watch reruns to encounter a more soul-less gaggle of stiffs, or view documentaries on Hitler Youth to see such mechanical arrogance.

While the narrative decomposes, the visuals are altogether superior. Admittedly, former commercials director Niccol is terrific at composing looks; however, an assemblage of glossy, gelid sequences does not necessarily add up to a satisfying cohesive film.

Still, the technical team is undeniably elite. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak's stylishly cold scopings are magnificent, heightened by composer Michael Nyman's unsettling sounds. Jan Roelfs' production design is sensational - it's as if Albert Speer commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to create the physical universe. It's human-unfriendly, to say the least.

Given the constraints of the writing, Hawke is fine as the ambitious Vincent/Jerome. As the uber-girl, Thurman is shrewdly chosen; alas, her portrayal is confined to mannequin dimension. Fortunately, the minor characters have more human blood in them: Alan Arkin is entertaining as a Columbo-ish investigator, while Gore Vidal is well-cast as a haughty man of science.

The most full-blooded performance is served up by Law, the young man whose promising life was shattered by an accident and who has chosen to give his genetic code to Vincent: we feel his anguish and exult in his vicarious joys. - Duane Byrge, originally published on Sept. 8, 1997

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On Oct. 24, 1997, Columbia Pictures unveiled Andrew Niccol's sci-fi thriller Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, in theaters. The Hollywood Reporter's original review is below. In the near future, racial, sexual and social discrimination will be out - that's the good news.

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Whether it's intentional or not, the most terrifying sci-fi stories can often be the ones that sound far-fetched on paper, but aren't all that far away from becoming the truth in one way or another. Andrew Niccol's Gattaca fits that bill, with the minor masterpiece painting a thought-provoking picture of a world that may not be as futuristic as it seems.

Ethan Hawke's Vincent has always harbored dreams of venturing beyond the stars and into outer space, but it's never going to happen after his physical limitations have seen him branded as genetically inferior. Making his own destiny instead, he purchases the genes of Jude Law's genetically-engineered specimen, and uses it to join the Gattaca space program.

Along the way, an investigation into the mysterious death of an officer further complicates matters, and the net soon begins to close in around our protagonist as he edges closer and closer to fulfilling the ambitions he's held his entire life. Powerful, moving, existential, and thought-provoking, the film is fully deserving of its status as one of the most unheralded classics of the modern era, one that left a legacy behind for transhumanists, socioethecists, and bioethecists to pick apart in detail given the plot revolves around separating humanity by its worthiness, and building perfect people from the ground up.

Look somewhere else if it's action sequences and space battles you're looking for, though, but that hasn't dissuaded streaming subscribers from revisiting the richly-detailed world of Gattaca on-demand. Per FlixPatrol, the Academy Award-nominated gem has entered the iTunes Top 10 in several countries dotted around the world, and it makes for an excellent companion piece to writer and director Niccol's In Time, which the filmmaker himself described as being the 1997 favorite's "bastard child."

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A minor sci-fi masterpiece that could yet prove to be terrifyingly true engineers streaming perfection

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Whether it's intentional or not, the most terrifying sci-fi stories can often be the ones that sound far-fetched on paper, but aren't all that far away from becoming the truth in one way or another.

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With Andrew Niccol's beloved 1997 sci-fi film arriving on 4K this week, I had a chance to revisit the film, and what struck me on this latest viewing (aside from the gorgeous visuals, which I'll get to in a bit) is how it's firmly in the mold of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. They're both stories about how genetic engineering will create new social classes, and yet, like any good sci-fi story, they're not so much about the future as they are about the present and how people are relegated to specific roles based on factors that are well beyond their control. Where Gattaca seeks to address these factors is in trying to uphold the triumph of the human spirit, something that can't be measured by genetics or science.

For those who need a brief refresher on the movie, it takes place in the "not-too-distant future" where genetic engineering of children has led to a new genetic caste system. At the bottom of this caste is Vincent ( Ethan Hawke), a man of natural birth (as opposed to genetically engineered in-vitro fertilization) with myopia, a 99% chance of a fatal heart defect, and dreams of becoming an astronaut. However, this world would never take the risk on someone with his genetic makeup, so he goes into the black market to work a scheme with Jerome ( Jude Law), a perfectly engineered man whose dreams of glory were lost when he was in a car accident that left him in a wheelchair. Through a series of demanding procedures and routines, Vincent is able to pass as Jerome, but a murder investigation at Vincent's company, Gattaca, puts the authorities on high alert and endangers Vincent's dream of going to the stars.

Gattaca is a story about passing but done in such a way as to build around the white characters who largely populate the film. Vincent sees an entire system constructed against him, and although he notes that it's technically against the law to discriminate, those laws don't really matter. That's a fairly accurate representation of our country where all kinds of discriminations are built in whether it's along the lines of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on. Gattaca is simply able to crystalize all of these by building solely around the concept of genetics rather than taking into consideration the intersections of these other socioeconomic circumstances. By being a story about a single, fictional type of discrimination that's fictional, it's able to be a story about all discrimination.

Where Gattaca shows the constraints of American individualism is in the late-90s' ethos when it was produced by showing that the solution to Vincent's dilemma is simply to work harder. While in the 2010s and 2020s we're starting to address how systemic issues create individual barriers, in the 1990s, we still swallowed the "personal responsibility" bromide unquestioningly (and to be fair, we're still swallowing it a fair bit today). However, a movie where Vincent becomes an activist to protest systemic genetic discrimination doesn't make for the riveting individual stories we tend to expect from movies since it's harder to capture the triumphs of groups and protest rather than the actions of the individual.

In this way, Gattaca slightly and unintentionally reinforces the discrimination it seeks to combat. Vincent isn't attempting to bring down the system, and near the end of the film, he discovers that Jerome has left him enough blood and urine to "last two lifetimes," indicating that when Vincent returns from his journey to space he will continue to pass for Jerome until the end of his life. There's never any talk of ending this system, but rather that it's contingent on the individual to work within its confines and game it to the best of their personal willpower.

But to Niccol's credit, he doesn't hold up the world of Gattaca as anything worth embracing. What the new 4K transfer illustrates is the brilliant design choice of using a mid-century modern aesthetic. Niccol consciously chooses a design of futurism past to show how that futurism consistently fails and only seeks to uphold a ruling order devoid of diversity, and ultimately, life itself. With the new 4K, you can really sink into how stylish yet cold the confines of Vincent's world are, and where the only moments of color and warmth come from the love story between Vincent and Irene ( Uma Thurman). For Gattaca, a world ordered on control and discrimination may run seamlessly, but it's also devoid of humanity.

The film's cleverness remains in how discrimination never remains overt. There's no roaming band of bigots out to ruin the lives of natural-birth citizens. Gattaca emphasizes that systemic discrimination is more efficient, subtle, and all-encompassing than the actions of any individual because ultimately your life is strongly impacted not by strangers you meet but the society you inhabit. That's not to diminish the role of hate groups or bigots, but rather that Gattaca shows how a society absorbs and disseminates its own prejudices without the intent of any single individual or group. That element of the story's subtext remains just as potent today.

And to be fair, I can kind of hang with its "transcendence rests on the power of the human spirit, not societal change" angle because ultimately it needs to fit into traditional narrative to better make its larger points. I may not agree in my day-to-day life, but as a piece of storytelling, Gattaca is potent because, as Huxley knew in the 1930s, a world where our choices are made for us before we've had any say is nightmarish. We want to believe we're captains of our own fate, and discrimination always chips away at those choices.

KEEP READING: The Best Sci-Fi Movies of the 21st Century So Far

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'Gattaca' Remains an Emotional, Complicated Story About Discrimination | 4K Review

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With Andrew Niccol's beloved 1997 sci-fi film arriving on 4K this week, I had a chance to revisit the film, and what struck me on this latest viewing (aside from the gorgeous visuals, which I'll get to in a bit) is how it's firmly in the mold of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World .

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'It's not just that I come back to these themes. They keep rushing at me. I find it difficult to ignore'

At this point in Andrew Niccol's career, audiences should be pretty clear on when they're watching one of his films, even if they miss the opening credits. Niccol specializes in high-concept stories about the ways technology affects society - sometimes radically, like in his science fiction films Gattaca, In Time, and S1m0ne, and sometimes more subtly, as in his drone-warfare drama Good Kill or his arms dealer story Lord of War. He's a writer as well as a director. He scripted Peter Weir's The Truman Show, which stars Jim Carrey as a man raised in a bubble as a reality-TV project, and he was a writer on Steven Spielberg's Tom Hanks vehicle The Terminal.

But mostly, Niccol writes and directs his own projects, which he tends to give a chilly, oppressive feel. His characters are often rigid and repressed, reflecting their worlds' considerable anxieties and frustrations. His latest film, the Netflix release Anon, is another case in point. The film takes place in a dystopic future where everyone has embedded technology that records their point of view from infancy onward. They see the world through an augmented reality lens that adds advertisements to the buildings, playback mode for their own endlessly recorded memories, and a constant stream of information about everyone around them. Clive Owen stars as Sal, a detective whose job is more or less like a file clerk's: when a crime is committed, he shuffles through the folders of other people's memories until he sees who's guilty. But then corpses start showing up with their memory feeds hacked, and no recorded evidence of the crime.

The entire idea of private acts is subversive and terrifying in a society with no privacy, which leads Sal to an encounter with a woman known only as The Girl (Amanda Seyfried), and it lets Niccol address how the endless information-gathering and information-trading of institutions from Facebook to the NSA would play out in a world where someone could escape them entirely. I recently spoke with Niccol about Anon's familiar coldness, how his films approach conformity and technology, and how it all relates to Black Mirror.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

So many of your films have a similar sterile, forbidding tone and look. How did you hit on this style?

Well, it's the stories that dictate the style. They all have a slightly different feel. If you go back to Gattaca, characters are scared of leaving a trace of themselves, so the world is very sterile. And in The Truman Show, everything looks artificial because the protagonist is living in a counterfeit world. In Time is slightly different as well because time is precious, so nothing exists that would be a waste of time. For instance, there's no graffiti, because why would you spend time scrawling on a wall? And in the world of Anon, there's almost no signage because all the ads are really in your head. So the story often dictates exactly the look.

But even if the stories all have different reasons for these severe, clean, oppressive futures, they all seem to come back to a similar aesthetic place.

Yeah, I guess many of these movies have similar themes. Although I don't personally try to analyze what I do. I'm superstitious that I won't be able to keep doing it. But I can see that there's an element of surveillance and voyeurism in there. Even in a movie that's almost contemporary, like Good Kill... I wondered why I was doing that movie. Friends said, "Hey, why are you doing a movie about the drone program?" And then I saw an article that said "this is more Truman Show than Terminator." And I realized, there's an eye-of-God perspective that I'm obviously drawn to.

If I were to try to draw a connection between your films, I would say they all have a theme of conformity and the individual struggle with an accepted, prevailing wisdom and a status quo that says conformity and passivity is a net positive for society.

That does ring a bell. There's some sort of rebelliousness. The Girl in Anon is definitely fighting back. I get that element. But I'm also often looking at how humanity and technology intersect. It's always something to explore. It's not just that I come back to these themes. They keep rushing at me. I find it difficult to ignore. No technology is all good or bad in my mind. It's really how it's used and / or abused. That interests me.

You mentioned how the signs all over Anon's city only exist in augmented reality. We've seen so many futures recently where the cities are haunted by giant hologram ads, but your world looks so different because they're all built around these very simple gray lines. How did you approach designing the visual world of Anon to fit your imagination?

Well, I realized that any signage in this world was superfluous. If it's all in what I call your mind's eye, there's no need to physically build it. It's always going to be there. I shot the film with two different aspect ratios. One was more square, which is a subjective point of view because it mimics your actual vision. And then there was an objective point of view, which was very cluttered with data, as our lives are now. You know, you see people walking down the streets looking at phones, sitting on buses on the phone. I just updated their technology. If you step back from that point of view, of course, there's no signage at all in the real world, because why would you? It's all in my technology.

I actually found it quite strange. Sometimes I would do a shot and realize it was meant to be subjective, so I would have to digitally remove signs, like parking lot signs. And then when I looked at the shot in post, I would digitally add back a virtual sign that said "parking lot." It was an interesting concept because it would be redundant to have physical signs anywhere, and you couldn't change them at will.

The reason all the signs and ads have a single, uniform look [is] if we all had the same implanted technology, what we called "human user interface," also known as HUI, then someone would have to pick the typeface for whatever government or corporate state was initiating this technology. I chose DIN, a German typeface. And I drained the world of color because I wanted to go with this grayscale that would be very legible when you were walking around the street and everyone had the same built-in technology.

There's a conformity in how your characters express themselves, too. They're very dialed-down, very unemotional. It seems like it comes from trauma or a fear of vulnerability, but it's really common throughout your films. Why is that kind of expressionlessness appealing to you?

Well, Clive Owen's character, Sal, is literally a man who has seen too much. If you imagine a job where you're mostly looking at the last moments of people's lives... he's obviously disenchanted with his work, but he's also used to proving right and wrong. And when he starts to be hacked, and he can't trust his augmented reality, he gets to the point where he can't prove anything, which I think would be traumatizing for anyone. So I found that aspect interesting. And yes, I guess I deal with a lot of traumatized characters, for one reason or another. Maybe I'm traumatized myself!

What did you tell Clive and Amanda about how you wanted them to play these characters?

With Clive, I had to actually direct for once because he's put in a position where he's being hacked. I had to actually talk him through all these things he's seeing because he's reacting to things that aren't there. It was interesting for him, I think. With Amanda, it was kind of the same thing as well, in that she's editing people's lives. So even though she has perhaps the world's most expressive eyes, I had to talk her through exactly what she was doing in her mind, as she edited memories.

Is that unusual for you? Are you usually more hands-off with actors?

Well, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek. But normally, the best advice I could give any director is to cast well, stay the hell out of the way, and trust the material. Normally with an actor, if they're good, I just have to lean them slightly in one direction or another.

With In Time, you made a tie-in short film to explain more about the world and how it happened. In Anon, you have another world where we can intuit how this world might have come about, and we can compare it to our world. Were you ever thinking about doing the same kind of subsidiary material, that could tell us more about the backstory?

Well, I think making that short was more for the studio's comfort, to give people more information. I actually had narration at the beginning of Anon, which Clive did really well. But then I realized that he starts the film walking down the street, seeing the information on everyone around him. Because we all walk down the street staring at phones, the audience was there already. They didn't need me to tell them how it came about. It's already here. That's why I think of this as a parallel present. You go to a concert, everyone's got a phone in their hand, videoing the event. They don't watch it with their own eyes. I just improved real technology a bit.

It seems like this is the perfect time for this film, just after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with a new mainstream interest in how society is approaching privacy and transparency. Has the loss of privacy through technology been a long-term concern of yours?

Yeah. I've thought for a long time that we've been given this false choice, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." That's not the point. I prefer the way Amanda says it in the film: "It's not that I have something to hide, it's that I have nothing I want you to see." Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are now giving people pause because they've given themselves up for nothing. It's all for convenience, and maybe people are thinking twice about that. Perhaps that is an element to this. It's a cautionary tale.

Given that the film is on Netflix and that it takes place in a high-tech dystopian future, people will inevitably compare it to Black Mirror, especially episodes like "Crocodile" and "The Entire History of You," which have similar memory interfaces and people fishing around in other people's pasts. Are you familiar with the show? Are you interested in exploring its take on these issues?

I haven't seen the show, but oddly enough, people do say, "Andrew, it's a lot like your stuff!" So maybe I should watch the show. But as far as Netflix is concerned, one thing I find interesting is that, in my world of Anon, there are no screens at all. People say, "You're a purist. Your film has to play in theaters." But people often have home theaters that are arguably better than the local multiplex. So I don't think you can be a purist anymore.

Andrew Niccol's Anon debuts on Netflix on May 4th, 2018.

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Gattaca director Andrew Niccol discusses his new Netflix film Anon

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The high-concept writer of The Truman Show and director of films including In Time and Good Kill has a new film on Netflix, starring Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried. In this interview, he discusses its chilly dystopic future, where all human experience is recorded, and privacy doesn't exist, until someone hacks the system.

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Gattaca deals with the potential ethical quandaries with genoism and eugenics. It became shorthand for a dystopian future enabled by genetic engineering.

In particular, the movie is invoked whenever people talk about technologies like the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas-9 or procedures such as pre-implantation genetic testing.

Cliche and misconceptions aside, all the experts see Gattaca as a decent representation of concerns people had about reproductive genetics and eugenics.

Like many others, the first time I watched Gattaca was in school. It was seventh grade, and we were in the middle of our genetics unit. The film, which was released in 1997 and marked the beginning of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman's ill-fated relationship, is set in a world in which genetic selection ensures children have the best traits - and life - possible. It follows Vincent Freeman (played by Hawke), an "in-valid" who was conceived naturally and at high risk for developing a heart defect. Unable to get hired for anything beyond menial cleaning jobs, he decides to disguise himself as a "Valid," using DNA samples from a former swimming star in order to secure a job at Gattaca Aerospace Corp. My teacher hoped to use the film to show us the potential ethical quandaries with genoism -discrimination based on genetics - and eugenics (and maybe give herself a bit of a break for a few classes).

This October marks the 25th anniversary of the film's release. Ever since, the word Gattaca - made up of the letters that stand for the four nitrogenous bases that make up our genes - has essentially become shorthand for a dystopian future enabled by genetic engineering. "We talk about Brave New World, we talk about 1984, we talk about Frankenstein, we talk about Gattaca," Josephine Johnston, an expert on the ethical, legal, and policy implications of biomedical technologies at the Hastings Center, said. "It's one of those kinds of cultural representation of a certain seat of concerns."

The film was released about a year after the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, was cloned, so it was really tapping into popular conversation about ethics and genetic technology. "At a time when we read about cloned sheep and tomatoes crossed with fish [a reference to genetically modified foods], the science in Gattaca is theoretically possible," film critic Roger Ebert wrote in a review right after the film came out.

And ever since, people have been invoking the name as a warning: Gattaca stands for a future in which genetic technology has created a society where scientists determine your genes, and your genes determine who you are. "The only protection society has from a slippery slope that basically leads to a Gattaca-type environment-designer babies, a master race-is public awareness, public scrutiny," says a doctor during a CNN broadcast in 2000 about designer babies - that is, babies genetically designed to have certain traits.

In 2008, Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which prevents employers and health insurance companies from using genetic information against individuals. Although GINA was first proposed a few years prior to Gattaca's release, the film was used to talk about it. "No Gattaca Here: Genetic Anti-Discrimination Law Goes Into Effect" reads the headline of a 2009 Discover magazine article on the law.

In particular, Gattaca seems to be invoked whenever people talk about technologies like the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas-9 or procedures such as pre-implantation genetic testing, which allows doctors to scan embryos for certain traits just like they did in Gattaca. (Using CRISPR-Cas-9 to edit human germline cells such as embryos is banned in the United States, but PGT is used in conjunction with in vitro fertilization in fertility clinics.)

In 2013, a Scientific American article really drew out the comparison when discussing the advancement - and ethical implications - of using pre-implantation genetic testing, asking " Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality? "

And after a scientist used CRISPR to create the first genetically edited babies in 2018, Ed Yong wrote in the Atlantic, "Even without any speculation about designer babies and Gattaca-like futures that may or may not come to pass, the details about what has already transpired are galling enough." (The scientist was widely criticised and sentenced to three years in prison.)

Those are just a few of the countless examples of articles about the ethics of genetic editing invoking Gattaca. In fact, the editor of Future Tense says she is constantly taking references to the film out of pieces because they get "a little tired."

Given the seemingly strong connection between the film and modern genetic technologies, I was curious - do people who work with these tools and concepts on a daily basis get tired of Gattaca, too? I decided to reach out and see how often the film comes up in their day-to-day and whether they think it's been a net good to society or just a way to create a moral panic.

Deanna Darnes is a genetic counsellor in Dallas, where she talks to patients about birth defects, chromosome abnormalities, and single gene disorders and helps them find genetic testing options. She's found that the movie left some patients - if they "are more my age or older," she says - confused about how genetics work, and what technology can do for fetuses with genetic diseases. Darnes especially noted that some people walked away from the movie with an oversimplified view of genetics as one gene codes for one trait.

"We're glad patients know what genetics actually are, but it anchors them to think certain things are permanent when they're not," she said. "People don't understand that genes are a big circuit. They work in concert, it's not a light switch. We need to move away from the pea plants and doing the rudimentary Punnett squares of 'it's either this or that' because it's not. It's a spectrum."

Experts in other areas of genetics also noted that because the film is coming on 25 years old, Gattaca jokes fall flat.

"I think I think about it more than my patients do because when they ask what we're testing for in the embryos, I on occasion say 'It's not like Gattaca, we can't test for traits. When we screen embryos broadly, we're screening for chromosomes'," Paula Brady, a reproductive endocrinologist at Columbia University, said. "I think the movie's old enough that it's not a frame of reference."

Brady also pointed out how the movie exists on the premise that genetics are fate and fails to account for the idea that the manifestation of certain genes can vary significantly from person to person.

"It assumes predisposition is inevitability, and we know that's not true," she explained. And some of her patients, who rely on donor eggs and/or sperm struggle with not having control over the reproduction process. She tells them that "the way genomes come together and make embryos and individuals is a 'slot machine.' It's not something we have such control over."

Brady also noted how the film fails to address other factors that can influence a child's development. "Watching the movie now, it was sad to me the degree to which it peripheralised parents and nurture, which we know is not true."

But geneticist Jonathan Pettitt seems to think the film does hint at the idea that genetics are not the end-all be-all.

"In Gattaca, the seductive certainty offered by genetic determinism ends up being cleverly undermined when Vincent (Ethan Hawke), one of the few people born outside the pre-selection process, proves more than a match for his genetically perfect peers," he writes in a 2016 article in the Conversation. "The film's ultimate message is that DNA is not destiny - which is precisely what science is now increasingly backing up. This being the case, allowing ourselves to be misled by science fiction is both an unfortunate and strange state of affairs."

Some people who work directly with Gattaca-like technology don't hear about the film as often as one might think. Megan Hochstrasser, who is currently a lead editor at Arcadia Science, got her PhD working on natural CRISPR systems at University of California, Berkeley. Hochstrasser was part of the lab when CRISPR-Cas-9 really took off as a genetic engineering tool. It wasn't until the gene editing component emerged that it became salient as to how her work was related to Gattaca.

"Because my work was so basic and it wasn't like I was doing gene editing in the early days, I didn't really think about Gattaca as something that applied to my life or my own research for a while," she explained. "As people started bringing it up all the time, it's become this ubiquitous reference, I started thinking about it more." She noted that at some point a bunch of lab members got together to jog their memory (and some watched it for the first time).

"I don't think it's as hot of a reference for general audiences," Hochstrasser added. "It seems like something the scientific community likes to reference a lot and definitely a lot of laypeople do know it, but I think they know it and care about it a lot less than we think they do."

Cliche and misconceptions aside, all the experts I spoke to see it as a decent representation of concerns people had about reproductive genetics and eugenics.

"At first I was like, 'A lot of people reference it, I shouldn't, it's kind of overdone,' but then I realised it's actually ridiculously relevant so I'm definitely going to reference it," Johnston said. "I have often felt like films and books do a better job than academic bioethicists of bringing alive some of those other concerns and arguments about who we are as humans, who we are as parents, what it means to unconditionally love, and what is healthy, and what is good."

And above all, it's a good springboard for conversations about the ethics of genetic research.

"I think it's a nice shorthand for dystopian futures and a way for people to imagine them, and a kickoff point for thinking about things in a more deep way," Hochstrasser said. "Sometimes people are limited in their imagination and when you're trying to have these discussions on the societal implications of science and how we all need to collectively care about these things in order to make the future something we want, it can be useful to have a reference point like that."
This piece was originally published on , a partnership between Slate magazine, Arizona State University, and New America.

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25 Years After 'Gattaca' Released, What Do Genetic Scientists Think About It?

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Gattaca deals with the potential ethical quandaries with genoism and eugenics. It became shorthand for a dystopian future enabled by genetic engineering. In particular, the movie is invoked whenever people talk about technologies like the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas-9 or procedures such as pre-implantation genetic testing.

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The seminal biotechnology science fiction film was released 25 years ago this month. The genetics-centric world Gattaca imagined, including genetic surveillance and associated privacy issues, seem prophetic given our current non-fiction genetic technologies.

First published: 10:00, 01.11.22

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A Gattaca replica? From science fiction to IVF reality | CTech

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The seminal biotechnology science fiction film was released 25 years ago this month. The genetics-centric world Gattaca imagined, including genetic surveillance and associated privacy issues, seem prophetic given our current non-fiction genetic technologies. First published: 10:00, 01.11.22

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HIS LYRICAL FILM, directed by Andrew Niccol in 1997, is a fusion of many parts. Using established science fiction and horror movie conventions, it engages with ethical and moral debates about cloning, genetic determinism and, on a more mundane level, the nature of the modern insurance game.

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Abstract

The 1997 film Gattaca has emerged as a canonical pop culture reference used to discuss modern controversies in genetics and bioethics. It appeared in theaters a few years prior to the announcement of the "completion" of the human genome (2000), as the science of human genetics was developing a renewed sense of its social implications. The story is set in a near-future world in which parents can, with technological assistance, influence the genetic composition of their offspring on the basis of predicted life outcomes. The current moment-25 years after the film's release-offers an opportunity to reflect on where society currently stands with respect to the ideas explored in Gattaca. Here, we review and discuss several active areas of genetic research-genetic prediction, embryo selection, forensic genetics, and others-that interface directly with scenes and concepts in the film. On its silver anniversary, we argue that Gattaca remains an important reflection of society's expectations and fears with respect to the ways that genetic science has manifested in the real world. In accompanying supplemental material, we offer some thought questions to guide group discussions inside and outside of the classroom.

The 1997 film Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol, envisions a "not-too-distant" future in which predictions made on the basis of genotypes play a central role in structuring society. Despite positive reviews from critics, Gattaca underperformed at the box office in its initial theatrical run. Since then, however, Gattaca has become a cult classic, and its title is a stand-in for the idea of genetic dystopia in popular parlance (e.g. Regalado 2019).

Gattaca's protagonist is Vincent Anton Freeman (Ethan Hawke), who was conceived the old-fashioned way, without the aid of modern technology. So-called "faith births" have become taboo in Gattaca's society-such people are labeled as "in-valids," " uteros," or "God children" and barred from opportunities and status. Based on what is in his genome, Vincent is predicted at birth to be at risk for several conditions, including a heart disorder foretold to lead to early death, which precludes his participation in educational and social institutions and in most employment opportunities.

Because of this genetic discrimination-outlawed in principle but common in practice in Gattaca 's world-doors are closed to Vincent that would allow him to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut at the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation. This goal is unreachable until he takes bold and desperate action, adopting the genetic identity of another person: an illegal, underground process called a "borrowed ladder." Vincent pays to adopt the genetic persona of a cooperating "valid"-that is, a person born under genetic supervision and assistance-Jerome (Jude Law), a former elite swimmer whose paraplegia prevents him from competing. Jerome's genetics give Vincent access to a job at the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation. Early in the film, a murder at the Gattaca Corporation jeopardizes Vincent's upcoming mission to Titan, and the ensuing investigation threatens to reveal his true identity.

Used widely in classrooms after its release, Gattaca remains as relevant as ever, a lens on modern uses of genetics. A quarter century later, we look back on the film, considering it from our perspective as geneticists. We organize our discussion around major scenes in the movie, taking up its depiction of genetic discrimination, genetic prediction, embryo selection, genetic investigations of crime, gene-by-environment interactions, and related topics. Along the way, we briefly review some technical aspects of contemporary genetics work related to Gattaca. For clarity, we have provided a brief definition of these concepts ( Supplementary Table 1) and a list of the main characters in the film ( Supplementary Table 2). We also discuss how the ideas in Gattaca have appeared in analogous social contexts in the United States. In Supplementary Text, we suggest questions for guiding classroom and community discussions of Gattaca. Caveat lector, minor spoilers await.

"We now have discrimination down to a science"

Though Gattaca has acquired a status as the quintessential genetics movie, the film's central messages are about discrimination writ large. The film makes the point that discrimination occurs along any of a number of dimensions (e.g. race, religion, gender identity), with genetics the instrument of discrimination in this fictional world. The science of genetics has already been a close partner of discrimination in its history, including via the eugenics movement ( Kevles 1995). Gattaca imagines a reinvigorated partnership in an era of enhanced genetic technology.

Vincent speaks to this in the film's opening scene, describing his plight via narration: "I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science." Gattaca depicts a world organized according to genetic predictions rather than the realized outcomes of genetic variation. For Vincent, his status as an in-valid, coming with predictions of elevated disease risk and limited ability, excludes him from much of society. For Jerome, laden with genetic gifts, the weight of prophecy is also crushing, leading to a wrenching personal crisis after he falls short of expectations.

The world of Gattaca is one in which the most privileged (valids) can propagate their privilege by ensuring that their children are born with genetic assistance. Privilege also becomes naturalized, justified by scientific prediction. Economic barriers to genetic assistance undercut Vincent's narrative claim that class is "no longer determined by social status." Through his experiences, Vincent realizes that though genetic variation matters, the social force of genetic prediction can be at least as powerful. Uncertainty about whether Vincent will continue to outwit the genetically defined elite, in part by capitalizing on their misplaced faith in an overstated genetic determinism, is an important driver of tension in the film's plot.

"There's no gene for fate"

Predictions are powerful in Gattaca despite their uneven performance. Some commentators have taken the overly precise predictions in Gattaca at face value. For example, futurist Ramez Naam wrote ( Naam 2014), "...the science in the film was just terrible. No genetic test will ever tell you how many heartbeats you have left...The film was a gross exaggeration." Naam is correct that the precision purported to be obtained by some of the predictions in Gattaca is impossible. Our reading is that the film acknowledges this and constantly undercuts the presumption that the predictions work as the characters seem to expect, suggesting thereby that overstatements of the predictive power of genetics are a powerful social tool.

Early in Gattaca, we see a flashback to the birth of the main character, Vincent. During Vincent's first moments, one member of the medical team recites predictions about Vincent's future from a monitor:

"Neurological condition: 60% probability

Manic depression: 42% probability

Attention deficit disorder: 89% probability

Heart disorder: 99% probability

Early fatal potential, life expectancy: 30.2 years"

Vincent narrates, "My destiny was mapped out before me-all my flaws, predispositions, and susceptibilities-most untreatable to this day. Only minutes old, the date and cause of my death was already known."

The events of the film cast the value of the fortune being told into doubt. Vincent, after all, has already outlived his predicted demise from heart failure at the time of the story and does not, to the viewer's knowledge, develop most of the diseases predicted at his birth. Foretold to be frail, Vincent becomes a strong athlete, eventually outswimming his genetically assisted brother, Anton. Although Vincent is predicted to have a substantial chance of developing a mood disorder, it is Jerome, a valid, who struggles with depression.

The film does give the impression that genetic prediction has proven accurate and precise for morphological traits, in fact, more precise than would seem to be possible on the basis of current estimates of environmental contributions to such traits ( Polderman et al. 2015). The record of genetic prediction in Gattaca appears, but is not stated, to be shakier in other areas, including disease, performance, and behavior. That said, the predictions being made are probabilistic, and one person failing to develop a condition predicted to develop with probability <1 does not by itself invalidate the prediction method, which may be accurate at a population level. Even if the accuracy of the predictions made in Gattaca is presumed, however, most characters in the movie appear to treat them as essentially deterministic, though they are not.

Prediction of traits has been a central pursuit of genetics for decades. In agriculture, genomic prediction ( Meuwissen et al. 2001) has been broadly useful ( Crossa et al. 2017; Georges et al. 2019) and transformative in some cases, for example increasing the rate of improvement from breeding programs of milk yield in dairy cattle by about twofold ( Wiggans et al. 2017). There has also been excitement about the value of genetic predictions in human health, but there are important differences between agricultural and human health applications, including the possibility of controlled breeding and environments in agriculture, and also distinct goals-individual prediction in the human case and shifting of a distribution in the agriculture case. Though rough predictions of disease risk could potentially be useful for screening purposes, accurate, personalized predictions of disease risk or response to treatment could transform healthcare. However, for many of the most medically important traits, such predictions have been slower to arrive than some might have expected.

For Mendelian diseases-diseases whose development is controlled by a person's genotype at a single genetic location-prediction can be very accurate. Nevertheless, there can be considerable variation in how classically Mendelian diseases (e.g. sickle cell disease) manifest, as they can be modified environmentally ( Piel et al. 2017; Royal et al. 2021), and there can also be uncertainty about uncharacterized variants in genetic loci known to generate Mendelian disease. Many other diseases, including most common forms of heart disease and cancer, are "complex" diseases, meaning that they are affected by numerous genetic variants, environmental factors, and their interaction. Most complex traits that have been studied appear to be extremely polygenic, with associated variants scattered across much of the genome ( Boyle et al. 2017; Visscher et al. 2017; Sella and Barton 2019).

The liability threshold model ( Dempster and Lerner 1950; Falconer 1965) is the most popular framework for linking multilocus genotypes to disease risk. (See Supplementary Text for more background.) The liability threshold framework allows us to get a sense of how unusual the predictions recited at Vincent's birth might be. To do this, we imagine that the liability threshold model holds exactly; that, in the world of Gattaca, healthcare providers have access to either exact liabilities or exact liabilities accessible via common SNPs; and that heritabilities and disease prevalences are similar to those measured in Western societies in the 20th century.

Given the liability threshold model, we can compute the percentile on the genetic liability scale necessary to achieve a given disease risk. The expression, justified in Supplementary Text, is

where is the cumulative distribution function of the standard normal distribution, p is the disease prevalence, r is the predicted individual disease risk, and and are the standard deviations of the environmental and genetic components of liability, respectively.

The closest analog of "manic depression" is bipolar I disorder, which has an estimated worldwide prevalence of 1%, liability-scale SNP heritability (i.e. heritability explained by common variants) of 20%, and estimated (from twin studies) heritability of 80% in Western samples of European ancestries ( O'Connell and Coombes 2021). Plugging these numbers into Equation (2) implies that to receive Vincent's risk estimate of 42%, a person would need to be at the 99.3th percentile of genetic liability, or, if liability is computed from common SNPs, the 99.9999th percentile. Similarly, for "Attention Deficit Disorder," the closest analog is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, with estimated prevalence 5%, liability-scale heritability 74%, and liability-scale SNP heritability 18% in Western samples of European ancestries ( Faraone and Larsson 2019). Under the liability threshold model, Vincent's genetic risk estimate of 89% is thus at the 99.6th percentile of genetic risk if the full liability is known, or the 99.999999995th percentile if the liability is computed from common variants.

Under the assumptions used here, the risk predictions given to Vincent would place him in the tail of genetic risk for these conditions. To say how improbable this set of predictions would be for a random person, we would need to make assumptions about how the risks were selected for reporting (is it the same set for every birth, or are only high risks noted?), as well as about the correlations of genetic liability for the diseases considered.

One question raised by the probabilities recited at Vincent's birth (considered more technically in Box 1) is the level of confidence we might ever conceivably place in the prediction of a complex phenotype. The environmental influences on complex traits mean that genetic near-identity is not enough to ensure identical outcomes ( Wong et al. 2005; Roberts et al. 2012). For example, among people with bipolar I disorder (the closest contemporary analog to the "manic depression" of Gattaca's screenplay) who have an identical twin, the twin has bipolar I disorder only about 40% of the time ( Barnett and Smoller 2009).

The potential to predict a trait from genetic information is limited by the trait's heritability, the proportion of trait variance explained by genetic variation in a given population and range of environments. Heritability can be estimated in many ways ( Visscher et al. 2008; Zaitlen and Kraft 2012; Brandes et al. 2022).

For most human traits, genetic prediction falls well short of the upper limit predicted by heritability estimates, despite the massive scale of studies devoted to estimating the associations between genetic variation and trait variation, which now commonly include hundreds of thousands of research participants.

For the complex trait that has been most intensively studied, human height, a titanic meta-analysis of 5.4 million people has led to a genetic predictor-i.e. a "polygenic score" (see Box 2 for background) ( Torkamani et al. 2018; Thompson et al. 2022)-that explains 40% of the variance in height in a sample of people of European ancestries ( Yengo et al. 2022). This enormous effort achieved an accuracy approaching the "SNP heritability" ( Yang et al. 2017; Hou et al. 2019), which is the portion of the heritability explained by common genetic variants. The SNP heritability is likely an upper bound on the performance of genetic prediction for the foreseeable future ( Wray et al. 2021). For height, the heritability estimated from twin studies is usually estimated at about double the SNP heritability, around 80% ( Visscher et al. 2008). Indeed, for many traits, the SNP heritability is substantially lower than heritability estimated from twin studies, but the relative importance of several nonexclusive explanations is not clear ( Young 2019).

Modest SNP heritabilities delay the prospect of predictions for complex traits with precision and accuracy levels approaching those advertised in Gattaca, even in cases in which such precision could be possible in principle. At the same time, generalizing genetic predictions of complex traits outside the settings in which they have been calibrated has proven difficult. For example, predictions from the massive height study mentioned above accounted for only 10-20% of the variance in height outside people of European ancestries ( Yengo et al. 2022), a pattern that has been observed repeatedly in analogous contexts ( Martin et al. 2017, 2019; Thompson et al. 2022). The causes of these problems with generalizability are not fully understood, but evidence points to contributions from worldwide differences in the frequencies and correlations of genetic variants ( Wang et al. 2020) as well as genetic interactions ( Mostafavi et al. 2020; Patel et al. 2022; Zhu et al. 2022), in which the effect of a genetic variant on a trait depends on the environment (gene-by-environment interaction) or on genotypes at other positions in the genome (gene-by-gene interaction, or epistasis).

Despite such challenges, polygenic scores may prove valuable in the clinic, and for specific purposes and conditions, including coronary artery disease, they already show promise ( Khera et al. 2018), especially in combination with known pathogenic variants ( Maamari et al. 2022).

Alongside whatever clinical usefulness they provide, genetic predictions raise ethical and legal challenges, including genetic discrimination ( Joly et al. 2020). In the United States, employers and health insurance providers are barred from considering genetic information under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). GINA, however, does not cover life, long-term care, or disability insurance, and at least one woman has been denied life insurance coverage because of her BRCA1 genotype ( Farr 2016). Nor does GINA extend to discrimination in education, lending, housing, or other contexts, though some states have laws that consider these domains ( Wood 2017). There have been calls to expand GINA's coverage ( Rothstein 2018). Beyond discrimination, the public's interest in genetics has driven a market for direct-to-consumer genetic prediction that is almost unregulated in the United States, including several companies that market aggressively while offering predictions with little or no scientific grounding ( Spencer and Topol 2019).

Genetic predictions of phenotypic values are often termed genomic estimated breeding values in the agricultural literature and polygenic scores or polygenic risk scores in the human genetics literature. In human genetics, polygenic scoress usually take the form of weighted sums of individual genotypes, with weights derived from effect-size estimates from genome-wide association studies (GWAS), in which the associations between genotypes at genome-wide loci and a phenotype are estimated in a large sample of individuals.

A widely applied method for estimating a polygenic score is clumping and thresholding, in which the goal is to select loci for inclusion in the polygenic score that are not strongly correlated (clumping) and that each pass a threshold for evidence of association with the phenotype, based on a P-value (thresholding). Once m loci are selected, the polygenic score is calculated as

where is the GWAS-estimated effect on the phenotype of carrying one of the alleles at locus j and is the number of effect alleles carried by the individual at locus j. The thresholds for P-value and for correlation among sites can be chosen empirically to maximize predictive accuracy ( Euesden et al. 2015).

Many variations exist, including approaches to model correlation among sites ( Vilhjálmsson et al. 2015), methods that take individual-level data rather than GWAS summary statistics as input ( Zhou et al. 2013), and methods that incorporate locus functional annotations ( Hu et al. 2017). In addition to the uses in agriculture and medicine discussed in the main text, polygenic scores are used for research, for example to explore relationships among traits ( Richardson et al. 2019). Choi et al. (2020) give an accessible primer on polygenic scores, and Ma and Zhou (2021) review the landscape of current approaches to polygenic score estimation.

At the time of its release, some geneticists viewed Gattaca as an antigenetics or antiscience film ( Kirby 2000), in part because of its implication-laced throughout the plot rather than stated outright-that precise genetic prediction is extremely difficult for many important human traits ( Silver 1997). Viewed from the present, Gattaca looks prescient in this regard, agreeing in spirit with the results of 25 years of energetic, multidisciplinary research.

"This child is still you, simply the best of you"

When planning for their second child, Vincent's parents opt for a genetically assisted birth: a "valid" child. When Vincent's parents visit a geneticist (Blair Underwood), they are told, "this child is still you, simply the best of you." This line and others, as well as the image of 4 candidate embryos on a screen in the geneticist's office, strongly suggest that "genetic assistance" is some form of embryo or gamete selection rather than CRISPR-like editing of parental genetic material. However, the geneticist's next line, "You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result," suggests that the process is not simple selection from 4 typical embryos. Perhaps the 4 candidates are picked from a much larger set, or sperm and eggs were submitted to an earlier selection process, or, perhaps, genetic assistance entails human guidance of meiosis.

The geneticist details the features available in the candidate embryos for consideration. The parents opt for a boy and confirm their preference for some cosmetic features-hazel eyes, dark hair, fair skin. (The broad smile of the geneticist, a Black man, as he enunciates "fair skin" brings to mind the question of embryo selection for racialized traits.) As the geneticist continues through a list of traits he has "eliminated," Vincent's parents appear uncomfortable and protest, saying that although they are comfortable preventing diseases, "we were wondering if it's good to just leave a few things to chance." The geneticist replies, "You want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already."

The conversation mirrors current discussions about the ethics of preimplantation genetic screening and embryo selection. Forms of embryo selection have been available since before Gattaca was released, beginning in 1989 ( Handyside et al. 1990), when embryos were selected to avoid the development of X-chromosome-linked conditions. Embryo selection has been controversial for decades along many dimensions ( Botkin 1998; Knoppers et al. 2006; Lázaro-Muñoz et al. 2021), including the difficulty and accessibility of necessary in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures, the ethical basis for selecting embryos, effects on relationships between parents and children, and the reliability of selection procedures.

Current controversy is concentrated on so-called polygenic embryo selection, in which embryos are selected for implantation on the basis of their polygenic scores. Polygenic scores, mentioned in the previous section, are predictions of trait values computed from genetic data, typically as a sum of an individual's genotypes weighted by each genotypes' association with the trait, measured in an extremely large sample. Polygenic embryo selection services are already being offered to consumers by at least 4 companies ( Turley et al. 2021), and the first child born via polygenic embryo selection was born in 2020 ( Goldberg 2021).

Several recent studies include models of the performance of embryo selection as a function of the number of embryos available and the predictive accuracy of the polygenic scores ( Karavani et al. 2019; Lencz et al. 2021; Turley et al. 2021). In their modeling framework, Karavani and colleagues (2019) find that with modern polygenic scores (assuming their predictive power holds across generations), the expected gain for continuous traits is fairly modest. For example, simulating selection of the embryo with the largest polygenic score from 10 candidates-a large number by current standards-they predict an expected gain of 2.5 cm in height. If multiple traits are targeted for embryo selection, the expected gain per trait can decrease substantially.

For a binary disease, under a liability-threshold model (see Box 1) the expected relative risk reduction can be somewhat more impressive ( Lencz et al. 2021; This is in part because a considerable fraction of people beyond the disease threshold are only slightly beyond it, meaning that relatively modest shifts in liability may push such an individual from the "affected" to the "unaffected" side.). At the same time, because many complex diseases are fairly rare, relatively impressive improvements in relative risk might entail only minor decreases in absolute risk for a given disease. The decrease in absolute risk may be larger for couples with family history of the disease, and for couples who carry known pathogenic variants, the effects of screening for those variants and polygenic score may stack, leading to more substantial decreases in risk ( Kumar et al. 2022).

The expected "gain" in a trait value produced by embryo selection is limited by the number of embryos available for selection, which may be low in many IVF settings. At the same time, the rate at which the expected gain increases with the number of embryos is very slow ( Box 3). The other important limiting factor is prediction accuracy, which is modest now for most traits, limited in principle by the environmental effects on the trait, and limited further in the near term by the SNP heritability (see previous section).

Turley and colleagues (2021) emphasize difficulties in polygenic embryo selection, many of which could still apply in a Gattaca-like world, in which predictive performance might be better than it is now. First, the correlation between polygenic scores in contemporary adults and their trait values is not necessarily a trustworthy estimator of the correlation between embryos' genotypes and their eventual trait values: for example, if the environment changes over time, the relationship between the polygenic score and the trait value may also change. Furthermore, gene-environment correlations in the population may be responsible for some of the predictive accuracy of polygenic scores. Those correlations are not guaranteed to take the same form within sets of siblings as they do in the general population, which may lead to decrements in accuracy for the relevant prediction problem. (Comparisons among siblings are the relevant scenario for evaluating embryo selection, since embryo selection is typically selection among a candidate set of prospective biological siblings.)

Another issue pointed out by Turley and colleagues is that of genetic correlation or pleiotropy, in which selection for one trait may influence a second trait, perhaps in part because the traits' variation has partially shared genetic bases, or because one trait is a causal influence on the other for nongenetic reasons. Turley and colleagues give an example in which selecting for educational attainment may simultaneously increase risk for bipolar disorder. Some have argued that this potential issue is minor because genetic correlations among many diseases appear to be mainly positive, such that selecting an embryo with lower heart disease risk (say) would tend to lower risk for several other diseases ( Widen et al. 2022). At the same time, most current genetic correlation estimates are based on population samples and could be biased by assortative mating ( Border et al. 2022), or by population stratification or other sources of gene-environment correlation ( van Rheenen et al. 2019). Within-sibling estimates of genetic correlation are more germane to the embryo selection setting.

Assuming that genetic assistance in Gattaca takes the form of embryo selection from a large number of embryos, what might the results be? How different from a couple's average child (produced the old-fashioned way) might we expect the "assisted" child to be? Several recent papers have taken up the related question of how embryo selection on the basis of polygenic scores might perform ( Karavani et al. 2019; Lencz et al. 2021; Turley et al. 2021). A key result from Karavani et al. (2019, Equation 1) states that the expected increase ("gain") in an offspring's value for a quantitative trait due to being selected as having the largest polygenic score in a set of n embryos from the same set of parents approximately obeys

where is the standard deviation of the trait, and is the correlation between the polygenic score in the embryo and the eventual trait value of the adult.

The hypothetical that the geneticist in Gattaca presents-that of having a thousand children-is accessible in Karavani and colleagues' expression via the term , arising as an approximation to the expectation of the Gumbel distribution, which is itself an approximation of the distribution of the maximum of a set of n independent draws from a normal distribution, with the approximation improving for large n. The term implies that the expected gain that results from selecting the embryo with the highest polygenic score out of 1,000 candidates is only 1.7 times as large as that obtained by selecting from 10 candidate embryos. a In other words, the expected gain climbs very slowly with increasing numbers of candidate embryos. That said, increasing the number of offspring does decrease the variance of the gain.

The traits targeted by embryo selection are another source of controversy. In Gattaca, selection appears to be guided by a discriminatory pseudo-medical consensus about what is desirable. As suggested by Vincent's parents in Gattaca, many people seem more comfortable, in principle, with selection against diseases than with selection for cosmetic or behavioral traits, leaving aside the issue of prediction accuracy ( Krones et al. 2005; Hudson 2006). Indeed, one of the least controversial cases of embryo screening is for Mendelian conditions lethal in early childhood, like Tay-Sachs disease. The category of "disease" is not always straightforward, however, with, in many cases, social forces and sometimes arbitrary cutoffs determining what counts as a disease ( Temple et al. 2001). And, of course, the presence of disease, in the abstract, does not determine whether one life is more or less worth living than another.

When reflecting on the limits of current embryo selection, one might also consider how future technology might overcome them. For example, some have pointed to opportunities for gene editing (as opposed to embryo selection), rendering moot the need for parents to carry the desired alleles ( Goldstein 2022). But while future technologies may quell some contemporary concerns, others will persist or even become amplified. For example, gene editing will face vexing scientific and ethical questions regarding which alleles to modify, as well as risks from even small error rates, which may well render gene editing counterproductive for its stated goals.

Gattaca's original ending, cut for the theatrical release but included in an advance screening for scientists ( Kirby 2000), raised this point with a montage of people who might never have been born if embryo selection against genetic disease had been developed sooner: "Abraham Lincoln (Marfan's syndrome), Emily Dickinson (Manic Depression), Vincent Van Gogh (Epilepsy), Albert Einstein (Dyslexia), John F. Kennedy (Addison's Disease), Rita Hayworth (Alzheimer's Disease), Ray Charles (Primary Glaucoma), Stephen Hawking (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Asthma)."

"We found our man"

Much of the tension in Gattaca's plot is driven by a murder, the unexplained killing of a mission director at the titular facility. The murder gives the film an opportunity to explore genetically assisted law enforcement. The contrast between old and new methods of detection is embodied-initially in reverse-by 2 investigators assigned to the case, an older detective (Alan Arkin) straight out of noir, complete with fedora and trenchcoat, and his younger, valid colleague (Loren Dean), who outranks him. (The older detective was presumably born before the era of widespread genetic assistance, and is thus in-valid.)

Vincent is not the murderer, but the investigation nonetheless threatens to uncover his genetic impersonation of Jerome. Though Vincent is fastidious in his effort to keep his identity secret, he nonetheless sheds an eyelash near the crime scene, which ultimately alerts police to the presence of an in-valid in the facility.

Vincent's illicit presence makes him a prime suspect, leading to a genetic manhunt. When Vincent's eyelash is analyzed, detectives learn he is an "unregistered" in-valid-i.e. one who is not included in an implied central database-and they see a picture of Vincent, complete with his preimpersonation hairstyle and eyeglasses. They do not receive a name, but they do learn that he used to work as a janitor at the facility, perhaps by questioning his former supervisor (Ernest Borgnine).

Although his picture is known to authorities, Vincent's appearance does not give him away. Vincent faces greater risk from widespread genetic screening. Detectives appear to test hundreds or even thousands of people while investigating the murder, looking for a match with the stray eyelash. The practice of searching for direct matches between a crime-scene sample and a suspect or database entry was ramping up in the United States around the time of Gattaca's release, following its origin in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s ( Gill et al. 1985). Today, the US National DNA Index System (NDIS) contains over 20 million profiles and has been used in over 500,000 investigations ( FBI 2021). For each person in the database, genotypes are recorded for either 13 (prior to 2017) or 20 microsatellite loci, known as the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) markers, along with Y chromosomal and mitochondrial genotypes that are searched in more restricted circumstances. Though the NDIS database is large, many people are not included-inclusion typically depends on prior encounters with law enforcement, though the specific rules vary by state. The current rules have created a database marked by racial disparities in inclusion ( Murphy and Tong 2019). Among other issues, racial disparities in the current databases have led to calls for universal databases ( Dedrickson 2017; Hazel et al. 2018), which are controversial for other reasons, including privacy concerns ( Joly et al. 2019). Public opinion surveys on universal DNA databases are sparse but do not suggest widespread support for universal databases in the United States or Europe ( Dundes 2001; Zieger and Utz 2015).

Despite ambivalence about universal DNA databases, the recent adoption of investigative genetic genealogy (IGG, also called long-range familial search or forensic genetic genealogy) has opened large segments of the population to de facto genetic search. In an IGG search, genetic genealogists upload genome-wide genotypes-not the handful of markers included in CODIS-to platforms typically used for recreational genealogy. Examining matching segments of DNA likely to be inherited from recent shared ancestors (i.e. identical-by-descent segments), genealogists identify likely biological relatives of the person they seek, aiming to build a family tree that points to their target ( Kennett 2019; Katsanis 2020; Kling et al. 2021). IGG is powerful because genome-wide markers allow reliable identification of biological relatives out to the third-cousin range, and with some success extending out to fifth cousins or further ( Donnelly 1983; Huff et al. 2011). Because the typical person has many distant cousins, even a database that includes only a small fraction of the population (2%) will include genetically detectable cousins of the majority of the population ( Erlich et al. 2018; Edge and Coop 2019), potentially allowing most people to be identified by IGG. IGG's power has caused it to be quickly adopted, and it has produced suspects or identified remains in ∼300 cases ( Dowdeswell 2022). At the same time, current regulation ( Ram et al. 2021) and scientific understanding of IGG are limited, and some of the upload-based databases used for IGG have been flagged for privacy concerns ( Edge and Coop 2020; Ney et al. 2020).

Speaking of universal databases, the genetic investigation in Gattaca raises a puzzle: If Vincent is unregistered, how do the detectives get his picture? And further, how do they have access to his picture but no name attached? One possibility is that the film wants us to assume that the detectives predict his phenotype, generating the picture from the genetic information in the eyelash. The detectives do make reference to other phenotype predictions, including Vincent's short predicted lifespan and a "violent temperament," which, in the eyes of the older detective, replaces the need for a plausible motive.

Phenotype predictions in forensic contexts, termed forensic DNA phenotyping, have been explored in the academic literature ( Walsh et al. 2013; Claes et al. 2014; Kayser 2015; Chaitanya et al. 2018; Schneider et al. 2019) and are currently marketed to law enforcement ( Wienroth 2020). Forensic interest in phenotype prediction focuses on so-called externally visible traits (EVTs), which might be perceived by a witness ( Jobling 2022). Sex, predicted from sex chromosome karyotype, has been used in this way for some time ( Sullivan et al. 1993), notwithstanding some errors resulting from imperfect matches between sex chromosome karyotype and sex, or between sex and gender identity or presentation. Other EVTs of interest relate mainly to facial appearance. Although coarse pigmentation prediction (e.g. classifying blue vs brown eyes, but not green vs hazel) can be reasonably accurate for eyes, hair, and skin, at least in some groups (excluding possibilities such as dyed hair, colored contact lenses, graying of hair with age, etc.), predictive performance on most facial traits is not accurate enough for reliable face reconstruction ( Schneider et al. 2019; Jobling 2022). For some facial phenotypes, predictive accuracy is limited in principle by moderate heritability under current conditions ( Šešelj et al. 2015; Cole et al. 2017; Tsagkrasoulis et al. 2017). Furthermore, modifications to one's appearance (makeup, eyeglasses, jewelry, hairstyle, facial hair style, etc.), though they may strongly influence a person's appearance, will never be reliably predicted by an individual's genotype. The facial traits most accurately predicted-pigmentation features-are racialized, and concerns have been raised that predictive phenotyping in forensics contributes to racial profiling ( Pollack 2015; Queirós 2019; Hopman and M'charek 2020; Bartram et al. 2021).

Gattaca's use of phenotype prediction specifically to investigate a crime is more than a plot device used to explore the ways in which forensic genetics would work in this fictional world. Debates about innateness have been central in conversations around criminal behavior and its social consequences. For example, the search for criminal "types" based in and recognizable in terms of biology has a long history with deep connections to the eugenics movement ( Rafter 1997). Myths about inferiority, especially concerning the poor, immigrants, and Black people in the United States, have influenced the development of crime control policies ( Lassiter 2015; Hinton 2017; Muhammad 2019). During the search for the murderer, Gattaca shows us officers accosting people in an area where in-valids are known to congregate, bringing to mind racial profiling. The film's depiction of a genetic criminal investigation resonates with the broader theme of genetic discrimination because criminal justice is a setting in which biological discrimination has appeared in flagrant forms.

"That piece can only be played with twelve"

Gattaca artfully weaves its themes into its characters' interactions. Irene (Uma Thurman) has several roles: she is Vincent's love interest and a staff member at the Gattaca Corporation who is assigned to assist the murder investigation. The interactions between Vincent and Irene generate windows onto the interpretation of genetic "imperfections" in Gattaca 's world. Early in the film, Irene takes a nonconsensual look at Vincent's genetic identity by taking a hair from his desk drawer to a corner genomic sequencing service. (The hair was Jerome's, stashed by Vincent in his desk for just this eventuality.) When Irene confesses her clandestine genetic monitoring, she also shares her insecurity about a heart defect that prevents her from going to space.

One especially critical moment involving Irene takes place on her first date with Vincent. They attend a performance, and we see a pianist playing an impressive serenade. At the end of the concert, Vincent (posing as Jerome) and Irene stand near a poster advertising the event that highlights the pianist's 12 fingers. Vincent says, "One finger or twelve, it's how you play," to which Irene responds "that piece can only be played with twelve". Vincent is speaking from his own experience, suggesting that what one is born with is not what dictates one's ability. Irene, alternatively, pushes the Gattaca-world doctrine of biological determinism-some people are born with the equipment to play certain tunes.

The film is not clear about whether the 12-fingered pianist was the product of genetic assistance (as in, was selected to have 12 fingers to play the piano) or was a "God child" from a natural birth. Whatever the mechanism, the 12-fingered pianist was born with some version of polydactyly, in which vertebrates have additional digits on their extremities (more than 5 digits in humans). The scene introduces a question about how abnormalities are perceived in the world of Gattaca: should we interpret the presumptive celebration of the 6-fingered pianist as a symbol of acceptance or of exoticism? Perhaps the scene highlights that certain conditions are tolerated insofar as they entertain and do not threaten the valid class.

In many settings, conversations around abnormalities, impairments, and disability have become more sophisticated, as scientists, scholars, and advocates have challenged scientific fields to rethink normative definitions of fitness, health, and disability ( Branch et al. 2022). In the poster Vincent considers after the performance, the pianist's 12 fingers cover his face, suggesting his feeling of shame in Gattaca 's world of physical conformity. But they also let him play a transcendent piece of music that few others can manage. One lesson is that fixed notions of impairment are imprecise. This is not only an ethical message but also a technical one: gene-by-environment interactions are a central concept in modern genetics, defined by how the phenotypic manifestation of genotypic information is dependent on context.

Conclusion: "But then, who knows what he could do, right?"

Gattaca is a work of science fiction, and thus its main charge is not to depict science as we know it, but rather, to ask questions using science-adjacent concepts as vehicles. Gattaca's most obvious pattern of scientific inaccuracy is the persistent overstatement by powerful people-healthcare professionals, police, employers-of the predictive potential of genetic information. This inaccuracy is a feature of the film, not a bug, in that it highlights the social force of such overstatements. More broadly, Gattaca introduces questions about contemporary applications of genetics to healthcare, embryo selection, forensics, and other areas. Gattaca was ahead of its time, an even richer text today than it was in its day.

In 2022, we stand in the midst of debates about the social implications of advancements in genetic science. These include technical and practical challenges (e.g. missing heritability), and broader questions regarding how new technologies (e.g. gene editing via CRISPR) should be used ( Greely 2019). And unfortunately, some voices take on a troubling form, echoing historical attempts to use genetics as a justification for the othering of groups based on presumed differences ( Graves 2001; Hammonds and Herzig 2009), fueling scientific racism and biological determinism that stymie the progress of modern genetics ( Ogbunu 2022).

A recurring problem at the interface of the science and ethics of genetics, participated in by both scientists and users of science, is a kind of giddiness-an unjustified optimism that genetic research will imminently solve the most relevant questions surrounding human nature and society. For example, Charles Davenport once wrote with exhilaration about the potential for tying all sorts of human traits to the Procrustean bed of Mendelism, including "nomadism," "shiftlessness," and love of the sea ( Kevles 1995, pp. 48-49). Davenport's flights of fancy were woven into the American eugenics movement, of which he was a leader, and eventually influenced immigration policy. Many forecasts of genetics' ability to solve large, complex social problems are driven by similar giddiness, saying that any day, our fates will be captured with simple metrics that can be read at birth or even in utero, just like those of the newborn Vincent or his brother, Anton.

The abuses of science in Gattaca's world are based on science advanced beyond our own, but they mirror ones in our own history. Reflecting on Gattaca implores us to look ahead, toward creating a world different from the one it portrays, where science is no longer misused to reinforce social inequality, to limit possibilities, and to transform hopes into dreams deferred.

Supplemental material is available at GENETICS online.

Acknowledgments

This project emerged from conversations that took place at the 2022 March workshop "Reimagining the Central Dogma" at the Foundations Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the authors would like to thank organizer D. Montell and the workshop participants. The authors thank L. Chang for sharing his expertise in cardiology, and G. Coop, R. Harp, A. Harpak, E. Hinton, A. Hirsh, T. Lasisi, V. Link, N. Mancuso, N. Rosenberg, and P. Turley, as well as associate editor N. Barton and 2 anonymous reviewers, for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. CBO would also like to thank organizer N. Baym and participants in "Race and Technology: A Research Lecture Series" sponsored by Microsoft Research, where iterations of the ideas in this manuscript were discussed. Lastly, CBO would like to thank L. Crawford and M. Boykin for helpful discussions, and M. Gray and D. Seligman for conversations that inspired the project.

Funding

MDE is funded by NIH grant R35 GM137758.

Conflicts of interest

None declared.

Literature cited

Author notes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Gattaca as a lens on contemporary genetics: marking 25 years into the film's "not-too-distant" future

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The 1997 film Gattaca has emerged as a canonical pop culture reference used to discuss modern controversies in genetics and bioethics. It appeared in theaters a few years prior to the announcement of the "completion" of the human genome (2000), as the science of human genetics was developing a renewed sense of its social implications.

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Gattaca:  A Vintage Future - The Workprint

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This was published 6 years ago

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"For all its style and promise", wrote Neil Jeffries in Empire, " Gattaca is far easier to look at than to actually watch".

A fair summation of an always attractive and originally designed film which deals with the desires of an ordinary mortal to make his way among a race of privileged and genetically modified upper-class individuals.

Ethan Hawke as Vincent Freeman and Uma Thurman as Irene Cassini in Gattaca. Credit:AP

Class envy writ large?

We are all ordinary and extraordinary in our own way yet most of us entertain some sort of fantasy avatar or more heroic persona - an external expectation or modified sense of self which is given wings in the magical realm of cyberspace.

And, in a world of cringing mediocrity, it's understandable to desire an enhanced sense of self...to improve on the basic model provided by our genes and social standing.

While assaying such concepts, Gattaca also provokes moral questions - questions increasingly asked as advances in technology are used against people as well as for their benefit.

Complex legal and ethical issues surround genetic manipulation and DNA engineering. If life insurance companies assess risk factors by studying clients' DNA, other companies can eliminate potential staff whose genetic profiles fail to match their parameters.

And that's the starting point for this near future drama.

Gattaca Aerospace Corporation defines strict criteria for trainees seeking admission to its off-planet programs.

If applicants are "Valid" - meaning they have had their DNA pre-arranged - they are deemed to have "the right stuff".

If they are In-Valid - meaning they were naturally born - they do not.

Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), is in the latter category but such is his desire to slip the surly bonds of Earth, he contrives to "borrow" certain fluids from a crippled Valid (Jude Law), adopt his identity and enter the program. Using urine samples, sweat and false iris techniques, he rorts the validation protocols and random checks of Gattaca's security system.

But he lives on the edge...as he always has since childhood when his older brother began stretching his capabilities to the limit.

The "just do it" credo, taken to extremes, is elemental to human evolution.

Corporate genetic discrimination deserves deception but intimate interpersonal relationships - sex, if you will - are something else.

Can he initiate "fluid exchanges" with yummy astronaut, Irene Cassini (Uma Thurman). Is non-Valid segregation just another manifestation of racism, sexism, of biologism?

Andrew Niccol's engaging film won't appeal to eugenicists and yuppie scum who view the creation of "an impeccable child" as their right. Their birthright.

Couples whose vanity insists their kids resemble them or conform to abject ideas of purity and perfection, tend to cringe at the sight of those impaired by nature's chromosomal mistakes. And although it's becoming increasingly feasible to repair damaged babies in the womb, it appears there isn't a corresponding advance when it comes to socially accepting those born impaired or disabled.

Incurable damage resides in hard hearts and utopian minds closed to fallibility. Good acting, a Michael Nyman score and intellectual sinew enhance Niccol's film and almost get it over the line.

WHAT Gattaca (1997)

WHEN SBS2, Monday, 12.05am (Tuesday)

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This was published 6 years ago Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size "For all its style and promise", wrote Neil Jeffries in Empire, " Gattaca is far easier to look at than to actually watch".

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Vincent does not accept his fate. He never has. As a child, he had swimming contests with his brother Anton ( Loren Dean), who has all the right scores but needs to be saved from drowning. Now Vincent dreams of becoming a crew member on an expedition to one of the moons of Saturn. Using an illegal DNA broker, he makes a deal with a man named Jerome ( Jude Law), who has the right genes but was paralyzed in an accident. Jerome will provide him with blood, urine samples and an identity. In a sense, they'll both go into space. "Gattaca" is the remarkable debut of a writer-director from New Zealand, Andrew Niccol, whose film is intelligent and thrilling--a tricky combination--and also visually exciting. His most important set is a vast office where genetically superior computer programmers come to work every day, filing into their long rows of desks like the office slaves in King Vidor's "The Crowd" and Orson Welles' "The Trial." (Why are "perfect" human societies so often depicted by ranks of automatons? Is it because human nature resides in our flaws?) Vincent, as "Jerome," gets a job as a programmer, supplies false genetic samples and becomes a finalist for the space shot.

The tension comes in two ways. First, there's the danger that Vincent will be detected; the area is swept daily, and even an eyelash can betray him. Second, there's a murder; a director of the center, who questions the wisdom of the upcoming shot, is found dead, and a detective ( Alan Arkin) starts combing the personnel for suspects. Will a computer search sooner or later put together Vincent, the former janitor, with "Jerome," the new programmer? Vincent becomes friendly with Irene ( Uma Thurman), who works in the center but has been passed over for a space shot because of low scores in some areas. They are attracted to one another, but romance in this world can be dangerous; after kissing a man, a woman is likely to have his saliva swabbed from her mouth so she can test his prospects. Other supporting characters include Gore Vidal, as a mission supervisor, and Tony Shalhoub as the broker ("You could go anywhere with this guy's helix under your arm").

Hawke is a good choice for the lead, combining the restless dreams of a "Godchild" with the plausible exterior of a lab baby. The best scenes involve his relationship with the real Jerome, played by Law as smart, bitter, and delighted to be sticking it to the system that has grounded him. (He may be paralyzed from the waist down, but after all, as the movie observes, you don't need to walk in space.) His drama parallels Vincent's, because if either one is caught they'll both go down together.

Science fiction in the movies has recently specialized in alien invasions, but the best of the genre deals with ideas. At a time when we read about cloned sheep and tomatoes crossed with fish, the science in "Gattaca" is theoretically possible. When parents can order "perfect" babies, will they? Would you take your chances on a throw of the genetic dice, or order up the make and model you wanted? How many people are prepared to buy a car at random from the universe of all available cars? That's how many, I suspect, would opt to have natural children.

Everybody will live longer, look better and be healthier in the Gattacan world. But will it be as much fun? Will parents order children who are rebellious, ungainly, eccentric, creative, or a lot smarter than their parents are? There's a concert pianist in "Gattaca" who has 12 fingers. Don't you sometimes have the feeling you were born just in time?

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Gattaca movie review & film summary (1997) | Roger Ebert

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What is genetic engineering, after all, but preemptive plastic surgery? Make the child perfect in the test tube, and save money later. Throw in perfect health, a high IQ and a long life-span, and you have the brave new world of "Gattaca," in which the bioformed have inherited the earth, and babies who are born naturally get to be menial laborers.

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Achieving mediocrity can be seen by rejecting the superficiality of the world and denouncing traditional notions of what it means to be successful - whether it be a high-paying job, fancy furniture, or creating a perfect, nuclear family. Mediocrity can also be in the everyday, mundane parts of life that allow individuals to be in the moment - where higher goals and possessions should not matter to their overall happiness. Mediocrity takes the specialness out of life or a person, where they exist, not how they should be.

RELATED: 10 Best Movies Based On Real-Life Events

Mediocrity in film has been explored in numerous dynamic ways: from nihilistic mindsets to understanding that achieving perfection is futile, seeing life from different viewpoints, and changing lifestyles for a new outcome. Existentialism makes for the best films - because they provide escapism or question life choices in the eyes of the beholder.

'Taxi Driver' (1976)

Directed by Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver is an American drama set in a crime-filled, morally corrupt New York not too long after the Vietnam War. The protagonist, Travis Bickle ( Robert De Niro), is a young war veteran who has PTSD and insomnia and begins a career as a taxi driver on night shifts in an attempt to cope. Working as a taxi driver, he meets campaign volunteer Betsy ( Cybill Shepard) but ruins their relationship and begins to fantasize about a city where there's no crime. This fantasy scopes deeper when he regularly encounters child prostitute Iris ( Jodie Foster) and makes it his mission to save her from the streets.

Taxi Driver ends with a disclaimer on screen: "In the aftermath of violence, the distinction between hero and villain is sometimes a matter of interpretation or misinterpretation of facts. 'Taxi Driver' suggests that tragic errors can be made". The film interprets escaping from a mediocre life by becoming a hero - where Travis's motives are selfless. After living a life where he wants to conform (in the sense of feeling less alone) but not having the ability to do so, his fantasies consume him. His mediocre life comes from feeling unfulfilled - he went from a war hero to a traumatized person who lacks substance in his life, overcome by insomnia. Travis chooses to fight mediocrity with (albeit misguided) heroism - and becomes an anti-hero in the end.

'Trainspotting' (1996)

Trainspotting is a drug-fuelled comedy-drama with the ever original Danny Boyle, following Mark Renton ( Ewan McGregor) through his heroin use and attempts at rehabilitation, where he is dragged down by friends Sick Boy ( Jonny Lee Miller), Spud ( Ewen Bremner), Swanney ( Peter Mullan), Begbie ( Robert Carlyle), and Tommy ( Kevin McKidd). As Renton begins a relationship with an underage girl Diane, he is forced into staying with her in fear she'll report him to the police. When he finally gets clean, he struggles with a loss of purpose, resulting in poor decision-making.

RELATED: How The Gritty Visual Language Of 'Trainspotting' Pushes Viewers To 'Choose Life'

The drug use in Trainspotting has led to a mediocre life - the repetitive nature of buying and using drugs becomes too mundane for Renton, yet he cannot figure out how to navigate life without it. "Who needs a reason when you've got heroin" is quoted in the film, reinforcing Renton's anti-materialism, anti-"rat race" stance that he claims is the collective societal reason to live. Renton acknowledges that no one chooses life; they receive retribution for all wrongdoings but never redeem themselves. Living in a world bitter by social class rankings, violence becomes the change that makes morality irrelevant - a surrealist opinion that comes about with a life of mediocrity.

'Fight Club' (1999)

Embracing mediocrity is the center of the cult-classic drama . Directed by David Fincher and adapted from the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk, an unnamed and unreliable protagonist ( Edward Norton) leads viewers through his struggle with insomnia, his alignment with his goals, and his identity. He goes to self-help groups to find solace because other people have it worse than himself but finds himself polarized by Marla ( Helena Bonham Carter) - a woman who does the same. On a work trip, he meets Tyler Durden ( Brad Pitt), a confident, well-dressed man who wishes to enjoy the freedom of irresponsibility. They soon begin a "fight club": an underground organization where men can throw punches at each other to expel their dissatisfaction with their mundane lives.

RELATED: Every David Fincher Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

Nihilistic tones rule the film, whereby Fight Club attempts to strip back its characters into a sameness - they conform to non-conformity by believing that no one is special. Instead, they are the "same decaying organic matter as everything else," where everyone is "part of the same compost heap." By embracing mediocrity, Fight Club tears down the capitalistic, materialistic lifestyle that creates class division and forces individuals to want more than what they have. In addition, society overpromising success and fortune to its people leads to a jaded, disaffected populace itching to rebel.

'Office Space' (1999)

A satirical look at the working life, Office Space is a comedy-romance that sees the everyday white-collar man fight back against mediocrity. Peter Gibbons ( Ron Livingston) is an unmotivated member of a tech company who, along with co-workers Samir ( Ajay Naidu) and Michael ( David Herman), become tired of being treated poorly. Constantly fearing they'll lose their jobs but dissatisfied with problematic office rituals, the group decides to get revenge by embezzling money. After Peter feels enlightenment post-hypnosis, he changes to a carefree attitude, allowing himself the pleasure to do as he pleases - which seems to be the moral of the film (in a comedic way).

Stifling work cultures and ever-present issues with the main character's true desires, Office Space explores the lack of fulfillment in daily life, where the comfort of a situation no longer becomes an adequate excuse to allow it to exist. By simply becoming the person Peter wanted to be, the film promotes the simplistic approach to happiness: removing things from life that make one unhappy. The existentialism in Office Space ties in with mediocrity because work-life has encapsulated all meaning into a 9 - 5 grind - a concept that many viewers can empathize with. The film fights mediocrity with mediocrity, whereby a change in attitude does not radically change the protagonist's way of life or how he lives it.

'Gattaca' (1997)

The science-fiction film Gattaca draws important conclusions about issues of perfectionism, genetic modifications, and the idea of destiny in a cold, mundane dystopian setting. Vincent Freeman ( Ethan Hawke) is ascribed to society as an "invalid": an individual conceived naturally and susceptible to genetic disorders. His position in society devalues his skills, where he is confined to menial work while he dreams of traveling to space. Vincent gets a chance to pose as a valid and work for Gattaca Aerospace when he meets Jerome Morrow ( Jude Law), a disabled former swimmer who gives him his DNA so that he can live out his dream.

Gattaca explores living in a world where one is forced to live a mediocre life dictated through genetic sequencing. Vincent fights to live in a world he is discriminated against, where he proves to himself that despite his health status, he can achieve his goal regardless. Despite the odds, Vincent rebels against his mundane cleaning job and turns into an astronaut. The film also explores mediocrity as something that can be positive.

Though Jerome's perfect genetic code enabled him to perform his dreams, his life changes when he is paralyzed in a car accident - where being perfect no longer serves a purpose. Bitter, Jerome hates the world he was created in, as he realizes that he could not reach the perfection he wanted in life despite being genetically perfect. Attempting suicide, Jerome found it easier to live without the pressures of perfectionism, and helping Vincent achieve his dream made him realize that the world they live in set out to fail them both. Being destined for mediocrity doesn't seem like an ideal life, but neither does not have a choice to live through it.

KEEP READING: How 'Captain Phillips' Serves As An Intense Exploration Of Privilege

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From 'Taxi Driver' to 'Gattaca': 5 Great Films About Mediocrity

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Achieving mediocrity can be seen by rejecting the superficiality of the world and denouncing traditional notions of what it means to be successful - whether it be a high-paying job, fancy furniture, or creating a perfect, nuclear family.

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The scene in question featured Hawke's character challenging a Valid friend of his, played by Loren Dean, to a swimming competition. Who can swim the furthest out to sea? Dean, knowing he is genetically superior, is convinced he will win. After all, he knows he has greater stamina. Hawke, however, ends up swimming further out regardless. His secret was that he knowingly didn't save energy for the swim back to shore. The scene takes place in the ocean but was shot in a conventional swimming pool. Waves were required. Says Sher:

"I always think about this when people talk about the glamor of producing. We couldn't afford a wave maker or a tank when we were shooting that final swim; the movie wasn't made for very much money for a studio film. So, somebody told us that if we put a forklift in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, it would make waves that would match the stuff that we shot outside. We needed the close-work for Ethan and Loren's conversation before Loren swam off in the 'I didn't save anything for the way back' scene."

How does one make ocean-like waves in an Olympic size swimming pool? There are many solutions, including operating a forklift under the water. Fun fact: Did you know that forklifts couldn't operate underwater? Sher, it turns out, learned that the hard way:

"So, we put the forklift in; we're in the Olympic-sized pool, and it just totally does not work. And at a certain point, me and every other person on set were lying on our stomachs with kickboards, making waves. So, that's the sort of 'no job too big or too small' philosophy of producing."

The hands-on approach did the job. This must be the glamor Sher was referring to.

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Gattaca's Tight Budget Meant They Had To Get Creative - /Film

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The scene in question featured Hawke's character challenging a Valid friend of his, played by Loren Dean, to a swimming competition. Who can swim the furthest out to sea? Dean, knowing he is genetically superior, is convinced he will win. After all, he knows he has greater stamina.

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GATTACA, a film directed by Andrew Niccol, was released 25 years ago, only a couple of years before the June 2000 announcement of the first working draft sequence of the human genome at the White House Rose Garden. Similarly auspiciously, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released a year shy of Apollo 11's landing in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

Notably, the world presented in Kubrick's films and books, with regular human space travel to and beyond Jupiter, is still completely removed from current technological capabilities. The notion of human travel to Jupiter now seems even further in the future than it did then, especially with the US national space program languishing in anachronistic technologies. Even the new Artemis Space Launch System, per US Congress dictate, is obliged to use space-shuttle-derived components dating back almost 40 years1. December 2022 marks half a century since humankind last stepped on the moon, and it will be perhaps decades more until astronauts are systematically traveling to Mars or orbiting Jupiter.

Compare that to the genetics-centric world GATTACA imagines. The film's technologies, pervasive notion of surveillance, and concomitant privacy issues seem prescient. Since the movie came out, science has produced rapid, accurate and cheap genome sequencing, genome-wide association studies, and precision genetic manipulation tools such as synthetic biology and CRISPR. Arguably, in the United States, much of this state of the art can be attributed to vast investments by the biotechnology industry, the profit margins that entice them, and extensive support by the government for both public genomic endeavors and private ones2. In contrast, although innovative, the privately funded billionaire space-exploration class is still in its nascent phase, conceivably driven more by vanity than by profits3.

Given that advancements in genetics continue to approximate and perhaps even supersede the innovations of the film, GATTACA remains a relevant touchstone - 25 years later - in discussions related to the ethical, legal and social implications of genomics and bioengineering for scientists, policymakers4,5 and the lay public6. The film continues to be a valuable feature of genetics and bioethics syllabi in academia.

In brief, GATTACA tells of a dystopian future in which class divisions seem to be based merely on the degree of prenatal genetic manipulation, reminiscent of the caste system in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. 'Valids' are virtually guaranteed the best opportunities, given their perceived genetic superiority, whereas genetically unmodified 'In-Valids' are second-class citizens, or worse. Ethan Hawke's character Vincent was conceived without any medical intervention. Although in another era he would have been considered a "perfectly healthy, normal baby," in Niccol's not-too-distant-future, to his detriment, his "destiny was mapped out...[all his] flaws, predispositions and susceptibilities [including] the date and cause of...death."

Not content to be constrained by these social norms and determined to be an astronaut at the eponymous GATTACA Aerospace Corporation, Vincent becomes a 'borrowed ladder', buying access to the DNA of Jerome (played by Jude Law), a disabled Valid who can no longer use his genetic enhancements to become a world-class athlete.

We watch as Vincent seemingly successfully conceals his true genetic identity through a daily purging of all his shed DNA and the planting of Jerome's DNA - that is, until a genetically identifiable wayward eyelash, which suggests that its In-Valid owner must be the murderer of a GATTACA director, threatens to upend his deception. Suspense follows as Vincent must evade exposure and capture by an inexplicably dogged and relentless police investigator. Ultimately, a Valid, Director Josef (played by Gore Vidal), is identified as the murderer, and the film closes with Vincent fulfilling his dream, blasting off toward the Saturnian moon Titan; granted, this part of Niccol's vision of the future, like Kubrick's, is not yet a reality.

GATTACA and pop culture stories like it are, for better or for worse, some of the main sources of society's conventional science wisdom7. Consider the paradigmatic fictional foundation of the public's apprehension of innovative science: Frankenstein. The story portrayed in books and film is so enmeshed in social consciousness that for many it symbolizes their visceral distrust of many advanced technologies, including genetics8 - hence the continued abuse of the prefix 'Franken-'9.

Like Frankenstein, GATTACA universalizes the fears and potential dangers of science run amok, although not necessarily of the science of genetics per se, but rather of its unregulated exploitation. More than Frankenstein and its fictional 'reanimation technology', GATTACA makes its feasible science and the concerns it raises approachable, contextualizable and, ultimately, understandable. GATTACA not only allows the public to comprehend the context of genetic technologies within society but also provides the tools with which to appreciate the actual legal, ethical and social importance of the issues raised. And like Frankenstein, the film portrays how the public sees scientists in the genetics field, an invaluable understanding for researchers aiming to be ethical and socially conscious.

GATTACA can also be appreciated as a retelling of the Frankenstein story, wherein man's efforts to use science to rise above nature's limitations always disappoint. To wit, throughout the film, it is the genetically optimized Valids who are shown to be physically and mentally flawed, despite the best medical efforts. In contrast, Vincent, the unaltered In-Valid, succeeds despite his perceived genetic limitations. Perhaps this best represents the filmmakers' rejection of genetic determinism, still a critical concern a quarter of a century later, as research continues to reveal how the complex synthesis of nature and nurture coalesce to make humans who we are.

Through the lens of genetic exceptionalism, society often envisions genetic predictions as infallibly deterministic. Consider the demand for direct-to-consumer genomic technologies and the foresight consumers believe it will bring. In reality, much of genetics is inherently messy owing to, among other things, the complexity of polygenic risk profiles, especially in light of unknowable environmental considerations.

The movie's warnings against allowing these statistical likelihoods to become self-fulfilling prophecies remain apropos. This is especially true for the increasingly pervasive 'walking sick' - those who underestimate their disease probabilities - and the 'worried well' (or, as the film refers to them, the 'healthy ill') - those who overestimate their statistical predispositions to future genetic conditions. Arguably, geneticists in their professional capacities can also sometimes seem to view genetic information as too deterministic. Even scientists can fail to fully appreciate the inexactness of many genetic predispositions, given penetrance, expressivity and external environmental factors that modulate the genetic information.

The film also portrays a more ominous aspect of genetic determinism. Offscreen, we learn of Jerome's attempted suicide after he fails to live up to his parents' predetermined genetic aspirations of gold medals. In the final scenes, he ultimately commits suicide; as a paraplegic, he can no longer achieve his preprogrammed genetic objectives, and his life now lacks its presumed purpose.

Sequencing services that promise to ascertain a young child's future abilities could potentially wreak similar mental havoc on children and their parents. Vulnerable people may even feel compelled to live up to the predictions of the often scientifically suspect genetic predispositions imposed on them by recreational direct-to-consumer genetic services10.

Even more nefarious than foisting a forecasted future on a young child through still-inaccurate genetic predictions is the possibility of parents choosing an embryo through preimplantation genetic diagnoses not because that embryo lacks a detrimental genetic condition, but instead to select a particular condition, whether that condition is an enhancement or, unfortunately, even a disease condition11.

Consider the example in GATTACA: In a musical sound bridge, Niccol takes us through scenes of various instances of egregious police abuse of In-Valids, contrasted with a piano recital by an enhanced musician playing Schubert's Impromptus (with added chords for additional complexity). We are left to assume that the pianist's parents prenatally picked an embryo to produce a polydactyl prodigy. Although their progeny lives up to their aspirations, he hides his face with his 12 fingers in his promotional posters, perhaps presaging the anguish he is likely to feel later in life.

These instances of police-based genetic discrimination in the film are one of at least two dystopian societal abuses of genetic information in GATTACA's envisioned future. Viewers watch as the police use knowledge about a person's genetic predispositions to justify discrimination, whether surreptitiously or overtly. Although current genomic technology allows science to determine much about a person, debatably even anti-social and aggressive behaviors12, from genome sequencing, the state of the art does not carry the same evidential weight as it does in the film13. However, as more understanding of the science is gained, this fundamentally unjust use of genetic knowledge remains a concern. And like in the film, in which "it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of genetics...but no one takes the laws seriously," in the real world, many laws against genetic discrimination often contain too many loopholes to be effective.

The American 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), a product of years of legislative negotiations, attempted to create a federal minimum level of protection of genetic information despite the reported lack of finding of widespread and ongoing genetic discrimination in the workforce so endemic in the film14,15. According to GINA, actionable discrimination is limited to some instances within employment and health insurance contexts. Many states have subsequently expanded the protections granted by GINA to include broader safeguards against other discrimination in the workforce or during the procurement of various types of insurance16.

However, it is not only the areas of employment and insurance in which there is the potential for abuse of genetic information. In the film, the police seem to test the DNA of citizens with impunity. Even a civilian such as Irene (played by Uma Thurman), Vincent's love interest, easily obtains and sequences Vincent's DNA to assess his genomic information. Although the US Supreme Court has allowed the collection of genetic information in the course of police work, such as arrests17, society remains unsettled by the potential genetic panopticon that could follow from unfettered access of the police, and others, to genomic information.

This relates to a second dystopian characteristic of the film: genetic privacy. The notion of tracking people through their DNA has long been a reality - the use of DNA fingerprinting for pursuing criminals has been commonplace for decades. The exposé and conviction of the Golden State Killer showed how even recreational genetic genealogy has become entangled in genetic surveillance18. However, real-life privacy concerns are potentially even bleaker than those sketched out in the film. Consider the potential for sequencing genomes as an offensive tactic: recently, heads of state visiting President Putin refused coronavirus testing, as sequenced non-viral genomic material would 'de-protect' their genomes19. There are even worries that after the COVID-19 pandemic, border-based PCR testing centers could easily be repurposed to seek out other genetic information from incoming travelers, including targeting of people with potentially undesirable genetic conditions or predispositions. Genetic data can also be integrated with other revealing big data, such as web searches, facial recognition or phone geo-location, creating privacy leaks not evident when each data type is considered separately, which would create a future even more problematic than GATTACA 's.

In light of the continual encroachment of genetic surveillance on privacy, there is a growing dissatisfaction with the government's use of genetic information. In particular, this past spring, a class action lawsuit was filed against the New York City Police Department for hosting a genetic database comprising samples from thousands of people who live in New York20. According to the lawsuit, DNA was surreptitiously collected, without consent, from gum, drinks and cigarettes offered to those in police custody, including minors, regardless of their eventual guilt, and principally from minority communities21. Problematically, the New York City Police Department's database lacks the regulatory oversight of state and federal DNA databases. A similar lawsuit was filed in Orange County, California, the year before, about an even larger DNA database of the County District Attorney's Office22.

In addition to the fears of potential discrimination and abuse by the justice system, genetic privacy remains an important component in the oversight of research involving human participants. And with science vastly outpacing legal controls, it is best to rely on self-regulation and technological tools to protect the privacy of millions worldwide who have been included in research databases. These protections relate both to privacy-enhancing technical tools for recording and aggregating data, and to the use of blockchain technology23 and cyberbiosecurity methods for hardening the databases themselves24.

There are many positive uses for genetic information, such as when genetic information is medically actionable. Although the film never preaches against the overall validity of genetic information, or its many legitimate uses, it makes viewers think about the extent to which society should employ the technology in healthcare and even within the criminal justice system. GATTACA, however, warns of the very slippery slope: "What began as a means to rid society of inheritable diseases has become a way to design your offspring - the line between health and enhancement blurred forever."

Consider the description of the genetic engineering of Vincent's younger brother, Anton (played by Loren Dean). He is designed and born a Valid lacking "prejudicial conditions [such as] premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence and obesity." Here GATTACA cautions against eugenic attempts to wipe out various non-lethal and/or cosmetic genetic conditions that are part of our diverse society.

In an early version of the script, the film closes with "a succession of portraits and photographs of renowned and historic figures...list[ing] their [genetic] affliction rather than their accomplishments."25 Today, communities representing genetic conditions, such as Down syndrome, argue that prenatal genetic tests designed to identify affected fetuses with the intent of abortion are an insidious form of eugenics that prevents the birth of potentially prized members of society. Whether one agrees or disagrees, GATTACA suggests that if these newfound genetic information and tools are not used wisely, humanity could end up discarding some of the most valued among us in the drive toward genetic perfection.

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GATTACA is still pertinent 25 years later - Nature Genetics

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It has been 25 years since the release of GATTACA, a film that tells the story of a credible near future in which society's inequalities, formerly associated with race and class, have been replaced with new prejudices based on genetic determinism.

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Gattaca is a 1997 American dystopian science fiction film written and directed by Andrew Niccol in his feature directorial debut. It stars Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman with Jude Law, Loren Dean, Ernest Borgnine, Gore Vidal, and Alan Arkin appearing in supporting roles. The film presents a future society driven by eugenics where children are conceived through genetic selection to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. The film centers on Vincent Freeman, played by Hawke, who was conceived outside the eugenics program and struggles to overcome genetic discrimination to realize his dream of going into space.

The film draws on concerns over reproductive technologies that facilitate eugenics, and the possible consequences of such technological developments for society. It also explores the idea of destiny and the ways in which it can and does govern lives. Characters in Gattaca continually battle both with society and with themselves to find their place in the world and who they are destined to be according to their genes.

The film's title is based on the letters G, A, T, and C, which stand for guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine, the four nucleobases of DNA. It was a 1997 nominee for the Academy Award for Best Art Direction and the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score. A follow-up series was in development at Showtime, but has been cancelled as of 2023.

In the "not-too-distant" future, eugenics is common. A genetic registry database uses biometrics to classify those so created as "valids" while those conceived naturally and more susceptible to genetic disorders are known as "in-valids". Genetic discrimination is illegal, but in practice genotype profiling is used to identify valids to qualify for professional employment while in-valids are relegated to menial jobs.

Vincent Freeman was conceived naturally, and his genetic profile indicates a high probability of several disorders and an estimated lifespan of 30.2 years. His parents, regretting their decision, use genetic selection in conceiving their second child, Anton Jr. Growing up, the two brothers often play a game of " chicken" by swimming out to sea as far as possible, with the first one returning to shore considered the loser; Vincent always loses. Vincent dreams of a career in space travel, but is always reminded of his genetic inferiority. One day, Vincent challenges Anton to a game of chicken and beats him. Anton starts to drown and is saved by Vincent. Shortly after, Vincent leaves home.

Years later, Vincent works cleaning office spaces, including that of spaceflight conglomerate Gattaca Aerospace Corporation. He gets a chance to pose as a valid by using donated hair, skin, blood, and urine samples from former swimming star Jerome Eugene Morrow, who was paralyzed after being hit by a car. With Jerome's genetic makeup, Vincent gains employment at Gattaca and is assigned as a navigator for an upcoming mission to Saturn's moon Titan. To conceal his identity, Vincent must meticulously groom and scrub down daily to remove his own genetic material, pass daily DNA scanning and urine tests using Jerome's samples, and hide his heart defect.

When a Gattaca administrator is murdered a week before a possible launch, the police find one of Vincent's eyelashes near the crime scene, but can only identify it as from an "unregistered" in-valid, and thus launch an investigation to find who owns the eyelash. During this, Vincent becomes close to a co-worker, Irene Cassini, and falls in love with her. Though a valid, Irene has a higher risk of heart failure that will bar her from any deep space mission. Vincent also learns that Jerome's paralysis is self-inflicted; after placing silver in the Olympics, Jerome threw himself in front of a car. Jerome maintains that he was designed to be the best, yet somehow wasn't, and is suffering because of this.

Vincent repeatedly evades the grasp of the investigation. Finally, it is revealed that Gattaca's mission director Josef killed the administrator because he threatened to cancel the mission. Vincent learns that the detective who closed the case was his brother Anton, who consequently has discovered Vincent's presence. The brothers meet, and Anton warns Vincent about his illegal actions, but Vincent asserts that he has gotten to this position on his own merits. Anton challenges Vincent to a final game of chicken. As the two swim out at night, Vincent's stamina surprises Anton, so Vincent reveals that he won by not saving energy for the swim back. Anton turns back and begins to drown, but Vincent rescues him and swims them back to shore.

On the day of the launch, Jerome reveals that he has stored enough DNA samples for Vincent to last two lifetimes upon his return and gives him an envelope to open once in flight. After saying goodbye to Irene, Vincent prepares to board, but discovers there is a final genetic test, and he currently lacks any of Jerome's samples. He is surprised when Dr. Lamar, who oversees background checks, reveals that he knows Vincent has been posing as a valid. Lamar admits that his son looks up to Vincent and wonders whether his son, who is genetically selected, but "not all that they promised", could exceed his potential just as Vincent has. The doctor changes the test results, allowing Vincent to pass.

As the rocket launches, Jerome dons his swimming medal and immolates himself in his home's incinerator. Vincent opens the note to find a lock of Jerome's hair.

CLA Building complex

Marin County Civic Center

The film was shot under the working title The Eighth Day, a reference to the seven days of creation in the Bible. However, by the time its release was scheduled for the fall of 1997, the Belgian film Le huitième jour had already been released in the US under the title The Eighth Day. As a result, the film was retitled Gattaca, which takes inspiration from the letters G, A, T, and C, derived from four of the nucleobases of DNA: guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine.

The exteriors (including the roof scene) and some of the interior shots of the Gattaca complex were filmed at Frank Lloyd Wright's 1960 Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, California. The speakers in the complex broadcast announcements both in Esperanto and English; Miko Sloper from the Esperanto League of North America went to the recording studio to handle the Esperanto part. The parking lot scenes were shot at the Otis College of Art and Design, distinguished by its punch card-like windows, located near Los Angeles International Airport. The exterior of Vincent Freeman's house was shot at the CLA Building on the campus of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Other exterior shots were filmed at the bottom of the spillway of the Sepulveda Dam, Culver City High School, and outside The Forum in Inglewood. The solar power plant mirrors sequence was filmed at the Kramer Junction Solar Electric Generating Station.

The film is noted for its unique use of color. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak employed vibrant gold, green, and electric blue tones throughout the film, and shot the film in Super 35mm format, which adds an enlarged layer of grain.

The movie uses a swimming treadmill in the opening minutes to punctuate the swimming and futuristic themes. The production design makes heavy use of retrofuturism; the futuristic electric cars are based on 1960s car models like Rover P6, Citroën DS19 and Studebaker Avanti.

The opening title sequence, created by Michael Riley, features closeups of body matter (fingernails and hair), which are later revealed to be from Vincent's daily bodily scourings, hitting the floor accompanied by loud sounds as the objects strike the ground. According to Riley, oversized models of the fingernails and hair were created for the effect.

The score for Gattaca was composed by Michael Nyman, and the original soundtrack was released on October 21, 1997.

Gattaca was released in theaters on October 24, 1997, in the United States by Columbia Pictures and opened at number 5 at the box office; trailing I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Devil's Advocate, Kiss the Girls and Seven Years in Tibet. Over the first weekend the film brought in $4.3 million. It ended its theatrical run with a domestic total of $12.5 million against a reported production budget of $36 million.

Gattaca was released on DVD on July 1, 1998, and was also released on Superbit DVD. Special Edition DVD and Blu-ray versions were released on March 11, 2008. Both editions contain a deleted scene featuring historical figures like Einstein, Lincoln, etc., who are described as having been genetically deficient.

Gattaca was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray in 2021.

Gattaca received positive reviews from critics. The film received an approval rating of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 66 reviews, with a rating average of 7.1/10. The site's critical consensus states that "Intelligent and scientifically provocative, Gattaca is an absorbing sci-fi drama that poses important interesting ethical questions about the nature of science." On Metacritic, the film received "generally favorable reviews" with a score of 64 out of 100, based on 20 reviews. Roger Ebert stated, "This is one of the smartest and most provocative of science fiction films, a thriller with ideas." James Berardinelli praised it for "energy and tautness" and its "thought-provoking script and thematic richness."

Although critically acclaimed, Gattaca was not a box office success, but it is said to have crystallized the debate over the controversial topic of human genetic engineering. The film's dystopian depiction of " genoism" has been cited by many bioethicists and laypeople in support of their hesitancy about, or opposition to, eugenics and the societal acceptance of the genetic-determinist ideology that may frame it. In a 1997 review of the film for the journal Nature Genetics, molecular biologist Lee M. Silver stated that " Gattaca is a film that all geneticists should see if for no other reason than to understand the perception of our trade held by so many of the public-at-large".

On October 30, 2009, reported that Sony Pictures Television was developing a television adaptation of the feature film as a one-hour police procedural set in the future. The show was to be written by Gil Grant, who has written for and . A Gattaca television series was revealed to be in development at Sony and Showtime in March 2023. It was intended to take place one generation after the events of the film. Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa were tapped as showrunners, and were also expected to serve as screenwriters alongside Craig Borten. Gordon, Gansa, Glenn Gellar, and actor Danny DeVito (who produced the film) would have served as executive producers. However, in June 2023, Showtime announced that they had abandoned plans to produce the show.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol has called his 2011 film a "bastard child of Gattaca". Both films feature classic cars in a futuristic dystopia as well as a caste privilege schism which the protagonist challenges and which prejudices the authorities into neglecting a thorough investigation in favor of condemning the protagonist.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul used near-verbatim portions of the plot summary from the English Wikipedia entry on Gattaca in a speech at Liberty University on October 28, 2013, in support of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's campaign for Governor of Virginia. Paul said that abortion rights advocates are advancing eugenics in a manner similar to the events in Gattaca.

In the 2004 democratic transhumanist book Citizen Cyborg, bioethicist James Hughes criticized the premise and influence of the film as fear-mongering, arguing:

1. Astronaut-training programs are entirely justified in attempting to screen out people with heart problems for safety reasons;

2. In the United States, people are already screened by insurance companies on the basis of their propensities to disease, for actuarial purposes;

3. Rather than banning genetic testing or genetic enhancement, society should develop genetic information privacy laws, such as the U.S. Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act signed into law on May 21, 2008, that allow justified forms of genetic testing and data aggregation, but forbid those that are judged to result in genetic discrimination. Citizens should then be able to make a complaint to the appropriate authority if they believe they have been discriminated against because of their genotype.

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Gattaca is a 1997 American dystopian science fiction film written and directed by Andrew Niccol in his feature directorial debut. It stars Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman with Jude Law, Loren Dean, Ernest Borgnine, Gore Vidal, and Alan Arkin appearing in supporting roles.

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