GATTACA is still pertinent 25 years later
By Dov Greenbaum and Mark Gerstein,
Nature
| 11. 24. 2022
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. Here we compare GATTACA’s fictional technologies with reality’s state of the art, assessing the legal protections afforded in today’s society against GATTACA’s dystopian future in which personal freedom and privacy rights are substantially curtailed by genomic innovations. We further discuss how GATTACA’s prescient forewarnings are still relevant today in light of the current trajectory of genomic science and technology.
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...
Related Articles
The Center for Genetics and Society is delighted to recommend the current edition of GMWatch Review – Number 589. UK-based GMWatch, a long-standing ally, was founded in 1998 by Jonathan Matthews as an independent organization seeking to counter the enormous corporate political power and propaganda of the GMO industry and its supporters. Matthews and Claire Robinson are its directors and managing editors.
CGS works to ensure that social justice, equity, human rights, and democratic governance are front...
If you’ve been online or caught the news in the past few weeks, you’ve probably come across Sydney Sweeney, her “great genes jeans,” and much debate over whether they reflect a resurgence of eugenics in American politics and culture.
In case you missed it, here’s what happened. At the end of July, US-based clothing company American Eagle released a new ad campaign. In one ad, Sweeney breathily recites the following, while lying back to zip up her jeans:
Genes are...
By Ryan Cross, Endpoints News | 08.19.2025
Human eggs are incredibly rare cells. The ovary typically produces only 400 mature eggs across a woman’s life. But biologists in George Church’s lab at Harvard University — a group that’s never content with nature’s limits — just got a...
By Staff, National Women's Law Center | 08.13.2025
INTRODUCTION
Baby bonuses. Motherhood medals. Fertility tracking. You may have heard of these policy proposals as solutions from the Trump administration to help encourage women to have more children.
Besides falling short of ensuring that people have what they need...
