When Gattaca was released in 1997, Dolly, the most highly publicised sheep in history and the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, was one year old. The human genome project, hailed as the biological equivalent of putting an astronaut on the moon, was progressing at an accelerating pace towards its goal of mapping and sequencing the entire human genome. These developments triggered widespread ethical debates about genetic determinism.
Would clones of a famous scientist or successful athlete be able to live up to the expectation that they would achieve as much as the person whose genetic material they had inherited, or would those very expectations be a crushing psychological burden? Would sequencing the human genome enable us to identify the genes that contribute to higher intelligence or other desirable traits and would that in turn lead to discrimination against those who do not have them?
Into this highly-charged debate came a film that took its name from the initial letters of the four building blocks of DNA. Gattaca portrays a future in which parents can select from their genes to produce the child that has the best genes that any child of theirs could have. These offspring, known as “valids”, get the best positions in society. The film's plot focuses on the attempt of Vincent, an ambitious “in-valid” conceived in the old-fashioned way, to escape his genetic destiny of being a cleaner and instead become an astronaut.
Vincent triumphs through sheer strength of will. In one scene he challenges his genetically superior brother Anton to see who can swim farther out into the ocean. Vincent wins, because he leaves nothing in reserve for the swim back. Presumably many of the audience come away a**enting to the film's tagline that “there is no gene for the human spirit”.
That tagline needs critical scrutiny. If “the human spirit” is a reference to the hero's guts and determination, then presumably there are genes for that, and if we knew enough about our genes, they would be part of one's genetic profile. If that isn't what is meant by “the human spirit” then what is it, and how do we come to have a characteristic that does not have a genetic basis?