Human Genetic Screening and Discrimination in Gattaca

Human Genetic Screening and Discrimination in Gattaca

Works Cited Missing

A few months ago I watched a movie called Gattaca, which dealt with the issue of genetic discrimination in the near future. In the movie, people were separated into two classes, those that were genetically screened and positively altered before birth and the class that was unaltered. The separate classes had stark divisions, from what jobs that you were able to apply for to where you could eat. Security was aimed at keeping unaltered people away from the enhanced people. Knowledge about who and what you are was done by "instant" genetic genotyping that tells anyone everything that they want to know about a person’s genome from a small sample of blood or a hair strand. The hero of the movie "cheats" the system and achieves his dream of space flight with the help of a crippled genetically altered man, using his hair and blood samples.

Although this movie was a work of fiction, it brought several ideas and issues to mind. Will it be possible for genetic discrimination in the future? Will people be divided into groups that are based on their genetic background? A short trip to the library computer lab to check on sources for this paper led me to believe that fiction could in part become real, especially when dealing with health insurance coverage and heritable diseases.

I will begin by clearing up some misconceptions and explaining some of the current shortcomings of DNA testing. It is not possible to completely genotype a person "instantly" as in the movie. We are only able to discern the markers of some diseases that are genetically linked. This takes time, is labor intensive, and easy to contaminate. Studies to make the process quicker and cleaner...

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...holding genetic information.

Insurance providers and other holders of genetic information should be prohibited from releasing genetic information (Hudson, 1998).

Guidelines like these need to be formed into a federal law that people can pass in one way or another so that we can be protected from the various forms of discrimination that is possible with this kind of information. The public should be aware of what could happen if this kind of information could become public knowledge, and of the opportunities that the knowledge brings. There is no doubt that the information from genetic analysis is going to help a lot of people with all sorts of problems live longer and healthier lives. The only problem is that we have to keep the information in the hands of those who need it, and out of the hands of those who would use the information to profit or discriminate.