In 2011, NASA scientists met at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and came up with a list of the seven best (and worst) sci-fi films ever made. “Best” doesn’t necessarily mean “most realistic,” and there are a couple of movies on their list — like 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still — that aren’t especially scientifically rigorous. But according to contemporaneous reports from the likes of NPR, the scientists were trying to nudge Hollywood producers towards making the science in their movies more plausible, so it was a factor.
Classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact appear on the list, but the top spot goes to an unlikely victor: Contact, the 1997 movie directed by Andrew Niccol about a time in the near future (the movie smartly doesn’t give us an exact date) when most people are born genetically modified so they have as many desirable traits as possible. It’s a great sci-fi movie that still holds up.
What is Gattaca about?
In the near future, things are kind of like they are now
Gattaca revolves around a man named Vincent (Ethan Hawke), one of the few people in this world born without any gene editing. That leaves him vulnerable to several genetic diseases, and he’s given a lifespan of around 30 years. Those who have their genes altered in the womb are known as “valids,” while naturally born people like Vincent are “in-valids.” Valids have access to good careers while in-valids are doomed to work menial jobs for their entire lives.
But Vincent dreams of a coveted career in space exploration anyway. He links up with a valid named Jerome (Jude Law), who was a champion swimmer but who is now bound to a wheelchair after an accident. Using daily skin, hair, and blood samples provided by Jerome, Vincent impersonates this valid and lands a job at the Gattaca Aerospace Corporation. The rest of the movie details whether he can successfully get around this world’s genetic caste system.
The first scientific Easter egg that Gattaca drops is right in the title, spelt using only the letters G, A, T, and C, which correspond to the four nitrogenous bases that make up the DNA alphabet: Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine. But that’s mostly just a cute wink at those in the know. Gattaca feels scientifically realistic because it doesn’t stretch things too far, predicting a future that’s already a lot closer to coming to pass than it was in the late ’90s.
Gattaca predicted a lot of the technology we live with today
Gene editing, genetic testing, and commercial spaceflight
When it comes to genetic alteration, a lot of sci-fi stories take things well past the point of plausibility. Think about the X-Men universe, where people are spontaneously born with genetic abnormalities that allow them to, for instance, control the weather. That might be fun, but no one’s going to call it realistic.
But Gattaca keeps itself grounded. Near the start of the film, we see a couple visit a geneticist who helps them select from various embryos that have already been scrubbed of “prejudicial” conditions like obesity and bad eyesight. This isn’t wildly different from how doctors and patients interact when talking about in vitro fertilization, where they try to choose the most viable embryos. Likewise, modern gene editing technology like CRISPR Cas9 can be used to add, remove, or alter sections of the DNA sequence. Scientists can’t yet use the technology to achieve the granular results doctors get in Gattaca, but if the technology keeps going, it’s not crazy to imagine they could get there.
Gattaca also predicted the ease of genetic testing. At one point in the movie, Vincent’s coworker Irene (Uma Thurman) takes one of his stray hairs (actually Jerome’s hair that Vincent planted to avoid suspicion) to a genetic testing site and gets a complete genetic workup done of him. Again, we can’t get anything quite so detailed today, but businesses like Ancestry.com and 23AndMe operate on basically the same principle. The concerns about privacy raised by that scene are also much talked about; we all know that companies love selling data about us, and genetic data qualifies.
Gattaca even predicted the rise of commercial space flight, which could help explain why NASA engineers in particular are fond of it. It wasn’t long after Gattaca came out in theaters that we saw companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin spring into being.
Gattaca is still a ways off from becoming a reality
There’s still a lot about genetics we don’t know
All that said, it’s still not possible to edit genes in a way that will produce the kinds of effects we see in Gattaca, because human traits are usually the product of multiple genes interacting with environment and lifestyle in complex ways that are nigh-impossible to predict. We don’t know what the long-term effects of gene editing are, although now that people who have undergone the process are growing up, we’ll have more data before long.
If we do master the technology, could we see a world where people are divided into higher and lower castes based on their genes? Even the National Human Genome Research Institution entertains the possibility, fearing that “taken to its extreme, germline editing could create classes of individuals defined by the quality of their engineered genome.”
That said, the whole point of Gattaca is that gene editing can’t account for the power of the human spirit, as Vincent does eventually achieve his dreams even though he’s an in-valid. Is that part realistic? Depending on how the technology develops, maybe we’ll be around to find out.
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More realistic sci-fi
Gattaca was not one of those movies that critics hated at the time but went on to become a classic; however, it was a box office bomb. Like Vincent, it’s persevered anyway, and is well worth watching today.
And since 1997, we’ve gotten a lot more scientifically plausible media to enjoy. For All Mankind is a good example of a TV show that takes care to make sure the science stands up to scrutiny. Or if you want a realistic sci-fi show that already finished, check out The Expanse.
