Santos
Chavarria
ENG 101- 0768
Dr.
Vasileiou
Essay
1 Final draft
Oct.
10, 2012
Who
are ‘The Others?’
Imagine a world with genetically engineered
humans to be the best of their parent’s genes known as the super humans or the
valid and the regular normal humans known as the invalids, according to George
J. Annas one side will seek to control or destroy the other. I will have to say
I agree with Annas because having just two sides with the world’s population
rather than having over hundreds of others will lead to chaos because humans
will just focus about the super humans. The movie Gattaca shows how the normal
and super human’s way of life are different from each other and how super
humans strive better than the normal humans, which is not surprising, but it
also shows that science isn’t always what they make it seem to be perfect.
Having the super humans will bring all the
normal humans together no matter where they might be from, what culture, race,
etc. it will bring them together to seek back control from super humans once
they have taken away all the good things they once had. The normal humans would
see the super humans as the others because they would see them as the ones who
took over what was once theirs and are now the cleanup crew in Gattaca. In the
movie Gattaca to get a high class job as an astronaut you would have to be
genetically engineered to be fit to go to space. There was a normal human named
Vincent who was born with a 99% chance of dying from a heart disorder at about the
age of 30 who dreamed of going to space since he was a little kid, but no
matter if he lied on his resume the employer saw he was an invalid just by
seeing his DNA profile. Invalids will soon after feel discriminated not on
race, gender, culture etc. but discriminated by “geneialism” (as Vincent called
it) because their DNA wasn’t built for certain types of jobs when long before
they had those jobs before the super humans came to be.
In the near future having the genetically
super humans will cause a war between the two groups and with the technology so
advanced the war machines could end up destroying the world.
If I were able to pick a side honestly I would be the regular human I am now,
even if genetically super human live in a world where diseases are myths and death
is only caused by old age but isn’t perfect. In the movie Gattaca there is a
young lady named Irene who works in Gattaca and was genetically engineered but
ended up having a heart condition. Vincent who also had a heart condition was
said to die by the age of 30 lived beyond the doctors expectations and he says
to Irene “I’m 1000’s of beats passed my expiration date.” This goes to show you
that science is not perfect and not the solution to everything in life.
If we go back a few decades to the 1930’s
and 40’s during the WWII era when Adolf Hitler dictated Germany we can see an
easily identify who were seen as the others. Annas also speaks of this in his
essay on how “Nazis philosophy was founded on the belief that Germans were a
superior race whose destiny was to subjugate and rule the inferior races.”
Germans believed this and sought out to eliminate “the others” and they were
the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. Germans wanted to be pure and superior so they
eliminated the others causing casualties very high in the millions. I believe
history likes to repeat itself whether it is a disease such as the swine flu
which broke out in 1976 and again in 2009 or the World Wars 1 and 2. Now as you
can see there is a huge chance there be another war due to the fact that we
will have a similar situation as Germany back then whether normal or super
humans want to rule the inferior gene.
To conclude my opinion on the ideal
genetically ‘superior’ humans will cause repercussions to the world we live in
now. Also if science isn’t perfect why try to change the human race, and
according to Gattaca it was a successful new world for those who lived in it
but what about the unfortunate who will suffer only because their genes weren’t
altered.
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