Sunday Story Break — Gene editing
AUGUST 14TH, 2016 — POST 223
This is the twentieth in a series in which I try to come up with a story for a movie from a piece of news, pop culture, or reinvigorated trope. You can read the last in this series, about a interplanetary “space train”, here.
Humans are imperfect. We get old, get diseases. We can even be born with conditions of varying degrees of debilitation. But humans are smart. The human genome has been mapped for over a decade. And in June of this year, scientists have begun the project of fully synthesising it. Creating a synthetic genome is one thing, editing our genes is another, but having a human born with those edits, that’s something different altogether.
We’ve long dealt with the theoretical possibility of genome synthesis. As far as phenomenally transformative scientific processes go, this one is relatively intuitive. Just like one can cut out the spelling mistakes, bad sentences, and formatting errors with a word processor, similar “errors” on a genome could be corrected. Even complete synthesis — that is, made from whole cloth — is fairly straightforward to understand, in much the same way as cloning. We just make another person like baking a cake. Simple.
The “we could” is simple to understand. The “should we?” is a much harder concept to begin to approach. Motherboard has recently reported on a paper that argues U.S. legislation around gene modification is a mistake, and might — if pursued successfully in other countries — actually be “morally untenable”. Immediately, the concept of individual nations pursuing gene modification at different rates provides nuance worth mining.
The possibility of gene editing is a favourite of recent science fiction. Perhaps the best science fiction movie ever made, Gattaca is set in a world in which genetically “perfect” humans and “love children”, conceived naturally, occupy distinct social classes. The pervasiveness of this “technology” in science fiction makes thinking about a novel approach difficult. Furthermore, as is the case with a lot of science fiction, thinking about an initial, gritty, and frankly cinematically less impressive exploration of this technology is too challenging when so many movies have already taken so much of the initial work for granted.
Handling this concept in a movie requires first finding what could be called a “contemporary in”: how is the world as we know it now able to be built out with this technology? It’s for this reason that the national competitiveness alluded to in the Motherboard piece was attractive. Like the mid-century space race, we might be on the threshold of a gene modification race. Not only would this provide a springboard that feels grounded in the mechanics of our real world — one that feels consistent with history — but also sets the U.S. (almost unavoidably the “protagonist nation”) as the underdog. More than anything, the ethical high ground featured in the Motherboard article — that we are in fact morally compelled to modify our genes if the technology is available — sets an interesting stage.
Edge Theft is set in a near-future world in which international organisations such as WHO and NATO have framed the U.S.’s ignorance of genetic modification technologies a violation of human rights. But the U.S. defends this law staunchly. Outside of havens along the Mexican and Canadian borders, the only option the majority of Americans have to see their human right to genetic modification met is through underground operatives for these international organisations. These “edge thieves” — so named for their capacity to steal Americans a “competitive edge” — administer in utero tests, provide “perfect” embryos, and assure safe passage for those curable by genetic modification to allied nations.
Okay. This is just a world I’ve set up here. No character, no story. And honestly I doubt this is the best one could come up with based on that Motherboard piece. But it’s something.
Go back to the piece and tell me what you can come up with.
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