Henk Middelkoop
For those of you who haven’t seen these movies: Gattaca is about a man, Vincent, who has a life expectancy of thirty years. To fulfil his dream, become an astronaut, he has to take over the personality and body of Jerome Morrow, who was supposed to be successful. Due to an accident, he is in a wheelchair now. He helps Vincent to take over his identity to get him through the training programme. Several times in the movie you get the sense that some things where not meant to be so. Jerome had the right genes, but an accident ruined his life.
Elysium is another story, but also characteristic for the possible followings of dividing people. A man, Max, takes on the mission to bring equality to the world. What you see is that the people with money and power are living on a perfect planet without war, sickness and poverty. The poorer people do live on Earth which causes chaos. This movie makes clear that the technology is supposed to help all people on earth, but it will be used in the end to divide the ‘chosens’ from the mob.
This movie made something very clear to me. Gene technology has the potential to have a great positive impact on the world, but it has such a dangerous side. What would happen if we are able to exclude children with a ‘too’ low IQ? What would happen if we are able to actually make humans like we want them to be? What would we do with them? Are we able to handle this power and influence?
I think we don’t. Some medical treatments nowadays are already made too expensive so that only a few percentage of the people on earth can afford them. We have the technology to make enough food for the whole world population, but still around 795 million people on earth do lack the food for a healthy nutrition. Consumption in Western countries is still going up. We can’t handle the welfare we live in. So what would we do if we had the possibility to exclude the people which are not useful for us? Indeed, it would be easy to simply prevent that these people are born or do live long. That is also a reason why I believe there will never be world peace. There is so much to win with war and conflict in the eyes of the world leaders, peace can never outweigh that.
I dream of a world where technologies like gene technology could be used for the people who really need it to improve their daily life. We only increase our already large welfare with it. But in the end, it will be the case that only a small group of people will have access to the pros of the technology, the rest would only have the cons. It has so many dangerous sides that a guaranteed success is excluded from the beginning.
So, creating an ideal world can be seen as impossible, but let us start today with what we already can do for the lesser blessed on earth: transfer a little of our welfare to them, before we’re going to decide who is allowed to live and who is not!