Cracking the Code of Life

The movie Cracking the Code of Life is a movie about genetics, more specifically a movie that shows us the importance and process of the huge milestone we have lived to see which is the cracking of the human genome. This movie guides us through the process of decoding the genome and how the technology has improved. At first, scientists had to do this process letter by letter which would take many many years. The movie describes how important and helpful technology can be, scientists then found machines that could decode for them and that sped the process a lot. With this movie you get an inside look at the race to complete the human genome, and the problems that occured while doing so. The human genome is so important because it presents us with potential to prevent a countless number of genetic disorders and diseases.

This movie is also supposed to make you think a little bit about the side-effects that this extensive knowledge of the genome could bring. I honestly am not too keen about this and the things it could bring. I think that it is great that this could stop some sicknesses but it has bad sides too. I think that people would abuse this technology as we do every other technology. While the purpose might be to remove genes for sicknesses, it could advance into much less important things. I also believe that the government would manipulate this technology too and I dont think the government in the world is trustworthy enough to properly use this technology. In conclusion, I am not a huge fan of this because I think this could potentially bring much more bad than good to us and would just be a gateway to using information on genetics for things that are not vital or even important to us.

Gattaca

The movie Gattaca is set in the future, in the year that it is set, science and technology in genetics and DNA has improved incredibly. Scientists found ways to manipulate genes, and create the best possible child from the parents genes, with this technology they have also learned to eliminate a high probability of diseases or addictions or even aggressive tenancies. Parents in this time have a choice to make, having their baby the scientific way to have a perfect child or the natural way and have a "god child" which is rare at that time. Vincent's parents decided to have him the natural way and he was born with a high probability of heart disease, aggressiveness and a expected age of death of only 30. This crushed Vincent's dreams because since he was little he had wished of becoming an astronaut because space companies would only accept those with the best predispositions. When Vincent saw that the closest he would get with his DNA was cleaning the building he decided he would not settle with that and he would take the extreme route. Vincent finds a man with perfect genetics and becomes him. He does this by changing his eye color, hair etc to look like him, he then has surgery to add to his height. Every day Vincent scrubs off as much dna as he can and tries to leave no tracks of himself anywhere. Jerome, the man with the perfect genetics lives with Vincent and supplies him with blood urine etc. I think that this movie gives an interesting view on what could come in the future, it is a little bit exaggerated but has a realistic part to it. I think that the storyline is also good.