In our Genes
Discrimination,
racism, and chauvinism: it’s all in our genes. No, seriously though. You are the victim of bullying because your
ADHD or hereditary diabetes, or dyslexia—take your pick—because you were born
that way. Nothin’ you can do about it
sonny-jim.
Chimamanda
Adichie, creator of the Facebook charity game Half the Game. When she was
a little girl, Adichie was introduced to a friend who had very little to eat
due to his family’s poverty. One day, her friend’s made a beautiful basket. It shocked Adichie, because she had never
thought that something so beautiful could come from someone so poor—in her
child’s eye, poor was just who they were, as if character’s in a book.
We are all
born with a “single story”: the way we have been nurtured in the nature that we
grew up in. Naturally, we are either
intrigued or frustrated with any changes in our views of normalcy. In my personal book of ethics, there’s nothing
“wrong” with having a disability at any level—even though that may be considered
something wrong with you by the public.
It is important to recognize our difficulties and treat them as needed,
but never has it proven beneficial to run from or hide our faults instead of
seeking help for the things that seem chemically, emotionally, intellectually
and politically, out of our control.
The 1997
film Gattaca addresses the idea of
genome manipulation, and poses the question: what if we could pay to have our
negative genetic traits removed before birth?
Essentially, the film creates a dystopian society where those who have
not been enhanced genetically are discriminated and cast out from prestigious
lines of work and athleticism.
Such
selective processes date back as far as sixth century B.C. when Spartan leaders
[1]would
slay their newborn babes who seemed to have been birthed with any type of
deformities so as to preserve their superior gene pool. Adolf Hitler conducted similar practices
during his Arian race campaign. This movement brought about the establishment
of breeding facilities where his selected elite could mate with various women
in attempts to produce a superior generation of über-men.
In 2002,
(incorrectly quoted as 2008 in my game Engene),
President George W. Bush released various press statements[2]
regarding the moral ethics of human stem cell cloning, body cloning, and severe
genome alterations. Engene addresses the issue of potential implications of the
science, and also the general obliviousness that people seem to have of the
subject, having cast the talk of genome manipulation to the wayside of science
fiction folly[3]. The game Engene
is set in the world of Gattaca, and
allows you to play as an agent for a fictitious job referral agency.
No comments:
Post a Comment