>Not as far as it looks.

People vastly overestimate our understanding and ability to produce reliable phenotypic changes. Being able to change the tiny percent of diseases that have a straightforward and simple genetic connection is a far cry from designer humans. I think Richard Dawkins said it well.

> “Think of the body as a blanket, suspended from the ceiling by 100,000 rubber bands, all tangled and twisted around one another. The shape of the blanket — the body — is determined by the tensions of all these rubber bands taken together. Some of the rubber bands represent genes, others environmental factors. A change in a particular gene corresponds to a lengthening or shortening of one particular rubber band. But any one rubber band is linked to the blanket only indirectly via countless connections amid the welter of other rubber bands. If you cut one rubber band, or tighten it, there will be a distributed shift in tensions, and the effect on the shape of the blanket will be complex and hard to predict. In the same way, possession of a particular gene need not infallibly dictate that an individual will be homosexual. Far more probably the causal influence will be statistical. The effect of genes on bodies and behaviour is like the effect of cigarette smoke on lungs. If you smoke heavily, you increase the statistical odds that you'll get lung cancer. You won't infallibly give yourself lung cancer. Nor does refraining from smoking protect you infallibly from cancer. We live in a statistical world.”

>Cheering for science advancements that are far out of reach for the majority leaves a bitter taste.

Yet a random child born in the slums of Mumbai has a higher life expectancy than the wealthiest people on earth did 100 years ago. Just because the rich have it better than everyone else does not mean that scientific advancement has not led to vastly improved lives all over the world. Yeah, people are still greedy and mean and blah blah, but with 2 extra decades of life to live on average.

>BTW, Gattaca is a temporary time. Once it's passed - one whole generation, so say ~80 years - that world would be wonderful, but that limbo time, when the movie plays out, is the nasty part.

I don’t think you understand the point of the movie. The movie was about how we shouldn’t put total and complete faith in gene editing, because our genes are not the only thing that make us “us”. Jude Law is a genetic phenom but ends up not doing anything with his life of note because of his decisions, bad luck, and his lack of drive and motivation. Ethan Hawk was written off as a loser before he was a day old because of his genes, but he succeeded due to his decisions, good luck, and his drive and motivation. His genes said he had a statistically super high chance of dying because of his heart, but he didn’t, because a statistical likelihood is not a certainty. Ethan Hawk is allowed on the shuttle by the doctor, who’s genetically enhanced son is “not all he would have hoped”.

The message of the movie is that we need to be careful of using genes as a proxy for everything that makes up a person, and how that could lead to a dystopian society where people are pigeon holed based on one thing about them. That taking the shortcut of using a proxy, even one as complex as our genes, for something as complex as “human potential” is folly. The statistical nature of genes, epigenetics, and environmental factors cannot be ignored.