In Gattaca, the Ethan Hawke film set in a Dystopian future with DNA-based discrimination, children are engineered to inherit all the good traits and none of the bad from mom and dad (dubbed the valids). Those who are born naturally are called “faith births” (the invalids).

We’re getting scarily closer to that dark vision, with new advances in the field of DNA research. CNN poses the question, “Should we be able to reprogram our genes,” to its readers, giving the proposed practice the salacious label, “Designer DNA.”  Bloggers pontificate how Gattaca actually impedes real science because they portray the possibilities as too scary to contemplate. Some scientists claim that Olympic gold medalists in Beijing will be the beneficiaries of undetectable gene doping, the next wave in athletic cheating.

To top it all off, one study shows that crappy lifestyles can actually alter parental DNA and become hereditary. If you get fat now, your children could inherit that genepool, too. Even if Nature is on your side, Nurture can bite you in the ass.

Questions of what it means fundamentally to be human—and whether we should meddle with that makeup—are easy to ask but difficult to answer with certainty.

Five years ago, Nicholas Kristof wrote the following in a New York Times piece called “The New Eugenics:”

My guess is that germ-line gene therapy will arrive a bit further down the road, initially to fix ”bad genes” that cause disease, and then moving on to enhance intelligence and performance. I’m afraid we may be slipping, without any conscious decision or even awareness of the implications, toward a future in which we will hugely accelerate our own evolution, in which our descendants quickly diverge from all that has been human for 200,000 years.

Today we have a baby to be born without any of the hereditary breast cancer genes that plagued generations of its family.  The debate in the scientific community, according to Kristof, is repair vs. enhance, with enhancements coming at the cost of what makes people people.  As Kristof theorizes, “[s]oon you’re headed toward a world where Kathy’s lungs work fine, but where her goodness, her kindness, don’t mean what they did. Where someone’s souping up her brains or regulating her temper, not just clearing up her mucus.”

In a response to Kristof’s column, Ram Samudrala, an assistant professor of computational genomics at The University of Washington wrote the following:

As a genetic researcher, I think that the ability to perform direct engineering is an inevitable consequence of evolution. Further, for any complex trait that is dependent on more than a few genes, and highly susceptible to environmental factors, no amount of genetic engineering will be able to influence the outcome.

George Church, the director of the Lipper Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, wants to catalog about 100,000 people’s genetic traits at an unprecedented level of granularity in his Personal Genome Project (PGP).

From the WIRED article on the man with the master plan:

If your genome is the blueprint of your genetic potential written across six billion base pairs of DNA, your phenome is the resulting edifice, how you actually turn out after the environment has had its say, influencing which genes get expressed and which traits repressed. Imagine that we could collect complete sets of data—genotype and phenotype—for a whole population. You would very quickly begin to see meaningful and powerful correlations between particular genetic sequences and particular physical characteristics, from height and hair color to disease risk and personality.

By documenting both the nature and nature that goes into making a 100,00 human beings, the goal is to “bring personal genomics to fruition [so] our genomes will unfold before us like road maps: We will peruse our DNA like we plan a trip, scanning it for possible detours (a predisposition for disease) or historical markers (a compelling ancestry).”

Church is also big on sharing the love, claiming he will make his findings available to the entire scientific community. The potential to identify patterns and relationships between genes and their physical manifestations is staggering. Put that info in the hands of Big Pharma or other corporate-sponsored scientists and Designer DNA suddenly sounds like more than a clever headline.