Not exactly. But last month scientists announced that monkeys had passed genetic modifications to their offspring for the first time.
Planet of the Apes it is not; the genetic modifications merely cause the monkeys to glow green under fluorescent light.
But it is another step toward the world of Gattaca: we have achieved heritable modifications with primates, and the “same techniques would be used on chimps or other primates even closer to humans or to try to endow people with desirable genetic traits,” the article noted.
Source: Rob Stein, “Monkeys first to inherit genetic modifications,” SFGate.com, May 28, 2009. Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with link and attribution
The new British version of Wired included a comment from me on genetics.
“We expect that this price will continue to drop, making some form of genetic analysis accessible to large numbers of people within the next decade,” [Linda Avey] says. Tamar Kasriel likens sequencing to a “Damocletian threat”, but Josh Calder disagrees. “The list of things we can partially prevent or prepare for is going to grow long enough that we’re going to want to do it.”
I’m not actually disagreeing with Kasriel: some ways that we could pursue genetic knowledge and biotech are indeed deeply threatening. I just suspect that collectively we are going to want to use that knowledge to prevent suffering, and that will almost inevitably blur into improvements (even if we don’t go as far as Gattaca), with different people and cultures disagreeing about the desirable and permissible boundaries of this use of genetics.
The futures depicted in the movies