Manipulación genética: el nuevo monstruo de Frankenstein en el cine

Abstract

On many occasions the cinema has been concerned with launching the questions raised by scientific progress and its repercussions on the lives of human beings. Not in vain is science fiction a genre dedicated to this task, that of attempting to predict where humanity is going thanks to the application of new discoveries. Genetic manipulation, because of its extraordinary range of possibilities, could not escape scripts that try to glimpse how society might apply it in the near future.             This article analyses three representative titles, The Boys from Brazil (1978), Godsend (2004) and The Island (2005), to show how the cinema has not abandoned the narrative model begun by James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), which in turn takes the Greek myth of Prometheus to show the terrible consequences undergone by those who dare to emulate God, the only creator of life.             Finally, a more detailed analysis of Gattaca (1997) by Andrew Niccol makes it possible to abandon this sensationalist model and, with an almost prophetic script which today is more science than fiction, call attention to the current fears of jurists, experts in bioethics and bodies such as the UNESCO regarding genetic privacy and the presumed determinism of the human genome.