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Gattaca

1. What does the text say about journeys?

GENETICS: THE FINAL FRONTIER
(contains spoilers)

"As night-fall does not come at once, neither does oppression... It is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become victims of the darkness."
Justice William O. Douglas

It is the near future, and Vincent/Jerome Morrow has a problem. A genetic problem. He is an imperfect man in a perfect world.
Every day it seems as if people are discovering new uses for the human genetic code. Hardly a day passes when there isn't a researcher who claims to have found another miracle gene. One for obesity, for cancer, for asthma, for manic-depression, and so forth. Gene therapy is on the rise, already some people have been used for the first leading forms of treatments, using recombinant DNA, injected by genetically-altered viruses. There is even talk (and perhaps an attempt) to clone a human. Ever since the decryption of the human genetic code, a burst of new research in the field of genetics has occurred, and certainly, as our ability to manipulate our DNA increases, so too will the debate over designer babies escalate.
Vincent/Jerome Morrow lives in such a future. It is one where science, and not religion, has taken over society. He is one born of a new subclass, one determined not by race or colour or political standing or even economic position, but of genetics. It is a world where a new form of discrimination has arisen, called genoism, discrimination according to one's genetic purity. He is one known as an invalid, a person born by normal means, whose genes have not been altered — contrary to the valids who are people whose genes have been altered to give them "the best of their parents". When he is born a reading is taken from his blood, and the probabilities of certain afflictions and genetic diseases are read off, one after another, to his dumbstruck parents. His probable life expectancy? A mere 33 years.
Soon after...