Illun

For a eugenics-based society to take hold like in Gattaca, you have to have government sponsorship. We have enough cautionary tales like Gattaca to forestall that until it has a grassroots movement behind it of people like these garage geneticists tinkering with themselves and more professional operations doing more standard procedures on the willing among the masses. As slowly as government moves with this sort of thing, I'm not worried about a Gattaca in the next century. By the time we got to that point, society would have changed enough to find that acceptable, and it wouldn't have the meaning it does today. The part of eugenics that scares me isn't the social structure or even the supermen/god complex aspect of it, but that it leads to narrowing of the gene pool. While it may need chlorine now, if you narrow it too much, a species doesn't differentiate enough anymore and you're essentially cloning, with all the inherent long-term problems associated with that. (See Stargate's Asgard for a simplified example.)