Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
view the rest of the comments
Also I know this is splitting hairs, but "Space Seed" doesn't even actually say "genetic engineering", Spock refers to Khan and Co. as having been "selectively breed". It's not until Wrath of Khan when they get into the "artificial" genetic augmentation stuff.
That said, it's always felt implicit to me that the Federation is against it because it's whole deal is embracing diversity and genetic engineering runs counter to that by granting one type of genetics dominion over the rest. It seems impossible to avoid that from playing out. Could Khan NOT be a Khan? Doubtful. But you're right that it's never to my knowledge explicitly said. There's a lot of room there.
I would love to see an episode about a species who's had their own Eugenics wars, or perhaps even one who's embraced gene augmentation, or goes full-on "Khan did nothing wrong". The fact that even the Romulans and Cardassians don't do it despite presumably having the tech, I think really shows what a poison pill it can be for civilization. Kind of like the Borg but with genes. Once a civilization embraces Borg philosophy, it can't really go back. It would be really interesting to explore that further.
That’s because genetic engineering wasn’t a thing until the early 1970s. When Spock was talking about eugenics, at that point in history it was purely a case of not allowing certain people to breed and making sure that only the “right” people were matched for the “best” offspring. That’s right out of the Nazi eugenics playbook, so despite the South Asian aspect of Khan’s supermen the expectation that they would become fascist and tyrannical was never in doubt. So Khan would never have been NOT a khan, and “Space Seed” does a good job in portraying the insidiousness of the eugenics argument and the seductiveness of it, what with McGivers being turned and even the senior staff expressing admiration for Khan, describing him as the “best of tyrants”, to Spock’s horror. It’s played off as a joke, but it does show how easy it is to buy into the “better world” rhetoric.
We’ve got TNG: “The Masterpiece Society” right there, which is a ready made premise for a sequel. Maybe after Picard made off with a sizeable chunk of their population, throwing it into imbalance, they resorted to more desperate means. And desperation does breed darker motivations.