First airing February 16, 1967, the original series episode "Space Seed" introduced the genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh, who would appear twice more in the franchise (1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness). Khan was described as a product of the Eugenics Wars, a still-nebulous concept in canon material that was supposed to take place somewhere in the 1990s. In 1967, the term "eugenics" was broadly understood to have Nazi connotations, although it was a concept widely shared in the United States as well. Eugenics was the idea that a "perfect" human could be engineered through selective breeding. In Nazi hands it led to a genocidal purge of undesired ethnicities for a "pure" nation.
Khan was presented as a monster incapable of reconciling his existence with those he found inferior, which was basically everyone else except the goons sent into the same exile as himself. When Kirk finds his ship coasting in space and revives him, Khan attempts a coup of the Enterprise and is subsequently sent into a second exile, and an attempt at revenge.
The extent of Khan's genetic engineering was physical as well as mental, so that he represented the idea of perfecting both by bypassing chance, willful education and fitness efforts. In doing so, he developed a level of arrogance he couldn't see past, what Kirk eventually called two-dimensional thinking. By taking his abilities for granted, Khan never considered that there was a chance anyone without his advantages could be his equal, much less superior.
In Star Trek lore, his existence and evident threat led the Federation to ban genetic engineering. The franchise didn't seriously revisit the idea until the Deep Space Nine episode "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" in 1997, a full thirty years after "Space Seed." In it we learn that Doctor Bashir, a member of the regular cast since the first episode of the series, has been genetically engineered the whole time. To look at him (a complete inverse of Khan physically, a beanstalk of a man), you would certainly have never guessed, and since this was a fifth season episode, nothing the writers had planned until plotting that episode. Bashir had always had a healthy ego from his introduction on, a recent graduate of Starfleet medical school who boasted of his high academic achievements and selection of the assignment to a station at the edge of Federation space meant as a challenge he didn't think he'd find elsewhere. The episode explains how his parents chose to modify his genes after finding themselves with a sickly child of no apparent prospects.
Now, no one will ever argue Julian Bashir to be the second coming of Khan. Starfleet ends up making a special exception for him (he would otherwise have lost his career), instead punishing his father for making the decision in the first place. For the rest of the series, the only real effect of the revelation is two episodes where he spends time with other products of recent genetic engineering, misfits whose outcomes weren't nearly as fortunate as his own.
The next time the franchise revisits the concept is the trilogy of Enterprise episodes from 2004, "Borderland," "Cold Station 12," and "The Augments," in which we learn the ancestor of Data's creator, Arik Soong, was inspired by the original Khan project in his work, and in fact nurtured the genetic material left over from it and even raised some of the results to adulthood. (In later episodes, the series finally answers the question of how Klingons in the original series had such smooth foreheads; the Empire attempted to reverse engineer this work, and it...backfired.) When Soong is repeatedly stymied, he eventually decides to pursues robotics instead.
Which brings us to the modern era of Star Trek programming and the reason I'm writing this. Genetic engineering has played a prominent role in three series from this period, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy. We'll start with Picard, as it most resembles the franchise's historic stance on eugenics.
The second season of Picard features another member of the Soong lineage, Adam Soong, whose efforts in this field of science are meant to create a daughter for himself. By this time the Eugenics Wars are long over, Khan has been put into cryostasis and shot into space, WWIII has yet to occur, and of course the Soongs have begun their long journey toward the creation of Data, one of the main cast members of The Next Generation, an android with an innovative positronic net powering him. Adam Soong, although a renowned member of the scientific community, keeps his greatest work to himself, and has failed a number of times at creating a daughter of unlimited viability, genetic flaws continually cropping up and leading to premature death or debilitating conditions. When we catch up with him, his daughter Kore has no idea she was created in a lab, although she certainly knows she can't stray far from home, since her skin can't withstand UV rays. Eventually she runs away from home, and the Soongs continually evolve their pursuits. Adam and Arik Soong are clearly presented as villains, although Kore, like Bashir before her, is an unwitting victim and sympathetic protagonist.
The same can be said for Strange New Worlds and Prodigy's contributions. Strange New Worlds gives us Number One, Una Chin-Riley, who has been hiding her Illyrian heritage since Illyrians maintain a regular practice of genetic engineering. Prodigy's lead character is Dal, and in the 2022 episode "Masquerade" we learn that he's entirely the product of genetic engineering.
At the end of its first season, Strange New Worlds positions Chin-Riley in the same kind of peril Bashir faced when finally exposed, just as Prodigy finds Starfleet forced to reconcile Dal's existence with its ban. Chin-Riley's case is in the past, before Khan is even revived, while Dal's is after Bashir's. It seems recent creators are increasingly interested in challenging the moral qualms of the whole concept. So is this a problem?
I think so. It's one thing to argue, as Bashir does, that he had no say in what happened to him. After all, although he knowingly lied throughout his Starfleet career, he didn't think he was otherwise responsible for conditions that ended up violating the ban. Dal's case is different. Although a character in a show geared toward kids and constantly presented as someone who just wants to fit in (and therefore it would be tough to come to any other conclusion), it becomes problematic that he's yet another unwitting victim we're asked to accept. As I write this, the second season of Strange New Worlds has yet to premiere, so there's no way to know if and how Chin-Riley's case is handled, but it seems equally unlikely that she will end up unabsolved, whether by Starfleet or her crew.
I'm not making an argument against modern Star Trek, or these characters. What I'm saying, here, is that it's a curious development in a franchise that has long been a champion of reason, spending the entire original series questioning basically everything, even the most precious indulgences of the counterculture that has long since been assumed to most closely align with its utopian ideals. The franchise has also become a beacon of acceptance, in increasingly overt ways, and yet...this might be a step too far. What some would call inevitable scientific progress still represents a Doctor Bashir who asks his parents, finally, why he wasn't good enough for them as he originally was. No subsequent depiction of genetic engineering in the franchise has voiced such a thought, nor the cautionary tale (which is the foundation of the franchise) of Khan and the generation of augments that followed him.
This is a dangerous road to travel. My hope is that someone at the controls realizes this at some point. We don't need a Khan to point this out. We certainly don't need another Hitler. Star Trek is always at its best when it depicts humanity's efforts to better itself. Through more conventional means. Moral means.
