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
My headcanon is that the ban on genetic engineering is mostly an Earth law, rather than a Federation law. Which makes sense if the reason for the law is Earth's experience with augments, as Phlox points out that other species have used it without the same dire consequences. This jives with the fact that only humans living on Earth are ever depicted as being bound by the law. It's not a perfect theory, but it does explain why Bashir's father was imprisoned but the Darwin station researchers were not.
Does it?
The Darwin Station researchers are human, as are their augmented subjects. Julian Bashir does not live on Earth at the time his augmentation is discovered. The Bashir family did not get this treatment done on Earth, and given the extreme lengths they went to get Julian treated, alongside Richard's documented inability to keep a job consistently, it would have been utterly insane not to move to a different world (instead of a different city on Earth, as they actually did) after they got the treatment if this would also free them from any risk of legal repercussions.
Further, Strange New Worlds explicitly refers to this as a Federation law, and the principal reason why Illyrians are not welcome in the Federation.
I agree with you. However, playing devil’s advocate, it could be argued that the law was applied because Bashir is a citizen of United Earth within the Federation, meaning that per the Prime Directive, Earth can enforce its own law within the bounds of the Federation constitution (perhaps with some limits on enforcing certain parts on non-United Earth citizens, especially in a zone like San Francisco).
International Waters in the 24th century?
That then begs the question: Why did they have a problem with Una, a non-human augment, joining Starfleet? In PRO, it is also implied that Dal would not have been let in if not for Janeway’s push.
Also, perhaps Darwin Station required a longer investigation to check which researchers were involved, so the arrest does not happen on screen and is left for another ship (after all, the D needs to keep boldly going, so I can imagine a Miranda swopping by later to do the arrest for the Enterprise).