Genetic engineering in the cinema…

Scientific advances and a good deal of imagination have been common ingredients in great stories of the Seventh Art. Clones have been the favorite resource of many directors: they have been used to recover extinct species, as organ reserves for the rich, as workers in unpleasant missions or simply as a way to improve human race as you like (eugenics). 

As science can be used for good or bad purposes, in 1978 the film The boys fromBrazil is about the evil (and fortunately fictitious) plan of Dr. Mengele to clone Hitler and restore the nazi regime. Four years later, Blade Runner, presented a decadent 2019 where an enterprise (Tyrell Corporation) creates by genetic engineering beings very similar to humans, with better features but emotionally clumsy and not able to feel empathy: the replicants. They are used as slaves in the Space but they are illegal on Earth after a group rebelled against humans in Mars. 

Now six replicants are in Los Angeles and the blade runners are the cops in charge of eliminating them, or as they say, of retiring them. What makes up a human being? In the case of Blade Runner only natural human beings are treated as persons. In Gattaca (1997) however it is the opposite: children conceived the regular way are considered in-valid, while those coming from genetically selected and improved embryos are the ones committed to the social elite. Is our genetic code deterministic? Vincent Freeman, a faith-birth, an in-valid, is convinced of the power of his will, that he can fight against his genetic limits and trick the system to make his dream of travelling to Space come true.

In Space is also set Moon (2009), where Sam Bell is about to return home after a 3-year mission in the far side of the Moon, with the sole company of a robot and the videocalls of her wife. His routine gets interrupted when at the end of the mission he abandons the working perimeter and finds another human being that looks a lot like him. 

While Sam dreams about coming back to Earth, the main characters of The Island (2005) live in a controlled place protected from a global ecological disaster and wish to travel to the island, the only place in the world that escaped the catastrophe and the only way to escape the prison they live in. However it looks like a big secret is hidden behind the idyllic paradise.

Even if a lot of water has flown since 1993, my favorite film is undoubtedly Jurassic Park. Multimillionaire John Hammond has returned to life creatures that got extinguished 65 million years ago. 

The procedure is simple: some of the mosquitoes that bit dinosaurs got trapped in amber, preserving the monster’s blood inside them. Scientists from Jurassic Park extract the DNA from the dinosaur’s blood, amplifying and ordering it afterwards.  Missing fragments are replaced with DNA from frogs. We mix, magic touch and put it all in an ostrich egg from which we will get a little dinosaur after some weeks, all female individuals to control the population. It sounds easy but, is it possible to bring dinosaurs back to life?

Today, 20 years after the premier, it keeps on being an unviable project.  Putting aside the difficulty to find fossilized mosquitoes containing dinosaur’s blood, any 65 million-year-old biological sample won’t be intact but suffering various levels of degradation. Besides it will be contaminated with DNA from other species, like fungi and bacteria. The sequences of the genomes from the different species of dinosaurs are not known and ordering the fragments of DNA found will be a great challenge: multiple samples from different animals will be needed so as to diminish the number of errors in the sequence and to get a viable genome (if it has many mutations the organism won’t survive). If there were missing pieces in the genomic puzzle, we will have to investigate how near relatives (maybe birds instead of frogs) fill in the gaps and complete the picture with the relative’s sequence: complicated!  In addition, it is very difficult to get the right sequence of repetitive regions like telomeres and centromeres even if this could be solved thanks to synthetic biology, that has created artificial fully functional centromeres. Getting the right sequence wouldn’t be enough: the different fragments of DNA should be organized in chromosomes and the number of chromosomes of the different species of dinosaurs is not known. If anyway all these obstacles will be beaten, we will still have to synthesize the chromosomes in the lab. Until now, the biggest genome chemically synthesized is the one of the bacteria Mycoplasma mycoides and any genome from a dinosaur will be undoubtedly bigger. The biggest the sequence is, the most difficult to synthesize it in vitrobecause it tends to nick and break. If despite all these problems we get the dinosaurs chromosomes synthesized, we will still have to introduce them in a nucleus, preferably an ovule that would allow the correct development of the embryo. It looks that bringing dinosaurs back to life is nowadays science fiction. Similar challenges have to be overcome to clone mammoths, even if in this case the biological remains are much better preserved and if there is a close relative alive, the Indian elephant.   However, the regeneration of plants that lived more than 30000 years ago from seeds frozen in permafrost is already a reality: the plasticity of plants makes the process much easier.

Coming back to the cinema, I don’t want to finish this post without mentioning The skin I live in (2011), where Antonio Banderas is Doctor Robert Ledgard, who tries to create a more resistant skin transferring pig genes to human cells. It looks like he is reaching his objective, but who is his human guinea pig?

Science and cinema form a great couple and for sure there are many more examples, which ones are missing?