The 2007 discovery of a perfectly preserved, 40,000 year-old baby mammoth raised hopes that the animal’s high-quality DNA could lead to a revival of the species via cloning.
This week, an elaborately produced documentary from National Geographic Channel traces the path of the baby mammoth (”Lyuba”) from discovery in Siberia to analysis in Russia and Japan, as scientists try to piece together the details of its life and death.
Narrated by erstwhile Alias dad Victor Garber, the show makes impressive use of CGI animation and reenactments using the real-life participants to tell the story.
(more…)
Last night’s episode of Eleventh Hour took a plot from the first episode and took it to the next level: From a failed human cloning experiment to success. We learn within the first ten minutes of the episode that Dr. Jacob Hood’s nemeiss, the evil geneticist known as Gepetto, has cloned humans, implanted the embryonic clones into women, and successfully brought them to term. We learn later that Gepetto cloned the babies with her own DNA so she can harvest one of them for a new pancreas, which she needs to live. Of course taking a pancreas means killing the baby, so Gepetto would be guilty of murder along with any number of additional violations of the law.
(more…)
Last night CBS premiered it’s new science-fiction detective show, Eleventh Hour, which revolves around a scientist investigating misuses of science, accompanied by his FBI minder. The first episode focused on human cloning and the show deserves big kudos for wringing out a fresh take from what has become a very hackneyed topic in science fiction. The writer and producers managed this feat by actually sticking close to today’s science: most stories that incorporate reproductive cloning introduce a successfully created clone (whether a child or an adult) and go from there. The messy details of actually creating a clone are glossed over, or not mentioned at all. Not so on Eleventh Hour.
(more…)
There’s a scene in the movie Babylon A.D., which opened Friday, where Mélanie Thierry’s character, Aurora, escapes from her guardians through a crowded post-apocalyptic marketplace and is suddenly confronted by two cloth-covered cages. She stares at the cages and as the camera zooms in, the audience realizes that something big is prowling about inside. The cage-porters whip the cloth off (Don’t ask why. This movie does not answer well to “Why?”) , and we see a pair of Siberian tigers pacing angrily and growling at the crowd. Aurora was raised in a convent, and the sight of the tigers awes her, not least because she knows (somehow) that tigers had been extinct for decades.
The plot of the film is set in some indeterminate future, and it centers on Aurora’s journey from Russia to America in the company of Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh as a badass nun) and Toorop, the hard hard-bitten, badass mercenary (Vin Diesel, who plays no other kind of mercenary, right Riddick fans?).
Anyway, there’s the market place, there’s the tigers, there’s Aurora as Toorop and Sister Rebeka come up behind her. Toorop is not so impressed, later dismissing the beasts as “copies. Clones of clones. Fakes.”
But why so dismissive, Toorop? (more…)
