Jill Banfield and David Baltimore and many others go over potential breakthroughs and pitfalls with the dispassion of academics.
The greatest scientists in the field discuss the process of decoding, the discovery of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) explained by the Spanish scientist ( Francisco Mojica) who was one of the first to recognize this key to the code, and key to future genetic editing. His will be a disease dangled in front of the viewer as “Human Nature” unfolds, the sort of coming-soon breakthrough that will be treatable in the “Brave New World” of gene editing. We meet a smart and thoughtful tween named David Sanchez as he undergoes blood transfusions for his sickle cell anemia. And a speech at Cal Tech in 1966 by biologist Robert Sinsheimer, decades before he advocated for a Human Genome (decoding) Project, welcoming his “fellow prophets” with a few thoughts about “the potential for disaster” in misuse of the growing knowledge of DNA and how to manipulate it, kicks off the film. “Human Nature” is a history of the rapidly evolving world of genetic science and the promise and potential horrors of “genetic editing.”Īrchival footage frames Adam Bolt’s film and peppers its many interviews, shifts in subject area and points of view. To which one can only snort, “Hear HEAR.”Īs the “#panDUMBic” erupts in an America and a planet weakened by anti-science know-nothingism and a sort of “Revenge of the Nitwits” - Centers for Disease Control defunded politicians callously ignoring the human cost of a pandemic by fretting only about “the markets ” cronies, myopic religious fanatics, hacks and blinkered industry insiders in charge when the Corona comes calling - it’s a relief to catch a lively and engrossing genetics documentary filled with experts, highly educated people who give many sides of a serious scientific issue without the shouting shallowness of cable TV weighing in with all they don’t know.
Just a couple of days ago the evolutionary biologist and religion-debunking gadfly Richard Dawkins, whom I follow on Twitter, tweeted the hopeful thought that some British personage making a statement the world was taking seriously heralded “ the return of the expert to the national conversation.”
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