BioPharma, Pharma

Why everyone in biotech should love BBC’s Orphan Black

When science fiction creeps toward a disturbing potential reality, it makes for very good TV. […]

When science fiction creeps toward a disturbing potential reality, it makes for very good TV.

Season 3 of the BBC’s Orphan Black returns April 18, satiating fans of the action-packed, conspiracy drama that’s delivered with a beautiful biotech backdrop. A fringe research foundation has peppered the earth with a series of human clones. Some of these clones have realized what they are and are digging deeper into their past, uniting and fighting for their lives.

It sounds like the kind of low-budget premise often used to play biotech like the villain. But the acting is so good (Tatiana Maslany plays each clone, and she nails it), the science is close enough to reality and the scripts are so edgy that you will lose yourself in it.

It should be the biotech sector’s guilty pleasure.

The show begins from the perspective of one particular woman who unexpectedly encounters her twisted clone debacle (it happens), which ends up making her life entirely more complicated, confusing and threatened than anyone could prepare for. It turns out there are 11 clones that we’ve been at least somewhat introduced to thus far, some of which are much more thoroughly developed as characters, and are the result of an operation from the illusive Dyad Institute. That then leads to a divisive and provoking plot line involving murder, crime, the analysis of how our DNA does or doesn’t necessarily determine who we are, where science crosses the line and how anyone who has been the result of some sort of scientific intervention can possibly maintain a solid sense of identity.

Getting ready for Season 3, you should know that the female clones are just the beginning. There are men now, too! Here we go again (gladly).

The politics and perils of futuristic biotech unfurl through the show, added in a way that’s credible and you can connect to the current debates in biotech. The clones’ genome has been patented and they are all essentially living intellectual property. Some clones (from the cloning process itself? We’re not sure) have a fatal genetic illness. Others are infertile. And everyone has been assigned a “monitor” to evaluate their assumed ignorance of the operation.

There really couldn’t be a better time to have a show like Orphan Black. Genetics is on the tip of everyone’s tongue: whether its the president or the FDA. The deeper issues of patenting genes will hit home for anyone in the medical industry with a position on the Myriad Genetics case.

The show’s science consultant Cosima Herter, the namesake for one of the clones, studied within the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Program at the University of Minnesota. She and has been a long-time friend of the show’s co-creator and writer Graeme Manson.

Here’s what Herter had to say about what’s preventing human clones from running around in real life in a Q&A on BBC’s site:

A lot of it is, we’re not entirely sure if that science is entirely perfected. I mean there was Dolly in ’96 and that took hundreds of tries. There’s also a moratorium on human cloning. There’s different kinds of cloning – there’s therapeutic cloning, and reproductive cloning. We can do therapeutic cloning, we do it all the time with all kinds of animals. Your cells clone themselves all the time, but reproductive cloning, – cloning meant for the reproduction of humanity – that’s not legal – at least not in North America. Whether that’s being researched in other areas, I have very little doubt that it is. We’re not allowed to hear about it, because we’re not allowed to do it. But we do clone other species, mammals. So, conceivably it’s not impossible that human beings could be.

Things moving forward in the show will inevitably get even more complicated. More people will die and more clones will show up, but when viewers can’t help but identify with the cloned characters, it makes a total catastrophe in a biotech-ruled world seem like something we kind of need to prepare for.

Nothing like the combination of pure terror and unadulterated entertainment to fuel the fire for the future of science!

Here’s a Season 3 preview:

Shares0
Shares0