The Science Of Orphan Black: The Official Companion - Softcover

Griffin, Casey; Nesseth, Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770413804 ISBN 13: 9781770413801

Verlag: ECW Press,Canada, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The official guide to the crazy science of Orphan Black

With exclusive insights from the show's co-creator Graeme Manson and science consultant Cosima Herter, The Science of Orphan Black takes you behind the closed doors of the Dyad Institute and inside Neolution. Authors Casey Griffin and Nina Nesseth decode the mysteries of Orphan Black; from the history of cloning, epigenetics, synthetic biology, chimerism, the real diseases on which the clone disease is based, and the transhumanist philosophies of Neolution, to what exactly happens when a projectile pencil is shot through a person's eye and into their brain. In full color, this must-have companion to the Peabody Award winning show covers all five seasons and includes a foreword by the "Real Cosima."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Casey Griffin is a graduate student pursuing her Ph.D. in developmental and stem-cell biology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She's been a fan of Orphan Black and avid member of the Clone Club since 2011. When she isn't loudly fan-girling over the show and being an all-around sci-fi and comic book nerd, she can be found working in the lab. Also an avid Clone Club member, Nina Nesseth is a professional science communicator whose background is rooted in biomedical sciences and science communication, with special interest in human biology. She is a staff scientist at Science North in Sudbury, Ontario. Nina and Casey write for entertainment news site The Mary Sue, where they dissect the science of Orphan Black. Cosima Herter is the science and story consultant on Orphan Black. Her scholarly background is in the history and philosophy of science and technology. Looking at questions of how science and technology, and particularly biology, are interconnected with politics and society informs her feminism, work, and interests. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Casey Griffin is a graduate student pursuing her Ph.D. in developmental and stem-cell biology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She’s been a fan of Orphan Black and avid member of the Clone Club since 2011. When she isn’t loudly fan-girling over the show and being an all-around sci-fi and comic book nerd, she can be found working in the lab. Also an avid Clone Club member, Nina Nesseth is a professional science communicator whose background is rooted in biomedical sciences and science communication, with special interest in human biology. She is a staff scientist at Science North in Sudbury, Ontario. Nina and Casey write for entertainment news site The Mary Sue, where they dissect the science of Orphan Black.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The official guide to the crazy science of Orphan Black

With exclusive insights from the show's co-creator Graeme Manson and science consultant Cosima Herter, The Science of Orphan Black takes you behind the closed doors of the Dyad Institute and inside Neolution. Authors Casey Griffin and Nina Nesseth decode the mysteries of Orphan Black; from the history of cloning, epigenetics, synthetic biology, chimerism, the real diseases on which the clone disease is based, and the transhumanist philosophies of Neolution, to what exactly happens when a projectile pencil is shot through a person's eye and into their brain. In full color, this must-have companion to the Peabody Award winning show covers all five seasons and includes a foreword by the "Real Cosima."

Aus dem Klappentext

The official guide to the crazy science of Orphan Black

With exclusive insights from the show's co-creator Graeme Manson and science consultant Cosima Herter, The Science of Orphan Black takes you behind the closed doors of the Dyad Institute and inside Neolution. Authors Casey Griffin and Nina Nesseth decode the mysteries of Orphan Black; from the history of cloning, epigenetics, synthetic biology, chimerism, the real diseases on which the clone disease is based, and the transhumanist philosophies of Neolution, to what exactly happens when a projectile pencil is shot through a person's eye and into their brain. In full color, this must-have companion to the Peabody Award winning show covers all five seasons and includes a foreword by the "Real Cosima."

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The Science of Orphan Black

The Official Companion

By Casey Griffin, Nina Nesseth

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Casey Griffin and Nina Nesseth
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77041-380-1

Contents

FOREWORD by Cosima Herter, 
INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the trip, 
CHAPTER ONE: "How many of us are there?", 
CHAPTER TWO: "There's only one of me", 
CHAPTER THREE: "You're just a bad copy of me", 
CHAPTER FOUR: "This is my biology, my decision", 
CHAPTER FIVE: "My poor, poor Rachel", 
CHAPTER SIX: "Your little girls are dying", 
CHAPTER SEVEN: "And we, here, shall drink from the fountain first", 
THE CONVERSATION: Graeme Manson and Cosima Herter, 
Glossary, 
Orphan Black and History: A Timeline, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Authors, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

"HOW MANY OF US ARE THERE?"

THE HISTORY & SCIENCE OF CLONES

Imagine that you are Sarah Manning. You are standing on a train station platform late one night when something catches your eye. It's a woman and her back is turned to you. The woman takes off her suit jacket, folds it, and places it on the platform. She slips off her heels. She turns around.

The woman is identical to you. Wearing nicer clothes, granted, but her face? The spitting image.

Before you can get any answers, the woman has stepped out in front of a moving train. She's gone. Dead. You're an orphan and have never known your family. Your best guess — after stealing her purse and riffling through her things — is that this woman, Elizabeth Childs, must be your long-lost twin sister.

SARAH

What the hell, Fee? Did I have a twin sister?

FELIX

Well, when you're a poor little orphaned foster wretch, anything's possible. Or so we tell ourselves.

(1.01 "Natural Selection")

It doesn't occur to Sarah Manning that "anything's possible" could include clones, and despite seeing Beth, and then meeting Katja, and then Alison and Cosima, the thought still doesn't occur to her. It takes a frustrated Alison blurting out that she, Cosima, and Sarah are all clones, all somebody's experiment, for the message to finally get across (although Cosima really wanted to float that whole clone thing a lot softer). But really, why should it have been obvious to Sarah that she was a clone? Human cloning is illegal, for one, and there is no record of a cloned human surviving past an embryonic stage, let alone into adulthood. The most famous clone — Dolly the sheep — was born in 1996. For Sarah, who is 28 years old in season one, to be a clone suggests that there was a much bigger cloning project happening more than a decade earlier in the 1980s. Is that unrealistic? Not really. Dolly may be a famous clone (for reasons we'll explain later), but she definitely wasn't the first.

First off, let's be clear about what we're talking about when we're talking about cloning. There's a whole world of possibilities for cloning out there other than just straight up creating identical copies of a being. We can clone on the tiniest scale and make copies of, say, fragments of DNA. This is known as molecular cloning. Then there's cellular cloning, which creates populations of identical cells from a single cell source. Cloned cells can be used for research (especially stem cell research) or to grow tissues. A really exciting aspect of cellular cloning is therapeutic cloning, which uses cloned cells for medical research, treatments, and transplants. And then, of course, there's organism cloning — known as reproductive cloning — by which we can create whole organisms that are identical to an original "parent" organism. With Orphan Black, we're talking about reproductive cloning: creating complete living, breathing, genetically identical humans. We're talking about Sarah Manning. About Beth Childs. About Cosima Niehaus, and Alison Hendrix, and Rachel Duncan, and all of the clones that we've met over five seasons. We know that they are all (save for Charlotte Bowles) from a single generation of clones, born in the 1980s thanks to the efforts of professors Ethan and Susan Duncan and their research team at the Dyad Institute (including one religious extremist research assistant by the name of Henrik Johanssen). The cell line that gave rise to these clones came from a tissue sample from a woman named Kendall Malone, and a second tissue sample yielded clones for a second project, Project Castor, headed by the military. Ethan Duncan alludes to the ethical and biological challenges of cloning a human being, but he only scratches the surface of what a secret illegal international science experiment such as these would entail. In reality, the history of clones and cloning has been and continues to be filled with hurdles and controversies.

We meet the "father" of Project Leda, Ethan Duncan, in season two — a season full of examinations of scientists of different experiences, worldviews, moral backgrounds, and motivations — and as a way of weaving in the scientific themes of Orphan Black, Graeme Manson and Cosima Herter fittingly chose episode titles pulled from the works of Sir Francis Bacon. Sometimes referred to as the "Father of Experimental Philosophy," Francis Bacon was an English scholar in the late 16th and early 17th centuries who focused most of his work on philosophical and scientific ideas, most notably the development of the scientific method. The scientific method is a process of inquiry that involves developing a hypothesis based on observations and testing this hypothesis through experimentation. This, of course, ties into Orphan Black in that the clones came about as a result of experimentation based on laboratory observations and the hypothesis that human cloning was possible. Bacon's emphasis on inquiry and induction is mirrored by Ethan's work, making it a good match for the second season. Bacon also wrote many works focused on philosophy and religion, and particularly on morality. Once again, this dovetails perfectly with a season in which we meet the Proletheans and examine their questionable practices in the name of a higher power.

Interestingly, Bacon's Novum Organum, published in 1620, is a philosophical work discussing a new system of logic Bacon deemed superior to syllogism. We see syllogisms in Orphan Black during season three, as a means of testing the Castor clones for signs of "glitching." Bacon's work, specifically his focus on discussing ways to improve mankind, also mirrors themes brought up in season four. He touched on topics such as prolonging life, reforming law, and scientific innovation.

Aside from his academic writings, Bacon also wrote a novel, New Atlantis, which falls into the category of utopian-philosophical writings. While the plot is thin and the writing itself reads like an oven instruction manual, New Atlantis describes a location known as Salomon's House, a centrally organized research facility with the purpose of collecting data, conducting experiments, and using knowledge to improve the outside world. Sounds a bit like some of the centers on Orphan Black. Essentially, this novel set the stage for modern research centers and scientific communities, providing the blueprint for the likes of the British Royal Society, the National Institutes of Health, the Dyad Institute, and Revival.

HOW TO CREATE A CLONE

Cloning actually has botanical roots. The word "clone" is derived from the Greek [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECW Press,Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1770413804
• ISBN 13: 9781770413801
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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