Unnatural Selection

My husband and I rarely watch the same show with the same amount of joy or excitement. This show however, has grabbed us both in a way that we weren't expecting. It is so well made; the story is excellent, to the point where we'll hit the pause button and discuss our thoughts and beliefs before resuming the episode. This is a heartfelt documentary that everyone needs to watch. I hope this is the beginning of the fall for the pharmaceutical company's control on drug pricing. This show is so complex! The points being brought up are so important to shed light on, and I hope it sparks as much interest for you as it did for us. You need to watch this.

I went into this with cliched expectations for what a documentary on a topic such as this might look like. Boy was I wrong.

This is an excellent balanced documentary which shows you both sides of the argument and covers all of the complex ethical concerns for a subject such as this. The human stories are sensitively and beautifully woven throught and keep your attention till the very end - enough to want to binge watch this.

I came away from it with a lot of excitement for what the future may hold and also some misgivings .... I'm waiting for my son to be old enough to be able to show this to him. Absolutely unmissable.

I finished watching all episodes in one set. Very very interesting. If in the beginning of the series I knew exactly what I think about genetic modifications, I wasn't so sure by the end of the last episode. Should we leave natural selection to mother nature or take it into our hands? Should we save and or cure every sick person? When we don't see them, know them, it is one thing, but we start thinking differently after we get to know them, like in these series. Does science exist for the sake of science itself? Seems so if no one can afford to use its discoveries and technologies. This applies not just to very rare genetic conditions, but to illnesses that affect thousands. Institutions of science seem concerned (in the series) almost exclusively with health and perfection of a physical body, leaving mental, psychological health out of equation. It is uncharted territory, but it is emotions that make us human. I was waiting to hear about The Gaia hypothesis, yet, no one has mentioned it. I think it is extremely important for every scientist to know, understand The Gaia principle which proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet BEFORE they start messing with genetic modification of all things alive. Be it a human, or a rat or a mosquito.

It can be a little boring at times but if you stay with the series and see for yourself the promise of gene therapy, you will understand why public understanding of this technology is so urgently needed. Once people grasp how potent gene editing is, they are going to want it more than they would anything else. The problem is that none of us know what the consequences will be when gene therapies become widely used and accepted.

It might be one of the consequential documentaries made in recent years because Unnatural Selection chronicles the rise of the gene editing revolution. Years from now people will look back (with regret I think) at the cowboy recklessness that unleashed disaster upon the world. Changing the DNA of any organism that can reproduce could have profound implications for the world we live in, not always for the better. But if you are a biohacker, to you the world we live in is already not only unsustainable but also in deep crisis. So to them there is no reason not to try something new, even if it may have potentially catastrophic consequences, to try and make the world a better place.

That sense of grasping at a possible utopia from a paradise that has fallen seem to underlie the motivations of many of the people who were profiled. And therein lies the danger for all of us because they believe that they can make the world a better place and are willing to force the rest of us to go along with or without our consent. It is also worthwhile to look at the ignorance of some of these people and their undisguised greed for life and wealth to see why the gene editing movement is not likely to end well for all of us.

This is one of those documentaries that make you wonder if these are indeed the best of times or the worst of times. We are basically children playing god, with science that is a lot more advanced than our capacity for reason. And this documentaries does a good job at covering both the incredible feats we are now capable of (with hints of even more fantastic things in store in the future) and all the societal and moral struggles we are barely equipped with to handle the implications and consequences. The pacing may be a bit uneven at times but all in all, highly recommended.