R a c h e l M a y e r i

Stories from the Genome: An Animated History of Reproduction

Stories from the Genome :
An Animated History of Reproduction

Mini-DV, TRT 14:36, 2003

The cloudy future of our genetic understandingand the suspected map of human history contained in the smallest piece of every one of us is on display in a collection of ideas ranging from Nature vs. Nurture to cloning to psychoanalysis to homunculus theory to Mortal Kombat to the semi-conscious act of sexual selection.   Mayeri's video is a formalist free-for-all that humorously takes it all into account and simultaneously leaves it all up for debate.
-- Sean Gallagher, Cinematexas

Part cloning experiment, part documentary, Stories from the Genome, follows an unnamed CEO-geneticist whose company sequenced the Human Genome in 2003 - a genome that secretly was his own. Not satisfied with this feat, the scientist self-replicates, producing a colony of clone-scientists to save himself from Alzheimer's. The animated video switches between misadventures in cloning, and a history of equally improbable theories of human development.

Stories from the Genome is based on the true life story of Craig Venter, who was the CEO of Celera Genomics in a race with an international consortium of scientists to decode the human genome.   He did in fact use his own genetic material for the Human Genome Project, completed in 2001, despite much fanfare about the "diversity" of human populations it would represent.   The video is intended to comment upon the dangers of short-sighted, self-interest in contemporary biotechnology and its appropriation for profit of human genetic information. The article, "I'm the Human Genome, Says 'Darth Venter' of Genetics," in the Guardian is the factual backbone of the video - which briefly sketches Craig Venter's professional life.