In addition to being a lifelong fan of sci-fi, Phil Nista is also a freelance writer and editor. It's as profitable as it sounds, and he's never been happier. He holds both a BS in ecology and evolutionary biology and PhD in plain old biology from the University of Connecticut (go basketball!) and Indiana University (go even more basketball!), respectively. Though Phil is fairly tall, he does not care for basketball.
In the penultimate episode of season 3, we learned a key piece of information about the Orphan Black clones—the origins of the Castor and Leda Projects lie within a single solitary individual person, Kendall Malone (Alison Steadman). This mysterious woman with a murky legal record is not only a genetic chimera and hence able to...
Times are getting pretty tough for Cosima Neihaus (Tatiana Maslany), the one-woman Clone Club R&D department in the Orphan Black universe. What started out as an irksome cough has progressed into a full-blown autoimmune disorder affecting her respiratory and reproductive systems. In one recent episode (Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate), the extent of Cosima’s...
We’ve considered an awful lot about what makes Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), Alison Hendrix, (Tatiana Maslany), and the swelling multitude of clones in the Orphan Black universe so dang diverse. Essentially, each week we’ve asked the science questions on the minds of all Orphan Black fans: “Why aren’t these clones identical?” “What gives? Aren’t they...
So far, this series on the science behind Orphan Black has made a number of conclusions, or should I say clone-clusions? To very briefly summarize: (1) it’s hard to make a synthetic genome; (2) it’s harder to make viable clones, even without first synthesizing their genomes; (3) clones can be wildly different from each other...
In a recent a blog post (nature vs. nurture), I outlined how it is that we aren’t much closer to understanding what makes each of the clones of Orphan Black totally unique. Though they sure do look alike, Orphan Black Wikia - Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) is a rebel, Orphan Black Wikia - Alison Hendrix...