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...
Season 2 of Orphan Black left us with a couple of doozies. First and foremost, we found there is But we also found out that the scholarly clone Orphan Black Wikia - Cosima Niehaus (Tatiana Maslany) is perhaps . Luckily, Cosima is a biologist currently working from inside the maligned Dyad Institute so at least...
The third season of BBC America’s critically acclaimed Orphan Black picked up right where it left off. Once again the defiant Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), brainy Cosima Niehaus (Tatiana Maslany), and straight-laced Alison Hendrix (also, somehow, Tatiana Maslany) are cascading through the Orphan Black universe as technologically impossible clones (as discussed in two previous blog...
Last time we learned that modern synthetic biology is still (thankfully?) years away from synthesizing human genomes. But I also hinted that the challenge of writing a genome from scratch wasn’t the only thing preventing the Dyad Institute from dominating the world with an army of clones. In episode 6 of season two, To Hound...