In this MIT Technology Review piece by Antonio Regalado, “[a] daring effort is under way to create the first children whose DNA has been tailored using gene editing.”
Like the characters in ANYA, scientists are grappling with the ethics of this breakthrough technology.
Read MoreRuth Padawer’s piece in The New York Times Magazine — “Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t.”— shows “[t]he surge in popularity of services like 23andMe and Ancestry means that more and more people are unearthing long-buried connections and surprises in their ancestry.” With both services offering deep “Black Friday” discounts ($49 and $59 respectively) to encourage holiday gifting, DYI genetics testing is bound to get more popular and to unearth more quandaries like Sigrid’s.
Read MoreGeneticist George Church’s new company, Nebula Genomics, “aims to give people complete control over who gets access to their data, and let individuals decide whether or not to sell the information, and to whom.” (Richard Harris, NPR)
Read MoreDiversity is central to ANYA: on screen, in the crew, and in the story. Article by Thessaly La Force (New York Times)
Read MoreANYA co-creator and anthropologist Carylanna Taylor discusses how genetics, genetic testing, gene-editing, and ethics became central to ANYA’s story and clarifies the line between fact and fiction.
Read MoreMIT Technology Review's Laura Hercher asks one of the most pressing questions of our time: ”Are we designing inequality into our genes?”
Read More“The NHS Genomic Medicine Service is the first national genomic healthcare service in the world and will allow faster diagnosis and personalised care.
The Health and Social Care Secretary has announced an ambition to sequence 5 million genomes in the UK over the next 5 years.
Where relevant, patients will be asked to give consent for their genome data to be securely analysed by approved researchers, who will develop new tests and treatments for cancer and rare diseases.”
Read MoreWe wrapped post-production this month! Thanks to our amazing post team led by Lilah Obregon-Wilson (music), Mike Nuget (color), and Ric Schnupp (sound). Now it's onward to festival applications!
Sign-up for updates on our progress and future screenings.
Director, Jacob Okada, and Supervising Sound Designer, Ric Schnupp, adjust the 5.1 mix of ANYA. Photo by Carylanna Taylor.
After a last minute discovery of a rights conflict, Yang Wang came to the studio to play the erhu, looping improvisations over his on camera subway performance.
Mounting evidence shows that ancient human groups (some once considered different species) not only coexisted, they interbred. (Nature)
Read MoreCarl Zimmer: “Genetic analysis of bones discovered in a Siberian cave hints that the prehistoric world may have been filled with ‘hybrid’ humans.” (New York Times)
“Scientists in China have used a cutting-edge Crispr [gene editing] technique to repair a disease-causing mutation in viable human embryos.” (WIRED)
Read MoreSince we wrapped production last August 2017, Jacob and I have been working in Premiere with proxies (low res versions) of the raw footage. I got used to how it looked and stopped thinking about what it could or should look like. After all, in the edit we were focused on performance and story.
After picture-lock in early June 2018, we began collaborating long distance with Mike Nuget at MayDay Post to color the feature. Imagine my surprise when we saw this color corrected version of a Jackson Heights scene. We’d totally forgotten about the doctor on the truck that happened to park in front of us. The crossed arms couldn’t be more apropos of how DR. SEYMOUR LIVINGSTON (Motell Foster) is feeling in this moment!
In Post-Production, the amazing music supervisor, Lilah Obregon-Wilson, fleshed out ANYA’s sound track with existing music from artists around the world.
See more of Lilah’s work at discochacha.com.
Read MoreWe don’t name it as Crispr, but the plot of ANYA hinges on this cutting edge gene editing technique. Here’s “everything you need to know about how scientists can repurpose a bacterial immune system to alter DNA, making everything from cheap insulin to extra starchy corn” (by Megan Molteni for WIRED).
A beautiful profile by Amy Dockser Marcus on what drives our science advisor, Dr. Ting Wu (Wall Street Journal).
Read More“The number of people who have had their DNA analyzed with direct-to-consumer genetic genealogy tests more than doubled during 2017 and now exceeds 12 million, according to industry estimates. Most of those tested are in the US, suggesting that around 1 in 25 American adults now have access to personal genetic data—a figure that could spur a range of new genetic analysis services. The boom comes amid a price war in which companies offered under-$60 tests and 2-for-1 deals during an end-of-year blitz of advertising and discounts.” (Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review)
Read MoreI got the inkling from hearing about George Church’s company Veritas and meeting business reps at the pgEd Industry Forum and Festival of Genomics that genomics is big business. In this Investors Business Daily article, Alliston Gatlin takes a look at three small biotech companies - Crispr Therapeutics (CRSP), Intellia Therapeutics(NTLA) and Editas Medicine (EDIT)- that recently went public with combined annual sales of less than $50 million and big dreams of curing debilitating disease.
Sam Kulkarni (president of CRISPR Theraputics) says “it's unlikely the market will remain at just three publicly traded biotech companies with CRISPR technology in the long run. The technology is just that remarkable. ‘Once in a lifetime may be a little bit of a stretch, maybe not," he said. "But it's definitely a once in a generation type of advance in the field. […] Here we have the basis of a CRISPR platform to create the next big biotech giants.’”
I'm excited to share that we've finished the first string-out for our original feature ANYA (a.k.a. “Narwhal-American”). The performances and locations are looking great and we can't wait to share the finished film in 2019.
We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but it’s looking more an more like a movie!
ANYA collaborator, Dr. Jeantine E. Lunshof, talks genetics & ethics. (World Post)
Read More“After Asilomar [a 1975 conference to discuss limitations on genetic engineering], the worst fears about genetic engineering did not come true. […] The odds are that human germline editing will develop similarly, having some value as both a research tool and as therapy. And as with genetic engineering, it's become too late to ask whether or not we should edit the human germline; we can now only ask how the experiments will proceed.” (Michael White, The Pacific Standard)
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