"You don't own us." - Sarah Manning

The Hive Observations, Unexpected Results, and Mind-Benders

Season Two Storm Wonder how we timed the teaser rainstorm? It's fake! We had two blocks of SFX rigged rain, plus the help of our VFX team, and ta-da Sarah’s alone, stranded, and at her wits end in a rainstorm. It took two days to shoot the entire diner scene, so wardrobe assistant Peter Webster had quite the job making sure Tatiana looked drenched on camera, but was warm between takes.

"Fee, they took Kira and Mrs. S!" - Sarah Manning

Sarah's Breakout Breakdown The bathroom and the Diner are in two different sets. In order to capture Sarah escaping from the bathroom the art department built an entire bathroom set in our studio, a fake wall for the Diner’s backdoor. They had to build seven different test walls until we could find the one that was breakable and also realistic looking. Breaking out of that bathroom was quite an ordeal!

Proclone Style Check Love Rachel Duncan's lip color? According to the Orphan Black makeup department Rachel wears a lip gloss by Hourglass.

“What are you wearing?!” – Alison Hendrix

Felix Style Check The assless chaps were Jordan and John’s conception. "I'm very sorry that I made that suggestion to a very eager John Fawcett on a plane right to San Diego," Jordan explains. "I was really inspired by the '80s for Felix's character and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be fun to resurrect some of the fetishes in gay clubs and just because we can?' We should because we're representing that community. As we said before, '#CloneClub: All are welcome' and I think that is reflected in our characters—all are welcome. Interesting wardrobe choices and all." (via eonline.com)

“You know a gun dealer named Ramon?“ – Felix Dawkins “He’s a gun enthusiast. He has many jobs. He is very hard-working.” – Alison Hendrix

Casting Call: Ramon Ramon was one of our favorite characters from season two. The actor, Alex Ozerov, brought so much humor to the character. The improv Tatiana and Alex did on set had the whole crew howling. John and Graeme wanted a Jesse-like character from Breaking Bad, and when the name Ramon came into play we all knew this character was going to be hilarious. The deco’s on Ramon’s car are all done by hand with a sharpie. THE ENTIRE CAR IS COVERED. Multilingual ProClone Yes, Tatiana learned some German for Rachel – what can’t Tatiana do? We’ve always said that Rachel went to a prestigious boarding school across the pond and that she most likely knows a handful of languages. Casting Doubles We had to bring in four or five actresses to meet Tatiana to make sure that the gag with Daniel in the skate park would work perfectly. “Can I touch your boob?” – Boy on the bus Graeme and John argued over this character’s dialogue for a long time. Ultimately, John’s favorite line of the season made it into the show. On Set: DYAD Institute We found the perfect exterior DYAD building in BridgePoint, a brand new hospital in downtown Toronto. The older part of the building is actually an old jail that has been repurposed to house the administrative offices for the hospital. It is perfect because the DYAD Institute has been around for a long time – the first building blocks set in 1918 according to Leekie, but is ever growing and expanding. The BridgePoint building marries the old and the new, just like the DYAD Institute. Blood Ties: The Musical Part of John and Graeme’s vision this season was to have Alison in a musical. It was an Orphan Black must. However, finding the right musical proved difficult. Luckily, our assistant Mackenzie had just worked on Blood Ties and brought it to the table. Although it wasn’t Grease, when we all heard Blood Ties for the first time, we knew it was the perfect mirror for Alison’s troubles – MURDER. Plus it was campy and catchy as hell. Other than Sarah Stubbs, the director, and Alison, the actors in the musical were cast because they had all been in the show before. In fact, the piano player and the blonde Kelsey, Anika Johnson and Barbara Johnston respectively, are the creators of the show. They had all just come back from performing Blood Ties at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and had a blast adapting and performing the show on Orphan Black. In the scenes of rehearsals of Alison's play, Tatiana's singing was recorded live for authenticity even though she was prerecorded for safety. The ensemble was also live, although the piano was not. In both cases, Tatiana and the ensemble wear earbuds to hear the piano playback. If they show on-camera, visual effects paint them out. Stay tuned for more of the musical in coming episodes! Chakra Talk The Hive had fun with detectives Grigson and Diaz (originally Grigson and Chow until we found the actor Carlos Diaz). Although small characters, they are a nice throw to the policing world. Hopefully someday they’ll be back to talk chakras once again.

“Are you making fun of me? I made that!” - Alison

House of Handmade Cards The art department made eight different versions of Alison’s handmade card, by hand. Tatiana actually signed all eight in Alison’s handwriting and wrote different messages to Sarah in each. Eventually, John picked with biggest writing so the camera could see it, but eventually edited out the insert. John and Graeme Hitchock? John and Graeme have a wicked cameo at the DYAD rooftop party. Did you catch it? After the Party is the... The rooftop party could have easily been an indoor lobby party. We shot it in late October and it was supposed to snow. Luckily the wind died down and it was above freezing so we went ahead. High Art We were really excited to build Art an apartment this season. Seeing into someone’s home gives you so much more of an insight into who they really are. For instance, if you look around Art’s you’ll see that he loves to cook and only with the finest tools. He loves football, he has kids that live with their mother (the pictures the Art department used are actually the actor Kevin Hanchard’s children), and that he has a workingman’s pet – a fish! Buckle Up The wardrobe and art departments came together to design the Prolethean fish belts. They had nine of them cast from the mold they designed. They are coveted items around set – everyone wants one.

NEXT: A Brief History of Cloning

A Brief History of Cloning By Cosima Herter, Series Science Consultant

“…when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded…” Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, 1620 One of the first recorded instances of the term "genetic engineering" appeared in a paper delivered in 1932 at the Sixth International Congress of Genetics. It referred quite simply to "the application of genetic principles to animal and plant breeding." ^[1] It's uncertain whether the author had, at that time, any intention of linking the term with the all-too-contentious idea of "improving" humans through the principles of eugenics. But by the 1960s, in an attempt to avoid association with “the ominous, germ-line perceptions of the term ‘human genetic engineering,'" "genetic engineering" was replaced with “gene therapy,” which harkened to a less dubious practice of turning genetic principles towards the treatment of human disease. Oncologist Waclaw Szybalski, whose mammalian gene transfer experiments were some of the earliest performed, recalled that "in 1962-1964, we coined the terms 'gene surgery' and 'gene therapy' to stress the clinical potential of our work, but there was little interest in our results (except among poultry breeders)." ^[2] Nevertheless, by the 1970s, gene therapy found a firm foothold within the pharmaceutical tradition. By fusing pharmacotherapeutic principles with genetics, gene therapy became, at least in principle, a promising way to use polynucleotides to clinically treat disease. "If one considers the purpose of a drug to be to restore the normal function of some particular process in the body," wrote former professor of pharmacology H. V. Aposhian in 1970, "then DNA would be considered to be the ultimate drug." ^[3] Of course most of us are familiar (and many of us quite comfortable) with an earlier, prototypical form of gene therapy: long before the term was coined (and found currency amongst geneticists and clinical practitioners), the wider public already had experience with the use of vaccines. Insofar as bodies are permanently modified by attenuated viruses, vaccination could be considered a kind of gene therapy. ^[4] By the 1970s, with the increasing sophistication in cloning techniques, the advent of recombinant DNA, and the successful production of effective viral vectors, the fearful cries over genetic engineering pertaining to humans once again sounded sirens that continue to be heard today. In 1973 the first animal gene was cloned. ^[5] That was also the year that recombinant DNA became a functional reality when the first “directed insertion of foreign DNA in a host microorganism” was successfully performed. ^[6] Almost immediately there was a public outcry against the potential hazards of creating new self-propagating organisms—in this case, an engineered derivative of Escherichia coli which naturally occurs as part of the human intestinal flora. So concerned were the scientists themselves about the unknown perils that these engineered organisms posed if they escaped into the wild, that they publicly implored others to halt further research on recombinant DNA until the dangers could be properly assessed. They collectively agreed to a self-imposed moratorium. ^[7] In 1975 Paul Berg (one of the biochemists involved) and more than a hundred others met in Asilomar, CA, to draw up NIH (National Institutes of Health) guidelines by which recombinant DNA research could proceed; and, shortly thereafter, proceed it did. These guidelines, however, certainly did not dispel all public (or scientific) anxiety. In 1976, the Cambridge, MA, city council organized a town hall meeting which ultimately ended with the city council imposing a moratorium on all recombinant DNA research within its municipal limits (including the major research institutions that fell within the city’s boundaries). This lasted for six months until, in 1977, the city council passed an ordinance regulating recombinant DNA research—the first ever ordinance of this kind in the United States.^[8] The products of recombinant DNA are now so prevalent that most of us hardly recognize how ubiquitous they are. While recombinant DNA was cutting-edge bioscience in the 1970s, cloning—like the term genetic engineering—was nothing new. Indeed, the idea and the term can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece. Clonos is the Greek word for "twig," and describes the familiar process of creating new trees—not from seed, but from the twig of an adult tree. ^[9] In 1952 biologists Robert Briggs and Thomas King demonstrated that by transferring blastula-cell nuclei into frogs’ eggs, they could direct the development of a complete tadpole. It was the first instance of a cloned animal—the leopard frog, Rana pipiens—by nuclear transfer in embryonic cells. ^[10] Within 10 years, developmental biologist John Gurdon and embryologist Robert McKinnell extended the work of Briggs and King when they "obtained adult nuclear transplants of Xenopus laevis [African clawed frog] and Rana pipiens, respectively, that produced normal progeny." ^[11] Over the next 30 years scientists experimented with improving these pioneering techniques. 1983 heralded the first confirmation that experimentation with nuclear-transfer techniques was successful in mice. Nearly 15 years later, Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell famously extended these techniques, and cloned the first mammal using the nucleus of an adult somatic cell: in 1996, Dolly the sheep was born. She died in 2003. Of course, we are all familiar now with the wildfire of debates regarding the ethical, legal, religious, and political issues sparked by the birth of Dolly. Immediately the public was whipped into a frenzy of fear (and, for some, excitement) regarding the potentials for human cloning. The ethical hazards, in particular, were forcefully articulated by the bioethicist Leon Kass when he famously (or, to some, infamously) penned, “The Wisdom of Repugnance” in 1997, wherein he summarized the “perversities of cloning.” To list but a few: the loss of human dignity; the degradation of the traditional family structure; the loss of individual identity; damage to the mother or the child’s body; the inability of the cloned child to give consent to being an experiment (how this is any different from a traditionally conceived child is still unclear to me); the disruption of the "soul-enhancing power of sexuality [towards the aim of procreation];" the very vanity and hubris in the desire to create a perceived identical copy of oneself or one’s beloved. ^[12] "The severing of procreation from sex, love and intimacy,” he wrote, “is inherently dehumanizing, no matter how good the product." ^[13] Rather cynically Kass explained:

Cloning turns out to be the perfect embodiment of the ruling opinions of our new age. Thanks to the sexual revolution, we are able to deny in practice, and increasingly in thought, the inherent procreative teleology of sexuality itself. […] Thanks to feminism and the gay rights movement, we are increasingly encouraged to treat the natural heterosexual difference and its preeminence as a matter of "cultural construction." […] Thanks to the prominence and acceptability of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, stable, monogamous marriage as the ideal home for procreation is no longer the agreed-upon cultural norm. […] Thanks to our belief that all children should be wanted children … sooner of later only those children who fulfill our wants will be fully acceptable. […] Thanks to modern notions of individualism and the rate of cultural change, we see ourselves not as linked to ancestors and defined by traditions, but as projects for our own self-creation. […] self-cloning is simply an extension of such rootless and narcissistic self-re-creation.^[14]

While it isn’t my aim here to adjudicate between any of these positions and the innumerable rebuttals that have been asserted against them, it’s important to take note that these form the bulk of the evidence Kass, who came to be known as the “president’s philosopher,” advanced in support of the Congressional moratorium on cloning and stem cell research in the United States. Of course, Kass is hardly an outlier, and iterations of these very same arguments about human cloning have been publically circulating amongst scholars and scientists since at least the 1960s—especially among geneticists themselves—when molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg published an article in The Washington Post titled, “The Genetics of Human Nature” in 1966 (to which Kass publically responded in a letter to the editor). For the next five years, Lederberg continued to write a regular weekly column in the Post on science and society, advancing his views and stimulating public debate on cloning, reproductive technologies, genetic engineering, and eugenics. One interesting aspect in the ‘cloning-debates’ is the seemingly omnipresent view pertaining to the idea that human cloning would allow us, someday, to create perfect, identical copies of ourselves; or, for that matter, any other historical person we wanted if only we could get a sample of their DNA. Cloning, in Kass’s mind, is "inherently despotic." It "seeks to make one's own children (or someone else’s children) after one's own image (or the image of one’s choosing) and their future according to one’s will." ^[15] But as evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin reminds us, "much of the motivation for human cloning and many of the ethical dilemmas that are said to be raised by cloning rest on the mistaken synecdoche that substitutes 'gene' for 'person.'" ^[16] We are more than our genes, more than our environments, more than the traditions and conventions that we are raised in, more than the desires of our parents—whoever and however many there might be. We are more than the sum of our parts. In the same way that identical twins (which are essentially clones, albeit ones split from the same fertilized egg which develop together in the womb) are not actually identical, neither would genetically engineered clones be exact replicas of each other—physically or psychologically. That human clones could be designed to share the same genes (with or without any other kind of engineered interference in hopes towards producing particular traits) does not, in any way, determine that they would become the “same” person. Cloning in and of itself does not produce interchangeable identities. If I were to meet a genetically cloned copy of myself, she’d be no more a perfect Xerox copy of me than the fictional Cosima Niehaus is. While nobody doubts that genes play an undeniable role in the identity of a person, they do not determine who or what that person will become as they grow and develop throughout their lifetime. "The fallacy of genetic determinism," argued Lewontin, "is to suppose that the genes make the organism." ^[17] No matter how much we might attempt to manipulate genetic material, genetic engineering can only accomplish so much in the overall development of an organism. And while this may allay some of the paranoid fantasies of freshly cloned Hitlers or the like running amok, it also rightly grounds many of the fears regarding genetically modified plants and animals engineered for human consumption, and genetically engineered organisms (like viruses) to be used towards clinical gene therapy. But that tale is best left for another episode… ____________________ ^[1]↩ James F. Crow, “Sixty Years Ago: The 1932 International Congress of Genetics.” In Genetics, 131: 761-768 (August, 1992), p.767.  Incidentally, 1932 was also the year that Brave New World was first published.  Aldous Huxley – grandson of Darwin’s ‘bulldog,’ T.H. Huxley, and brother of evolutionary biologist & eugenicist, Julian Huxley – was, of course, well versed intellectually with notions (and fears) of genetic engineering before they were so named.  I am not suggesting that Huxley had any knowledge of the papers delivered at the Congress of Genetics in Ithica, NY that year (not to mention that his novel had been written over a year earlier); however, it’s worth noting the various ways that ideas of genetic manipulation (not just in plants and animals, but insofar as how it was associated with “social engineering” – especially in the USSR) found form in the public consciousness – provoking varying degrees of both hopefulness and fearfulness. ^[2]↩ Jon A. Wolff and Joshua Lederberg, “An Early History of Gene Transfer and Therapy,” in Human Gene Therapy, 5:469-480 (1994), p. 470.   Also see Bernard Davis, “Prospects for Genetic Intervention in Man.” Science, 170:3964 (December 18, 1970), 1279-1283, p. 1283, fn. 2 referring to Lederberg’s letter to the editor, New York Times, Sept. 26, 1970. ^[3]↩H. V. Aposhian, “The use of DNA for gene therapy – the need, experimental approach, and implications.” In Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 14, 987-108.  Quoted in Wolff and Lederberg, p.471. ^[4]↩Wolff and Lederberg, p. 473. ^[5]↩For information on the first cloned animal gene see: National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health: http://www.genome.gov/25520303. ^[6]↩1972, Stanford biochemist, Paul Berg, was among the first to produce a recombinant DNA molecule, but the first successful insertion of foreign DNA was in 1973.  See: Jackson D.A., Symons R.H., Berg P. “Biochemical method for inserting new genetic information into DNA of Simian Virus 40: circular SV40 DNA molecules containing lambda phage genes and the galactose operon of Escherichia coli.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 69(10): 2904-9 (1972). ^[7]↩Berg P., Baltimore D., Boyer H.W., Cohen S.N., Davis R.W., Hogness D.S., Nathans D., Roblin R., Watson J.D., Weissman S., Zinder N.D. Letter: Potential biohazards of recombinant DNA molecules. Science, 185(148):303 (1974). ^[8]↩For a remarkable video recording of the Cambridge, MA city council meeting on the dangers of recombinant DNA research, see: http://video.mit.edu/watch/hypothetical-risk-cambridge-city-councils-hearings-on-recombinant-dna-research-1976-7192/.  An incredible instance of town-hall democracy amongst citizens, scientists, and politicians in action! ^[9]↩A.A. Diamandopoulos and P.C. Goudas, “Cloning’s not a new idea: the Greeks had a word for it centuries ago.” In Nature, 408 (December 21, 2000), p.905. ^[10]↩Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King, “Transplantation of Living Nuclei from Blastula Cells into Enucleated Frogs’ Eggs.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 38:5 (May 15, 1952), 455-463. ^[11]↩Marie Di Berardino, “Animal Cloning – the route to new genomics in agriculture and medicine.” Differentiation 68 (2001) 67-83, p.69.  emphasis added. Also for an extended discussion of this history, see: Marie Di Berardino, Genomic Potential of Differentiated Cells. Columbia University Press: New York, 1997. See, in particular, chapter 3, “The “Fantastical” Experiment in the Metazoan Frog.”  For a wonderful interview with Robert McKinnell about his work, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0nqR8MELA0. ^[12]↩Leon Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” The New Republic. (June 2, 1997), 17-26.  Concomitant with the issues surrounding human cloning are an even more complex imbroglio regarding embryonic stem cell research.  Neither set of debates seem to have yielded much resolve. ^[13]↩Kass, p.22. ^[14]↩Kass, p.18. Italics in original. ^[15]↩Kass, 24. ^[16]↩Richard Lewontin, “Cloning and the Fallacy of Biological Determinism.” in Human Cloning: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy. Edited by Barbara MacKinnon. University of Illinois Press, 2000, p.37. ^[17]↩Richard Lewontin. “Cloning and the Fallacy of Biological Determinism.” in Human Cloning: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy. Edited by Barbara MacKinnon. University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 38.

NEXT: Wet Lab and Library

The Hive Wet Lab and Library

James F. Crow, “Sixty Years Ago: The 1932 International Congress of Genetics.” In Genetics, 131: 761-768 (August, 1992) Jon A. Wolff and Joshua Lederberg, “An Early History of Gene Transfer and Therapy,” in Human Gene Therapy, 5:469-480 (1994) Jackson D.A., Symons R.H., Berg P. “Biochemical method for inserting new genetic information into DNA of Simian Virus 40: circular SV40 DNA molecules containing lambda phage genes and the galactose operon of Escherichia coli.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 69(10): 2904-9 (1972) Berg P., Baltimore D., Boyer H.W., Cohen S.N., Davis R.W., Hogness D.S., Nathans D., Roblin R., Watson J.D., Weissman S., Zinder N.D. Letter: Potential biohazards of recombinant DNA molecules. Science, 185(148):303 (1974). For a remarkable video recording of the Cambridge, MA city council meeting on the dangers of recombinant DNA research, see: http://video.mit.edu/watch/hypothetical-risk-cambridge-city-councils-hearings-on-recombinant-dna-research-1976-7192/ One of the REAL Cosima’s favorite science blogs by a great historian of science at Johns Hopkins University – this blog contains interesting, subject matter relevant to topics explored in Orphan Black! http://genotopia.scienceblog.com/ Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King, “Transplantation of Living Nuclei from Blastula Cells into Enucleated Frogs’ Eggs.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 38:5 (May 15, 1952), 455-463. For an extended discussion of this history, see: Marie Di Berardino, Genomic Potential of Differentiated Cells. Columbia University Press: New York, 1997. See, in particular, chapter 3, “The “Fantastical” Experiment in the Metazoan Frog.”  For a wonderful interview with Robert McKinnell about his work, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0nqR8MELA0 Leon Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” The New Republic. (June 2, 1997), 17-26.  Concomitant with the issues surrounding human cloning are an even more complex imbroglio regarding embryonic stem cell research.  Neither set of debates seem to have yielded much resolve.