Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Unnatural Selection’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About The Ethics And Ease Of Editing DNA

With everything you’ve been hearing about genetic engineering over the years, starting with the idea of genetically-modified fruits and vegetables all the way through gene editing in humans, you’ve heard a lot about why it shouldn’t be done. But what are the positives? And what might happen if gene editing goes mainstream and available to (gulp) everyone? A new Netflix docuseries examines that issue.

UNNATURAL SELECTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: At night, we see a large cage full of barking dogs, likely pit bulls. The location is Mendenhall, Mississippi.

The Gist: The dogs are owned by Paul Ishee, an oil field tech who breeds dogs on the side. He collects sperm from the dogs (in just the way you’d expect) because he wants to genetically engineer a better dog. How does he do that? Via CRISPR, a small protein that can be injected via a bacteria into an organism to edit its DNA. One of the big features with CRISPR, which was perfected only a few years ago, is that the protein is easily obtainable. So genetic modifications can be done in expensive labs by trained scientists or by biohackers in their garages.

Unnatural Selection, a docuseries produced and directed by Leeor Kaufman and Joe Egender, examines the new frontier of genetic engineering, and what ethical stumbling blocks there are to adapting gene editing on a wider basis.

The filmmakers interview a mixture of scientists and biohackers, some of whom are both. Dr. Jennifer Doudna, widely regarded as the inventor of the CRISPR method, seems to be in the middle of the debate; she knows how powerful using CRISPR can be when it comes to curing genetic-based diseases and other conditions, but is wary of people who want to use it to engineer superior organisms. Biohackers like Dr. Josiah Zayner, a biophysicist who used to work for NASA, is in favor of the democratization of genetic engineering, sending $140 CRISPR kits to people via Priority Mail. One of those people is Ishee, who wants to make a glowing dog as his first experiment, just to prove that the engineering worked.

Others, such as Dr. Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary engineer at MIT, want to put genetic engineering into practice by modifying mice to be immune to the bite of Lyme-carrying ticks and then releasing them to breed on a small island in Martha’s Vineyard. What will the consequences of that be? Even Esvelt really doesn’t know for sure. And that’s the problem, and where the ethical issues take hold. Sending genetically modified mice, dogs, or humans into the world may introduce unintended consequences, or might be deadly in the wrong hands. But are people who think it’s dangerous just being alarmist?

Our Take: Genetic engineering and all of its advantages and ethical quandaries is a complex topic to cover, and in the first part of their four-part docuseries, Kaufman and Egender try to lay out the issue in as balanced a way as possible. But what we got during the feature-length (70-minute) first episode was more of a sense of fear than one of wonder.

Why? Because, while the filmmakers are giving biohackers like Ishee and Dr. Zayner as much time as the more legit scientists, it doesn’t help matters when you see Dr. Zayner concocting CRISPR samples in his kitchen or see Ishee looking at YouTube videos of glowing mice and luminescent monkeys for inspiration.

Both of them, while highly intelligent, start to sound like extremists at a certain point, especially Zayner, who is determined to make the CRISPR technology available to everyone, not just governments or huge corporations. Watching multiple scenes of Ishee “collecting” samples from his horny dogs in what looks like a militia compound didn’t exactly instill us full of confidence that letting everyone have the ability to genetically engineer animals, including humans, won’t result in mass extinction. Yet we’re also not all that encouraged by the scientists at the Salk institute making a chicken embryo grow an extra leg, either.

But then we see Jackson Kennedy, a boy from New Jersey who is autistic and was born with poor vision, and we become hopeful again. His parents got genetic testing for him that showed that he’s missing a gene that would help him see. And he’s going to go for treatment that fixes that gene, which should restore his sight if it works. This is where genetic engineering could make a huge positive impact on the world. But, whether the filmmakers intended it this way or not, there seems to be a whole lot scarier ways the use of CRISPR could go haywire, which makes us as cautious as the anti-engineering activists they interview for the first episode.

Parting Shot: We see Jackson right before he goes in for the procedure, excited at the prospect that he might see more than just shapes for the first time.

Sleeper Star: When Jackson’s mother talked about how he wanted to be an astronaut and how heartbroken he was when he heard that astronauts need 20-20 vision, it almost broke our hearts. While his story will be a through-line through the limited series, we’re disappointed that there isn’t a documentary just about him.

Most Pilot-y Line: There are actually two scenes of Ishee collecting sperm from his dogs. Yuck.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re wondering how much of what we’re going to see during the rest of Unnatural Selection will be more crackpots and less of the positive stuff like Jackson’s treatment. If it’s the former, we’d likely end up skipping it.

Your Call:

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, FastCompany.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Unnatural Selection On Netflix