#Andromeda strain movie rhesus monkey skin#
What the Vacantis and colleagues actually did was form a biodegradable polymer into the shape of a human ear, seed it with cow cartilage cells (bovine chondrocytes), and implant it under the skin of the experimental mice 1.
He apparently didn't pay much attention to the story attached with the picture, though, because the experiment had absolutely nothing to do with genetic engineering. It's no wonder that it caught Natali's attention. Back in 1997 their photo of a mouse with a human ear-shaped growth on its back made a splash in the popular media. The experiment that Natali is remembering is probably the work of Joseph and Charles Vacanti of the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. It was such a crazy, shocking weird image that I was inspired to write a story about genetic splicing. It actually was a plastic armature under a kind of skin that could be grafted onto human beings. Why splice? Because years ago there was this thing I saw a photo of, its called (something)mouse, it was, by all appearances, a human ear on its back. Natali also mentioned the real science that was his inspiration for the movie: On some level, the movie is about deciding to have a family, and what you do with becoming a parent, so it had to be about young people so Clive and Elsa are sort of, as rock and roll geneticists, are ill equipped to become parents, and that’s what makes it exciting to watch them have a mutant kid. It just seemed like the appropriate thing. I’m sure that that is happening currently in the bio-technology field as well. A lot of really young people do computer programming, they deal with really sophisticated technology, really sophisticated hardware. I sort of saw it as the natural evolution of whats happening with computer programming. Nelson Cabral of interviewed Natali, whose description of the main characters makes them sound a bit like computer hackers: Named "Dren", the creature rapidly develops from a deformed female infant into a beautiful but dangerous winged human-chimera, who forges a bond with both of her creators - only to have that bond turn deadly. Producer Guillermo Del Toro and Director/Writer Vincenzo Natali's latest movie is Splice, which stars Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as a pair of molecular biologists with more ambition than sense.Įlsa and Clive, two young rebellious scientists, defy legal and ethical boundaries and forge ahead with a dangerous experiment: splicing together human and animal DNA to create a new organism. Hopefully they'll release some promotional images soon. She also points out that Guillermo Del Toro is the executive producer and that Steve Hoban of Copperheart Entertainment is the producer. You can see the images at Ain't it Cool News. Update: The publicist for Splice has asked me to take the promo image down, so I have.