Gattaca

At the end of the CTY Genetics class, we watched Gattaca.  The premise of this movie is that a natural-born, genetically flawed individual is born into a society that is near-perfect with genetic engineering, and DNA samples are used to identify every individual and to place them into social/economic classes (e.g. working as a janitor vs. being an astronaut).  These samples are used as the sole basis for jobs, and the life of the person is “known” at birth by looking at the DNA samples.  Go read the Wikipedia page for a more comprehensive plot.

Gattaca has a really interesting set design and lighting–the people, not the technology, are focused on.  It has a stark feel, with everything given a sterile look.  If you gey a chance to watch it, you definitely should.

CTY Jokes

Okay, I’ll start about my CTY experience with a few pick-up line jokes I learned at CTY.

1. Relating to genetics (especially DNA replication and transcription): “I wish I were a helicase so that I could unzip your genes!”

2. On the idea of bacterial pan-genomes: “Hey, baby.  I see you have a large peripheral genome.  Do you want to do some horizontal gene transfer?”

3. On lateral gene transfer: “I noticed that your serotype resembles mine and you lack an F-plasmid.  Let’s conjugate!” (Corollary: some joke about “my f-factor being longer than yours”)

4. On Ultimate Frisbee: “You be a cherry-picker.  I’ll hammer it into your end-zone!”