INTERVIEW: New PBS documentary looks at history of genetic research
Photo: Calvin Bridges, Alfred Sturtevant and O.L. Mohr work with Thomas Hunt Morgan on his drosophila experiments at Columbia University. Photo courtesy of Archives, California Institute of Technology / Provided by PBS pressroom with permission.
One has to appreciate the simple, yet profound title of the new PBS documentary about the human genome: The Gene: An Intimate History. Enough said, really.
This two-part documentary, airing April 7 and 14 on the network, uses Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book of the same name as a roadmap to understand the complex world of genetics.
For Mukherjee and his fellow executive producer, acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns, the research into this unique science dates back some time. The two collaborated, along with senior producer Barak Goodman and directors Chris Durrance and Jack Youngelson, on a previous PBS miniseries called Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. They learned a lot on that journey, and no doubt viewers took home many important lessons, so they decided to put their collective talents together again for this deep dive into the endlessly interesting subject of genes.
“So The Gene was Sid’s followup book [to Cancer] and therefore our followup series,” Goodman said in a recent phone interview. “We convened the same team. In many ways, it’s a sequel to the Cancer series, but broader. We decided Cancer was a deep dive into that set of diseases, but we wanted to look more deeply, more broadly at what the gene itself is, and the history of it, and the history of discovery around it and how it affects all of us. So it’s a natural sequel to that original project.”
Durrance said the creative team used Mukherjee’s bestselling book as a template. The director finds the doctor is a beautiful writer and that the reporting in the book is so extensive that each lesson is easily understood.
“He’s done so much reporting on all of these stories and tells the history in a way that really brings it to life,” Durrance said. “So that was a starting point for us on the historical side. From that, we took the major milestones in really what is a great detective story that starts off in ancient times with the Greeks and Romans wondering how it is that parents and children resemble each other, what happens, what goes on scientifically to make that happen. That’s a question that isn’t really answered until the 1950s / 1960s when people begin to understand technically how that happens.”
The director said the second aspect of developing this new series was finding stories and anecdotes that could bring the scientific lessons to life. It was important for Durrance and company to find families intimately impacted by genetic disease and also doctors who work on this research almost every day of their professional life.
“That’s where we spent the bulk of our efforts — finding families, finding scientists and doctors who are pursuing not only cutting-edge research, but research that affects lives,” Durrance said. “So we found a young family that we feature in the first part, the Rosens, who have a young daughter with an awful … genetic disease who are in an odyssey to try and find a treatment before it’s too late with a wonderful doctor, Wendy Chung, of Columbia University in New York. We have a young woman with another degenerative disease, spinal muscular atrophy, who is pursuing research in her own disease, and it’s stories like these that we hope will really stick with viewers.”
Going deep into the lessons of the Cancer series and now The Gene series has been enlightening for both Durrance and Goodman. The filmmakers did not consider themselves experts in this subject matter, but they learned as they explored, mimicking the same journey many viewers will take with the content.
“I had the experience of the Cancer series, which gave me a little bit of a working knowledge of how our body works,” said Goodman, who also co-directed the new gerrymandering doc Slay the Dragon with Durrance. “Part of the thrill of doing this for us is the chance to drop into this incredibly fascinating world and to try to learn as much as we can about it. There are limitations for me in just how my brain works. It is so fascinating to come to understand the basics of how genes work and how our bodies work and how when they go wrong just awful things can happen, and particularly at this moment. Yes, there’s a pandemic going on, but more broadly we are in the middle of a revolution in genetics where we are just beginning to really master some of the most intractable diseases that mankind has ever known and really finding practical tools to fight them.”
There is perhaps no other TV project better suited for these troubling times than The Gene. Although these four hours go into many different genetic diseases and scientific research, there are numerous parallels to what the world is facing with the coronavirus pandemic. This might be escapist entertainment that doesn’t exactly offer an escape, but actually a footnote to the constant barrage of news stories about a minuscule thing that is killing thousands of people.
“All of the tools that have been worked on and developed over many years are going to be brought to bear on conquering this tremendous challenge,” Goodman said of the genetics of this historic moment. “It’s been a great moment to be doing this and super-exciting for us to be entering the field.”
Durrance added: “This is coming from someone who never did biology in high school. I gave up science as soon as I could. I did physics and chemistry, no biology ever, and so all of this passed me by at the time. But what’s astonishing about it is when you start talking to the leaders, it’s such a young field that many of them are still around with us. James Watson, who made the seminal breakthrough in the 1950s, is still here and active. … When you talk to them you realize that fundamentally these are detective stories. Fundamentally they are trying to solve a mystery. Fundamentally they are intensely and unremittingly curious people looking at the world around them and trying to understand how it works, why the body does this, why the body does that.”
Durrance said he is fascinated by the many pioneers highlighted in the film who made it their personal quest to dig, dig, dig for answers to seemingly simple questions: Why does my child have a certain eye color? Why do several family members have similar health problems?
“It was a question of finding the people who could explain that most lucidly and most clearly,” Durrance said. “It wasn’t really a question of having to dumb anything down, but pulling, distilling these stories to their essence because when they are presented like that, they are, I find anyway, intrinsically exciting stories. Almost every case is this race against time to try to crack a mystery. There really was a bonanza for us, and the difficult thing was picking and choosing from the myriad of stories out there.”
Goodman, as senior producer, recognized that some of the scientific lessons can be over the head for a lay audience. Plus, The Gene needs to be engaging enough to compete with other television in the 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. hours. It’s perhaps not entertainment, but it needs to be interesting — otherwise, click, next channel.
“Watching these series is an education,” Goodman said. “What you know at the end is so much more than what you know at the beginning, and you can build on that knowledge as the viewer goes through. They’re not conscious of being taught, but that’s really what’s happening. So when we make the film, we’re able to lay on more and more complex ideas as we go because we know that along the way people are learning. That is a challenge. How much complexity can people handle at any given moment in the film and make sure they are not conscious of this because we want them to enjoy it. We want them to be caught up in the drama of the stories, in the human drama. We don’t want them to think that they’re sitting in a classroom, but in essence that’s what’s happening. They’re learning a great deal as they go.”
There are large existential questions asked in The Gene as well. Much research into genetics runs into ethical considerations about doctors playing god and parents selecting the perfect baby. This has led to interesting and occasionally uncomfortable questions about how far is too far.
That said, both Goodman and Durrance are excited and hopeful about the future of genetic research, but they never want the industry to lose its caution as well.
“As the series shows, throughout our history, every time there is one of these leaps forward, it’s shadowed by these dangerous excesses that go along with it,” Goodman said. “They inevitably accompany each other. The hope and the caution go hand in hand, but I’m an optimist by nature. I think if you look at the history of this, and if you look into the future, you have to be pretty excited about where we are and where we’re going.”
Durrance concurred with these assessments, pointing out the many diseases, such as diabetes, that have plagued the world, but have also been counteracted by sound genetic research.
“You look at diseases all around us — you look at diabetes, you look at cancer — and we’re able to understand them thanks to genetics in a way that we never could before,” Durrance said. “Before these were black boxes. Where a disease has a genetic underpinning, and that’s many diseases, doctors can now look at them scientifically. They can now look at them rationally and say, OK, this is what is going wrong. It gives them insights into how to treat them and how to potentially cure them. That literally didn’t exist before. It was like people were operating in the dark before, and now at least they have a roadmap.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Gene, executive produced by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee and Ken Burns, is directed by Chris Durrance and Jack Youngelson. Barak Goodman serves as senior producer. The two-part special airs April 7 and 14 at 8 p.m. on PBS. Click here for more information.
