Genetics and film: A short history 21/3/06. By Michael Clark Like buses; you wait for ages, then dozens come at once.

At the beginning of the 20th century, only five years separate the Lumière Brothers' first public cinematic projection in 1895 from the rediscovery of Mendel's laws in 1900, while at the beginning of the 21st century, the publication of the first 'working draft' of the human genome in February 2001 was followed barely a year later by the release of the first Hollywood blockbuster movie to be shot entirely in High Definition Digital Panavision – appropriately enough, George Lucas's Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002).

The history of the cinema thus occupies almost exactly the same timeframe as the rise of modern genetics and genomics, yet genetics-based themes and subject matter have only really caught the imaginations of filmmakers and cinema-goers during the past 25-30 years.

Admittedly, plant and animal genetics had long been a familiar theme in natural history films, from at least the 1920s onwards, while eugenic ideas had also begun to appear in both public health films and fiction film dramas such as A Bill of Divorcement (1932), Katherine Hepburn's first starring role, from the 1910s onwards [see note 1 ].

Film review: A Bill of Divorcement

But despite the publicity surrounding the discovery of the biochemical structure and function of DNA in 1953, the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins in 1962, and the publication of Watson's book 'The Double Helix' in 1968, genetics and its applications to biotechnology and medicine featured only very occasionally in British and American popular cinema before 1980.

Book review: The Double Helix

Until the 1980s, the rise of modern genetics seems to have held little interest for mainstream filmmakers and screenwriters. By comparison with, for example, space and time travel, the creation of artificial life-forms, organ transplantation, brain surgery and the unforeseen effects of atomic radiation, genetics and gene manipulation are scarcely to be found in major English-language films of the 1950s and 1960s, and during this period genetic themes and motifs were largely confined to low-budget sci-fi and horror movies [see note 2 ].

The Boys from Brazil (1978) was perhaps the first major English-language fiction film seriously to address some of the implications of recent advances in genetics and assisted reproduction technology, while Michael Jackson's docudrama Life Story: A Double Helix (1987), made for BBC Television's 'Horizon' strand, remains to date the only major film dramatisation to be based on the momentous discoveries of 1951-53.

However, since the 1980s there has been an explosion in the number of major Hollywood and other English-language fiction films in which genetic themes figure prominently. Thus, as a very rough guide, out of 20 English-language movie titles generated by a keyword search of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for 'genetics', all but two have been released since 1985. A similar search for 'genetic engineering' yields only nine titles out of 46 released before 1985; for 'gene manipulation', only six titles out of 31; and for 'cloning', five out of 37. Similar searches for 'genetic experimentation' and 'DNA' yield no indexed titles released before 1985 [see note 3 ].

At the same time as this sudden rapid growth in the number of English-language fiction films with genetic themes, the whole media and public profile of genetics in film has been raised to new heights. Somewhat improbably, the James Bond franchise may be said to have led the way in this regard, with the key role ascribed to eugenics in the plot of Moonraker (1979), but the real breakthrough for genetics in film came with Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), which not only enjoyed great commercial success and critical acclaim but also attracted enormous public interest not just in dinosaurs but in the whole subject of genetic engineering and cloning technology.

By this time, genetics was attracting serious attention from some of the best-known and most influential producers, directors, actors and screenwriters in English-language cinema, including Steven Spielberg, David Cronenberg, Richard Attenborough, Michael Crichton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jeff Goldblum and Uma Thurman. Hollywood was not slow to appreciate the commercial potential for exploiting the sudden upsurge in public interest in, and concern about, genetics and genetic engineering consequent upon the rapid advance of the international Human Genome Project; and the second half of the 1990s saw the release of a whole series of films featuring genetic themes, including Species (1995), Gattaca (1997), The Sixth Day (2000) and, of course, the two Jurassic Park sequels of 1997 and 2001 [see note 4 ].

Film review: Gattaca

Film review: The Sixth Day

With Jurassic Park and its sequels, genetics in film was becoming big business. Until the release of Titanic (1997), Jurassic Park was, after Star Wars (1977) and ET (1983), the third largest grossing movie in the history of the cinema, earning an estimated $357 million on cinema admissions in the USA alone. Even its much-criticised sequel, Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997), earned more than $229 million from cinema admissions in the USA and recovered its estimated $72 million costs ($9 million more than for its predecessor) within two days of its general release [see note 5 ].

Much of the extraordinary public interest in 'Jurassic Park' focused on its Oscar-winning computer-generated special effects, based on some of the latest findings in palaeontology and biolocomotion, but other recent films with genetic themes have also provided more reflective film goers with much food for thought. In particular, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), although a commercial failure at the time of its original release, has subsequently become one of the most widely discussed, minutely analysed and culturally influential movies in the history of the cinema, especially since the release of the so-called 'director's cut' in 1991, while Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), although only a very modest box-office earner for Columbia Pictures, has also been acclaimed as one of the most intellectually and artistically accomplished films of the 1990s.

Not every recent film with an important genetic theme has enjoyed such critical or commercial success. Nick Hamm's Godsend (2004) was widely regarded as a low point in the career of Robert De Niro, unhappily cast as a maverick doctor willing to provide a cloned replacement for a dead child, while Michael Bay's The Island (2005), starring Ewan MacGregor and Scarlett Johansson, seems likely to be the most spectacular box-office failure of 2005, having recouped less than a third of its $122 million budget six weeks after its worldwide release.

But although no movie with genetic themes released in this decade has managed to rival the success of Jurassic Park and its sequels in the 1990s, continued public fascination with the 'new genetics' and concerns about the implications of genetic engineering and cloning technology seem likely to provide screenwriters and directors with rich sources of inspiration and thematic material for years to come. Indeed, even as this essay was being written, news came that Peter Bogdanovich is to direct 'The Broken Code', a new dramatisation of the controversial events surrounding the discovery of the structure of DNA, starring Rachel Weisz in the role of Rosalind Franklin [see note 6 ].

Clearly, the movie-making potential not only of the social and cultural dimensions of modern genetics and genomics, but also of its history, is far from being exhausted.

Michael Clark is a research associate of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, and a freelance writer on medical and scientific film and television.

Notes

1. See, for example, part 1 of 'From Generation to Generation' (Gaumont British Instructional for the Eugenics Society, 1935), which illustrates the action of the 'laws of heredity' in domestic animals before examining their effects on humans. A number of the pioneer natural history filmmaker F. Percy Smith's films from the 1910s and 1920s also deal with aspects of animal and plant genetics. See Jenny Hammerton, 'Cheese-Mites, Mosses and Moulds: Percy Smith and the Secrets of Nature', Viewfinder 35 (Feb. 1999), 9-11. Martin Pernick, 'The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915' (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) is a major study of eugenics in US public health and fiction films dramas during this period.

2. For a recent overview of scientific and technological themes and motifs in English-language sci-fi movies of the 1950s and '60s, see Chrisopher Frayling, 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema' (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), especially Chapters 5 and 6. For a recent introduction to the history of genetic themes in feature films, see Stephen Nottingham's essay 'Genetically Modified Cinema', originally published in German as part of the exhibition catalogue 'Put on Your Blue Genes: Bio-Tech Kunst und die Verheissungen der Biotechnologie' (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 2005); English version.

3. For the purposes of these searches, foreign language titles, duplicate entries, short films and TV series were omitted from the raw search results generated. However, the results are still only indicative and approximate, as the keyword indexing of titles in the Internet Movie Database is very inconsistent and incomplete.

4. The two 'Jurassic Park' sequels were 'Jurassic Park: The Lost World' (1997) and 'Jurassic Park III', variously subtitled 'Return to the Island' and 'Breakout' (2001).

5. All figures for box-office returns are taken from the Internet Movie Database entries for the films in question.

6. See London Evening Standard (10/12/2005), p. 15.