Welcome back. This is episode 2 of pop culture Petri dish. I'm a Veperson and I'm a baby when it comes to understanding all things science and here

with me is our resident Neil de Grasse Tyson?

Christian, say hello.

If by Neil deGrasse Tyson you mean we both wrestled in high school

and or into that sort of thing, yes I suppose you could compare me to

Neil degrass Tyson. Indeed I did. Is he anything other than a wrestler I don't know anything

about Neil degrass Dyson.

All right, so today we're doing episode two

and where we talk about science fiction

and it's, you know, parallels in the real world and how you know authors get their ideas from the

real world and how the real world gets ideas from science fiction.

Today we're talking about genetic engineering.

Yeah, you might have seen this kind of stuff.

I mean, obviously, the first one that comes up

is Captain America, any kind of super soldier. He has been genetically engineered to be the prime human.

Also, yeah, also stuff like, I don't know, Universal Soldier. I'm not sure if that one fits as well.

Well, walk us through. Give us the crash course in genetic engineering.

What's going on in the horizon of today? Like what's happening?

All right, so genetic engineering, a brief history is that we've always been doing

genetic engineering. If by genetic engineering we consider things like selective

breeding from the first time that we decided to plant the wheat crops that

produced more wheat and we selected those ones to keep planting year after year.

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