This is how science could make Mewtwo. The world of Pokemon is all about being the very best trainer,like no one ever was, but sometimes, no matter howmany rare candies you may have, your Pokemon just won't get strong enough. But that is where science might come in, because almost a quarter of a century ago, Poke scientists like myselffound something in the jungle and decided to apply genetic science to it in the hopes of creating one of the most powerful Pokemon of all time. And they succeeded. But how exactly do you make a Mewtwo? (upbeat music) Now where is that floating,plushy, cat baby thing?
I wanna squeeze it. With its appearance in Detective Pikachu, Mewtwo, one the Pokemonfranchise's most iconic villains, is back in popular culture in a big way, and you can trace Mewtwo all the way back to the first Pokemon gamesin 1996, in Red and Blue, which even explain how Mewtwo came to be in a series of journal entries. But since Mewtwo is explicitlya product of science, let's figure out exactly what science it would take to create it, step by step. And the first games are our first clue. The journal entries that you find on Cinnabar Island in the Pokemon mansion, the place that has waytoo many Grimers in it, trace the origins of Mewtwoback to the Pokemon Mew, an extremely rare psychicfloating kitten Pokemon, that Poke scientists encounteredin the jungles of Guyana, a real country in South America.
The scientists thenpresumably captured Mew and brought it back to their laboratory, though the sequence ofevents isn't really clear. Although we know after this, that's when the experiments started. (Poke ball squeaking) Takes a lot longer without glitches. Then, on February 6th, Mew gave... What? I took like one step. Why is it always a Zubat? Not even worth it. Like I was saying, onFebruary 6th, Mew gave birth, and from other Pokemon media we know that Mew in fact gave birth to its own clone, a second Mew, a Mewtwo. But this is where wehave to transition from Pokemon science to real science.
How can we possibly get an animal to give birth to its own clone? Well, we actually have aprocess in science that will do just that, called somaticcell nuclear transfer, which is a way of creating a viable embryo from body and reproductive cells. So if we wanted to make our own Mewtwo, what we would need first is some of those somatic cells from Mew. Any one of its cells, asidefrom its reproductive cells. Hey, wait! Wait, don't leave mewith all those Zubats! Canonically, Mewtwo wascloned from the somatic cells found in one of Mew's eyelashes. So with these somatic cellswe can start to process of somatic cell nuclear transfer, which sounds complicated but it's exactly what it sounds like. Each one of the somatic cells in your body has a full copy of DNA inside of it, so if we wanted to clone an animal we would first take oneof its somatic cells and then extract that DNA from it.
Now this all soundedlike techno babble to me when I was a kid firstplaying through the games, but these are very real processes, and you're probablyvery familiar with them because we benefit fromthem literally everyday. Recombining or splicinggenes are terms used within so calledrecombinant DNA technology, which is a way of takingDNA from outside of some host organism,inserting it into that DNA, and then hoping that the organism starts expressing those foreign genes. And this is the basictechnology behind GMOs or genetically modified organisms. I know this sounds scary to some people, but millions and millions of people every day benefit from GMOs through the creation of vaccines,through gene therapies, and through bacteria thatsynthesize human insulin because we modify them to do so.
So Mewtwo then would technically be a GMO. What? No I'm not gonna put a labelon you, that's just marketing. To truly make a Mewtwo, we're gonna follow the same process for genetic modification, and first we'll need some genes from other powerful Pokemon that we want to insert into Mewtwo's cells with the hope of it getting even stronger. If we wanna follow thePokemon games to the letter, let's grab some genes fromother powerful Pokemon that will give Mewtwoits eventual move set. So let's grab some genes fromKadabra to give its psychic, from Staryu to give it recover, and maybe Vaporeon to give it mist. Then we grab those genes andcut them into tiny fragments with special enzymes that arelike tiny genetic scissors.
At the same time we'regonna want something, a vector, that's able to actually get these DNA fragments into Mewtwo's cells. One very common vector is a plasmid, which is a ring of DNA which we extract from the cells of bacteria and then we use enzymes again to open up these rings to make them ready forthose DNA fragments. Maybe we grab these plasmids in this case from something that'sused to transforming. Once the DNA is the vectors,those vectors can be inserted into Mewtwo's cellswhich we extracted earlier, and then those cells can bereintroduced into Mewtwo's body. Hopefully Mewtwo's body will then read these DNA instructionsfrom these powerful Pokemon and start expressingall of these new powers that we definitely wanted. Or did we? Ahh. Come on, super effective.
Knowing how somatic cell nuclear transfer could birth a Mewtwo andhow genetic engineering could make it the powerhouse that it is, this is my unified scientifically accurate and canonically correct theoryfor how Mewtwo was made. Here we go. Okay so we take a somatic cell from Mew, we remove its nuclearmaterial because that's the thing that we wantto copy to make a clone. We then take Mew's egg cell, we remove its nuclear material, we combine the two. We then, with an electric shock, stimulate these cells into dividing. We then inject these cells back into Mew because it has the biologyto birth a Mew embryo, and then eventually Mewtwo is born. From there we take Mewtwo'scells, we remove some, and then from an arrayof powerful Pokemon, we cut up their geneticmaterial for the genes that we want, we put it into a vector, and we put those vectorsback into Mewtwo's cells.
Those cells are put backinto Mewtwo's body then, and then this process is iterated until eventually you get a Mewtwo that is expressing exactly the powerful genes in the way that you want. This is how you make Mewtwo. At least, that's how you'dmake a Mewtwo in theory. In practice, it'd be a lot more difficult. In most cases an organism treated with recombinant DNA technology doesn't just suddenly look and act different. In other words itsobservable characteristics, its phenotype, doesn't reallychange before or after. And remember, Mewtwo wasborn as a clone of Mew, a genetically identicalcopy that would look just the same when it wasborn, like an identical twin. The changes you would needto impose on this animal in order to turn itform a cute space kitty into an armored tube kangaroo, would be so substantial theywould probably kill the animal. And just getting a cloneof Mew in the first place would be very, very difficult.
Think back to the firstcloned horse, Prometea. She was the only single embryo to make it to full horsehood out of 841 attempts. To its credit, the Pokedex does say that Mewtwo was subjected to horrificgene splicing experiments, and they would have to be. Poor tube kangaroo. Even if Poke scientists could clone a mew and insert powerful genes, they would have to be extremely careful that those genes wereexpressed in the correct way. Once foreign DNA is inserted into a body, that body doesn't alwaysexpress those genes correctly. For example, those Vaporeanproteins from earlier could be over expressedor under expressed, or expressed in completelythe wrong tissues. And according to the final journal entries in the Pokemon mansion in red and blue, we know that something likethis, under expression, over expression, theincorrect expression of genes, went wrong with Mewtwo. Genetic experimentation not only gave Mewtwo immense Poke power, it caused a psychologicalchange in the animal, giving it vicious tendencies,which in theory, I suppose, it is possible for misappliedgenetic splicing to do.
Mewtwo eventually destroyedthe lab it was created in, and then fled to lie in wait for only the strongest challengers, and me with my level 65Raichu, and hey, I get it, if I was experimentedon my entire life with horrific gene splicing, I'dwanna hide in a cave too. What? No. It's a cool cave, it'sjust very backtracky and I'd never buy all the escape ropes. Ahh. So, how do you make a Mewtwo? Well with cloning andgenetic modification. If Poke scientists used these very real and proven processes,they could do something close to what the games suggest. In real life though, wewouldn't be able to make an armored tube kangaroowith psychic powers because those powers aren't a thing. But we can and doaccomplish Mewtwoian things with real organisms every single day. The real question hereisn't whether or not we can do something likegenetic engineering and cloning, it's whether or not we cando so safely and ethically, because if we do not,then you can end up with a real pocket monster on your hands.
Because science. If this is a Zubat I'mdeleting the channel. (upbeat music) Gene splicing and gene experimentation is obviously highly technical, it's taken us decades anddecades to get to this point, and it takes a lot ofwork and a lot of effort, but what I like about science is that there's always room for abrute force approach to try it. So yes we use these microscopicvectors from bacteria and we put genes insidethem and we insert them into cells in the animalsand we see what happens. And that's very cool. But we also use geneguns, which are tiny guns that we load up with genesand we shoot genes into cells and see what sticks. I like that.
Thank you so much for watching, Peter, it was a Geodude by the way. If you wanna follow us and give me ideas for future episodes, youcan contact us through these social media handleson Instagram and Twitter. Also, the final episode ofthe science of Mortal Kombat is now live. I'm very proud of this series, so go back and watch all six episodes, and tell me you know,just how you would have punched someone off theground with more force than a car hits things with. (upbeat music)
I wanna squeeze it. With its appearance in Detective Pikachu, Mewtwo, one the Pokemonfranchise's most iconic villains, is back in popular culture in a big way, and you can trace Mewtwo all the way back to the first Pokemon gamesin 1996, in Red and Blue, which even explain how Mewtwo came to be in a series of journal entries. But since Mewtwo is explicitlya product of science, let's figure out exactly what science it would take to create it, step by step. And the first games are our first clue. The journal entries that you find on Cinnabar Island in the Pokemon mansion, the place that has waytoo many Grimers in it, trace the origins of Mewtwoback to the Pokemon Mew, an extremely rare psychicfloating kitten Pokemon, that Poke scientists encounteredin the jungles of Guyana, a real country in South America.
The scientists thenpresumably captured Mew and brought it back to their laboratory, though the sequence ofevents isn't really clear. Although we know after this, that's when the experiments started. (Poke ball squeaking) Takes a lot longer without glitches. Then, on February 6th, Mew gave... What? I took like one step. Why is it always a Zubat? Not even worth it. Like I was saying, onFebruary 6th, Mew gave birth, and from other Pokemon media we know that Mew in fact gave birth to its own clone, a second Mew, a Mewtwo. But this is where wehave to transition from Pokemon science to real science.
How can we possibly get an animal to give birth to its own clone? Well, we actually have aprocess in science that will do just that, called somaticcell nuclear transfer, which is a way of creating a viable embryo from body and reproductive cells. So if we wanted to make our own Mewtwo, what we would need first is some of those somatic cells from Mew. Any one of its cells, asidefrom its reproductive cells. Hey, wait! Wait, don't leave mewith all those Zubats! Canonically, Mewtwo wascloned from the somatic cells found in one of Mew's eyelashes. So with these somatic cellswe can start to process of somatic cell nuclear transfer, which sounds complicated but it's exactly what it sounds like. Each one of the somatic cells in your body has a full copy of DNA inside of it, so if we wanted to clone an animal we would first take oneof its somatic cells and then extract that DNA from it.
Now this all soundedlike techno babble to me when I was a kid firstplaying through the games, but these are very real processes, and you're probablyvery familiar with them because we benefit fromthem literally everyday. Recombining or splicinggenes are terms used within so calledrecombinant DNA technology, which is a way of takingDNA from outside of some host organism,inserting it into that DNA, and then hoping that the organism starts expressing those foreign genes. And this is the basictechnology behind GMOs or genetically modified organisms. I know this sounds scary to some people, but millions and millions of people every day benefit from GMOs through the creation of vaccines,through gene therapies, and through bacteria thatsynthesize human insulin because we modify them to do so.
So Mewtwo then would technically be a GMO. What? No I'm not gonna put a labelon you, that's just marketing. To truly make a Mewtwo, we're gonna follow the same process for genetic modification, and first we'll need some genes from other powerful Pokemon that we want to insert into Mewtwo's cells with the hope of it getting even stronger. If we wanna follow thePokemon games to the letter, let's grab some genes fromother powerful Pokemon that will give Mewtwoits eventual move set. So let's grab some genes fromKadabra to give its psychic, from Staryu to give it recover, and maybe Vaporeon to give it mist. Then we grab those genes andcut them into tiny fragments with special enzymes that arelike tiny genetic scissors.
At the same time we'regonna want something, a vector, that's able to actually get these DNA fragments into Mewtwo's cells. One very common vector is a plasmid, which is a ring of DNA which we extract from the cells of bacteria and then we use enzymes again to open up these rings to make them ready forthose DNA fragments. Maybe we grab these plasmids in this case from something that'sused to transforming. Once the DNA is the vectors,those vectors can be inserted into Mewtwo's cellswhich we extracted earlier, and then those cells can bereintroduced into Mewtwo's body. Hopefully Mewtwo's body will then read these DNA instructionsfrom these powerful Pokemon and start expressingall of these new powers that we definitely wanted. Or did we? Ahh. Come on, super effective.
Knowing how somatic cell nuclear transfer could birth a Mewtwo andhow genetic engineering could make it the powerhouse that it is, this is my unified scientifically accurate and canonically correct theoryfor how Mewtwo was made. Here we go. Okay so we take a somatic cell from Mew, we remove its nuclearmaterial because that's the thing that we wantto copy to make a clone. We then take Mew's egg cell, we remove its nuclear material, we combine the two. We then, with an electric shock, stimulate these cells into dividing. We then inject these cells back into Mew because it has the biologyto birth a Mew embryo, and then eventually Mewtwo is born. From there we take Mewtwo'scells, we remove some, and then from an arrayof powerful Pokemon, we cut up their geneticmaterial for the genes that we want, we put it into a vector, and we put those vectorsback into Mewtwo's cells.
Those cells are put backinto Mewtwo's body then, and then this process is iterated until eventually you get a Mewtwo that is expressing exactly the powerful genes in the way that you want. This is how you make Mewtwo. At least, that's how you'dmake a Mewtwo in theory. In practice, it'd be a lot more difficult. In most cases an organism treated with recombinant DNA technology doesn't just suddenly look and act different. In other words itsobservable characteristics, its phenotype, doesn't reallychange before or after. And remember, Mewtwo wasborn as a clone of Mew, a genetically identicalcopy that would look just the same when it wasborn, like an identical twin. The changes you would needto impose on this animal in order to turn itform a cute space kitty into an armored tube kangaroo, would be so substantial theywould probably kill the animal. And just getting a cloneof Mew in the first place would be very, very difficult.
Think back to the firstcloned horse, Prometea. She was the only single embryo to make it to full horsehood out of 841 attempts. To its credit, the Pokedex does say that Mewtwo was subjected to horrificgene splicing experiments, and they would have to be. Poor tube kangaroo. Even if Poke scientists could clone a mew and insert powerful genes, they would have to be extremely careful that those genes wereexpressed in the correct way. Once foreign DNA is inserted into a body, that body doesn't alwaysexpress those genes correctly. For example, those Vaporeanproteins from earlier could be over expressedor under expressed, or expressed in completelythe wrong tissues. And according to the final journal entries in the Pokemon mansion in red and blue, we know that something likethis, under expression, over expression, theincorrect expression of genes, went wrong with Mewtwo. Genetic experimentation not only gave Mewtwo immense Poke power, it caused a psychologicalchange in the animal, giving it vicious tendencies,which in theory, I suppose, it is possible for misappliedgenetic splicing to do.
Mewtwo eventually destroyedthe lab it was created in, and then fled to lie in wait for only the strongest challengers, and me with my level 65Raichu, and hey, I get it, if I was experimentedon my entire life with horrific gene splicing, I'dwanna hide in a cave too. What? No. It's a cool cave, it'sjust very backtracky and I'd never buy all the escape ropes. Ahh. So, how do you make a Mewtwo? Well with cloning andgenetic modification. If Poke scientists used these very real and proven processes,they could do something close to what the games suggest. In real life though, wewouldn't be able to make an armored tube kangaroowith psychic powers because those powers aren't a thing. But we can and doaccomplish Mewtwoian things with real organisms every single day. The real question hereisn't whether or not we can do something likegenetic engineering and cloning, it's whether or not we cando so safely and ethically, because if we do not,then you can end up with a real pocket monster on your hands.
Because science. If this is a Zubat I'mdeleting the channel. (upbeat music) Gene splicing and gene experimentation is obviously highly technical, it's taken us decades anddecades to get to this point, and it takes a lot ofwork and a lot of effort, but what I like about science is that there's always room for abrute force approach to try it. So yes we use these microscopicvectors from bacteria and we put genes insidethem and we insert them into cells in the animalsand we see what happens. And that's very cool. But we also use geneguns, which are tiny guns that we load up with genesand we shoot genes into cells and see what sticks. I like that.
Thank you so much for watching, Peter, it was a Geodude by the way. If you wanna follow us and give me ideas for future episodes, youcan contact us through these social media handleson Instagram and Twitter. Also, the final episode ofthe science of Mortal Kombat is now live. I'm very proud of this series, so go back and watch all six episodes, and tell me you know,just how you would have punched someone off theground with more force than a car hits things with. (upbeat music)
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