Crispr! The Musical
Unlike the “pure” sciences of physics and mathematics, biology is messy and unpredictable, the complex interactions of organisms and environment, underpinning it the reactions the cell, and inside that the genome made of billions of base pairs, meticulously transcribed during replication but prone to errors which can express in mutations, genetic diseases which are sometimes not apparent until later in life as metabolic pathways change.
Where biology is exactly the same as other sciences is in the academic rivalry, competing for funds, for equipment, for lab space, to be the first to publish, ideally something meaningful and beneficial for humanity, and while geneticist Doctor Alex Dearborn and her PhD student Brady Lasalle may have just had the breakthrough they needed, a new strain of soy resistant to drought, the avaricious Dean of Science Doctor Nelson would just as soon see them fail and be evicted.
Named for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, a bacterial enzyme used to edit DNA, substituting favourable gene sequences, Crispr! The Musical is written and performed by Lina Zikas and Duane Stanford and directed by Kevin Qian, and all is not it seems in the labyrinth of labs at Lakeview College’s Science and Technology Institute, with millions of dollars of funding at stake, Doctor Nelson’s ethics up for sale to the highest bidder and the Student Utilitarian Non-Violent Taskforce taking a militant anti-science stance.
Asking the big questions such as whether the Covid vaccine really did contain a microchip or whether if a zombie eats a mutant it counts as cannibalism, with pleasantly tuneful voices and manic gusto the duo throw themselves into their research with numerous quick changes as they slip from view while crossing the stage, and while the process does not conform to standards and the results may not have been rigorously peer-reviewed the outcome speaks for itself, encoded with laughter and occasional dance to please every audience.
Crispr! The Musical continues at C Aquila on Johnston Terrace until Sunday 25th August
