- 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 how many 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 myself found 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 Pokemon franchise'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 games in 1996, in Red and Blue,
which even explain how Mewtwo came to be
in a series of journal entries.
But since Mewtwo is explicitly a 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 way too many Grimers in it,
trace the origins of Mewtwo back to the Pokemon Mew,
an extremely rare psychic floating kitten Pokemon,
that Poke scientists encountered in the jungles of Guyana,
a real country in South America.
The scientists then presumably captured Mew
and brought it back to their laboratory,
though the sequence of events 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, on February 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 we have 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 a process in science that will
do just that, called somatic cell 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, aside from its reproductive cells.
Hey, wait!
Wait, don't leave me with all those Zubats!
Canonically, Mewtwo was cloned from the somatic cells
found in one of Mew's eyelashes.
So with these somatic cells we 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 one of its somatic cells
and then extract that DNA from it.
Then we want to birth the animal,
so we want to put that DNA into something
that can become an embryo and then an animal
like an egg cell.
And if Mew is birthing something in the first place,
it presumably has egg cells.
So we take one of those and we remove its nuclear material.
We've then combined the egg and the material
that we actually want, and then with a lot of luck
and a little bit of literally an electric shock,
we can get those cells to start dividing.
We then put that cluster of cells into an animal
that has the biology to birth those cells,
in this case Mew itself.
And then eventually the clone would be born.
This sounds all very sci-fi I know,
and it begs the question, despite what all of this
theory says, can we actually do this?
Yep, meet Prometea, the world's first cloned horse,
born as a clone of herself in 2003.
And as of the time we're filming this episode,
she is alive and well.
And even a few years ago she gave birth
to her own beautiful baby horse.
So this clone was definitely viable
and all of this is possible.
And if we can do this with a horse,
we can clone a Mew.
However, cloning a Mew is only the first step,
and Poke scientists would have to do
a lot more than this to make Mewtwo so powerful.
I swear, if this is a Zubat I'm gonna lose my sh...
Okay good, if you're familiar with your Pokedex,
you know that Mewtwo here is ultimately
the result of recombining Mew's genes
and subjecting Mewtwo to gene splicing experiments.
Now this all sounded like techno babble to me
when I was a kid first playing through the games,
but these are very real processes,
and you're probably very familiar with them
because we benefit from them literally everyday.
Recombining or splicing genes are terms used
within so called recombinant DNA technology,
which is a way of taking DNA 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 basic technology 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 that synthesize 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 label on 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 the Pokemon games to the letter,
let's grab some genes from other powerful Pokemon
that will give Mewtwo its eventual move set.
So let's grab some genes from Kadabra to give its psychic,
from Staryu to give it recover,
and maybe Vaporeon to give it mist.
Then we grab those genes and cut them into tiny fragments
with special enzymes that are like tiny genetic scissors.
At the same time we're gonna 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 for those DNA fragments.
Maybe we grab these plasmids in this case
from something that's used to transforming.
Once the DNA is the vectors, those vectors can be
inserted into Mewtwo's cells which we extracted earlier,
and then those cells can be reintroduced into Mewtwo's body.
Hopefully Mewtwo's body will then
read these DNA instructions from these powerful Pokemon
and start expressing all 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 and how genetic engineering
could make it the powerhouse that it is,
this is my unified scientifically accurate
and canonically correct theory for how Mewtwo was made.
Here we go.
Okay so we take a somatic cell from Mew,
we remove its nuclear material because that's
the thing that we want to 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 biology to birth a Mew embryo,
and then eventually Mewtwo is born.
From there we take Mewtwo's cells, we remove some,
and then from an array of powerful Pokemon,
we cut up their genetic material for the genes
that we want, we put it into a vector,
and we put those vectors back into Mewtwo's cells.
Those cells are put back into 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'd make 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 its observable characteristics,
its phenotype, doesn't really change before or after.
And remember, Mewtwo was born as a clone of Mew,
a genetically identical copy that would look
just the same when it was born, like an identical twin.
The changes you would need to impose on this animal
in order to turn it form a cute space kitty
into an armored tube kangaroo,
would be so substantial they would probably kill the animal.
And just getting a clone of Mew in the first place
would be very, very difficult.
Think back to the first cloned 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 horrific gene 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 were expressed in the correct way.
Once foreign DNA is inserted into a body,
that body doesn't always express those genes correctly.
For example, those Vaporean proteins from earlier
could be over expressed or under expressed,
or expressed in completely the wrong tissues.
And according to the final journal entries
in the Pokemon mansion in red and blue,
we know that something like this, under expression,
over expression, the incorrect expression of genes,
went wrong with Mewtwo.
Genetic experimentation not only
gave Mewtwo immense Poke power,
it caused a psychological change in the animal,
giving it vicious tendencies, which in theory, I suppose,
it is possible for misapplied genetic splicing to do.
Mewtwo eventually destroyed the lab it was created in,
and then fled to lie in wait for
only the strongest challengers,
and me with my level 65 Raichu, and hey, I get it,
if I was experimented on my entire life with
horrific gene splicing, I'd wanna hide in a cave too.
What? No.
It's a cool cave, it's just very backtracky
and I'd never buy all the escape ropes.
Ahh.
So, how do you make a Mewtwo?
Well with cloning and genetic 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, we wouldn't be able to make
an armored tube kangaroo with psychic powers
because those powers aren't a thing.
But we can and do accomplish Mewtwoian things
with real organisms every single day.
The real question here isn't whether or not
we can do something like genetic engineering and cloning,
it's whether or not we can do 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'm deleting the channel.
(upbeat music)
Gene splicing and gene experimentation
is obviously highly technical,
it's taken us decades and decades to get to this point,
and it takes a lot of work and a lot of effort,
but what I like about science is that
there's always room for a brute force approach to try it.
So yes we use these microscopic vectors from bacteria
and we put genes inside them and we insert them
into cells in the animals and we see what happens.
And that's very cool.
But we also use gene guns, which are tiny guns
that we load up with genes and 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
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Also, the final episode of the 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 the ground with more force
than a car hits things with.
(upbeat music)