- 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 for future episodes, you
can contact us through these social media handles
on Instagram and Twitter. 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)
