Where: Cinema Theater, Discovery Square
Description
We are excited to host the 2020 WEP Film Festival, where renowned scientists will introduce and lead discussions for a range of educational documentaries and fictional film screenings related to this year’s theme ‘Personalized Medicine’.
Gattaca is a 1997 American science fiction film written and directed by Andrew Niccol. It stars Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, with Jude Law. The film presents a future society driven by eugenics where potential children are conceived through the genetic selection to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. The film centers on Vincent Freeman, played by Hawke, who was conceived outside the eugenics program and struggles to overcome genetic discrimination to realize his dream of going into space.
Keynote speaker Dr. and Professor Rene Frydman will introduce and lead the discussion of this screening.
Christian Jensen
Christian Frøkjær-Jensen is an Assistant Professor at KAUST, where he tries to keep his lab focused on developing methods for synthetic genome biology in C. elegans. His scientific education started with physics and biophysics (University of Copenhagen - B.S. in 2000 and M.S. in 2002), continued with neuroscience (the University of Oregon, M.S. in 2004) and concluded with health sciences (University of Copenhagen Medical School, Ph.D. 2008). His post-doctoral work began with projects related to developing genome editing technologies in Erik Jorgensen's laboratory at HHMI/University of Utah (2008 - 2014). "Bugs" in how transgenes were expressed led to projects with Andrew Fire at Stanford University (2014-2017) on how non-coding DNA may play an important role in cellular self-recognition. Recently, he has worked on improving an engineered system for non-Mendelian inheritance where progeny inherit exclusively paternal DNA.
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