John Oliver tackled gene editing on Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight,” focusing mostly on the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology. That is, at least, when the HBO “Last Week” tonight host wasn’t making wisecracks about “Jurassic Park” or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s “Rampage.”
First up was “Rampage,” which Oliver believes wasn’t the best title available for the April action flick.
“This is a movie about aerial military equipment being harnessed to fight a 30-foot wolf and it is not called ‘Wolf Blitzer?’” he posed. “That it a huge missed opportunity. That’s movie malpractice.”
The “Daily Show” alum eventually got down to the actual science of genetic editing, which has huge potential and a long way to go. For example, all of those headlines about geneticists bringing back the extinct woolly mammoth? In reality, we’re nowhere close to that — not even in the relatively unimpressive computer simulations that are being run.
“That’s not a woolly mammoth though, that’s just a wrong elephant,” Oliver comments on video showing off one meh effort.
“It’s not so much ‘Jurassic Park’ as an off-brand $3 petting zoo called ‘Pet the Whatever,’” he quipped of the results.
Watch the video above — you could learn something.