The frozen, bodiless genes of millions of plants, animals, and humans are stored in biobanks
worldwide. Together with corn seed, the stem cells of polar bears, and frozen drops of human
blood - rekindled dreams of old are traveling towards potential futures: re-creating species
threatened with extinction, ending world hunger, and human life without illness or disease.
The documentary film Golden Genes embark on an expedition to some of the largest, oldest and
most contemporary archives of life — from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Spitsbergen to the
animal cell banks of the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and the most extensive biodiversity
storage in the world in Shenzhen, China. Biobanks such as these are data centers in the global
network of the genetic research community. The information that they generate from the DNA of
various living organisms provides the basis of today’s life sciences.
But biobanks do more than that. Within their freezers, the boundaries between lifeforms are
blurred. Fungal, bacterial, or human — it’s all the same to the technology. Biobanks pose a
fundamental question to humankind: what does it mean to be part of nature in the age of the
genome? Things that were unthinkable 20 years ago are discussed by scientists interviewed in
the film as concrete research projects. The storage of every DNA molecule on the planet — an
idea closely related to the century–old history of genetics — has now become a real
possibility. Caught somewhere between a nature film and a political documentary, Golden Genes
outlines the enormous challenge that the comprehensive study of biodiversity presents to
society but also to our image of humankind.