Episode
NOVA: Life: Patent Pending
Overview
NOVA shows how scientists go about creating new forms of life, and investigates the impact of the gene bonanza on industry, medicine, and the universities themselves. NOVA reveals that other countries are plowing far more resources than the US into the burgeoning industry.
Details
- Series
- NOVA
- Season
- Season 9
- Episode
- Episode 7
- Air date
- 1982-02-28
- Runtime
- 55 min
Episode context
Life: Patent Pending is Episode 7 in Season 9 of NOVA. It aired on 1982-02-28. The runtime is 55 min.
Previous / Next
Episode 6: The Television Explosion
NOVA explores the past, present, and future of American television including the potential of cable, the Columbus, Ohio, two-way TV experiment, the array of new techniques and their potential social impact. Will the new video technology let people see what they really want, rather than what the networks want?
Episode 8: Palace of Delights
NOVA visits San Francisco's Exploratorium—part laboratory, part school, part three-ring circus—run by an unlikely collection of physicists and high school students.
More episodes from this season
Episode 5: Finding a Voice
What is it like not to be able to communicate with others? NOVA explores the severest of speech disabilities with Dick Boydell—born with cerebral palsy, confined to a wheelchair and unable for 30 years to say more than "yes" or "no" and investigates some of the new technology that gives the speechless a "voice."
Episode 9: Animal Impostors
In this vivid study of mimicry and camouflage NOVA shows dramatically how snakes, butterflies, fish, turtles and many other kinds of animals, both predators and their intended victims, use remarkable forms of deception to achieve their goal: to eat, or avoid being eaten.
Episode 4: The Hunt for the Legion Killer
One of the biggest investigations in medical history began when a mysterious killer disease broke out during independence celebrations in Philadelphia in 1976: Legionnaires' disease. NOVA traces the search for a cause and cure—a search bedeviled by false trails, accusations of incompetence and cover-up, and increasing urgency as the death toll mounted.
Episode 10: Aging: The Methuselah Syndrome
What is aging? Why does it happen? Can it be stopped? NOVA presents a startling report on research into the processes which make us age and how to control them.
Episode 3: Field Guide to Roger Tory Peterson
NOVA takes an intimate look at Roger Tory Peterson, the man whose best-selling guide books to ornithology have played a pivotal role in turning birdwatching into a mass sport.
Episode 11: The Case of the UFOs
For the first time on television a rigorous, scientific investigation into the fact, fiction, and hoax of Unidentified flying objects. With vivid film and accounts from several eyewitnesses including astronauts, NOVA sifts the evidence for and against the existence of UFOs.
Episode 2: Test-Tube Babies: A Daughter For Judy
NOVA presents a dramatic, exclusive film of the first "test-tube" baby born in America, Elizabeth Jordan Carr. NOVA follows the pregnancy from the start, presenting the only view on American TV of the extraordinary medical procedures used to remove and fertilize the egg, and of the historic birth, 28 December 1981 in Norfolk, VA.
Episode 12: The Fragile Mountain
The Himalayas, highest peaks in the world, are crumbling. People are making them crumble, and people are the victims, as NOVA reveals in this breathtaking documentary.
Episode 1: Salmon on the Run
NOVA captures the breathtaking power and determination of these amazing creatures and examines how business and technology are changing the fishing industry—and the salmon itself.
Episode 13: Here's Looking At You Kid
Of the 70,000 Americans hospitalized annually for severe Burns, one-third are children. NOVA tells the story of extraordinary personal resilience in an 11-year-old boy's fight to recover from burns suffered over 73 percent of his body.