Traveling Upstream

Shane Carruth is the man behind the world's most complicated film, Primer. It's a movie that fascinates even when you haven't the foggiest of what's going on. After a few viewings you get the impression that time travel may be involved, that time travel is as addictive as crack, and that a lot of characters are walking around with similar names and faces. Unfortunately, something this complex is often seen as either an intelligence test or the emperor's new clothes. But that was 2004; now is 2012. Carruth is now moving Upstream Color. And it's coming to Sundance.


If that teaser (NOT a trailer) means anything to you, you may not be tethered properly.

Of course the whole movie may not add a lot of clarity, if Primer is any indication. I'm excited though. And it comes from my daily perusal of Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. I can tell you that:

Within the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry, there are many process streams that require purification by some means or another. Typically, this requires that a specific impurity is removed or that a range of impurities are eliminated. In the latter case, these impurities are never fully characterized and are generally called color-species. 



In all cases, the color is regarded as an impurity that must be removed in order to avoid any adverse quality problems downstream with the final pharmaceutical product. The removal of upstream color also serves to improve the resin lifetime of expensive chromatography media that is used in downstream purification.

Feel better now?