Aint it great when you can go online and find complex ideas in science explained clearly with beautiful animations? I couldn't help thinking that Saturday when I happened upon this video of DNA wrapping and replication.
But, really, the late UC San Diego laser chemist Kent Wilson. was onto the importance of images to explain science back in the 1960s, and he used the tools at his disposal undergraduate students and general hippie sensibilities to create an unforgetable lesson in biology.
The video that Wilson orchestrated is so delightfully bad, it's good. It's a dance of protein synthesis. The first part of the film is Wilson explaining protein synthesis at a blackboard. He is the perfect mix of hipster/nerd, with his skinny tie and earnest demeanor. Then begins a dance of 100 or so undergraduate students, writhing as ribosomes, twirling as various release factors, prancing with colored balloons on their heads as messenger RNA codons.
If you're not into the science, watch it for its time-capsule value. It is so '60s, you'll think you're having a flashback. It's a little long, so what I would do is let the thing download while doing something else...then watch a little of Wilson's lecture. When you're no longer hanging on his every word, slide the film forward to where the actual dance begins. I don't know what I liked more: the trippy music, the really bad singing, or the the whole protein happeningness of the thing.
I challenge college professors and high school teachers to recreate this. In fact, I think it should be recreated everywhere protein synthesis is taught. There could be national competitions, dance-offs. Maybe we could have it performed next year on Darwin Day Feb. 12.
Anyway, take a look at the film. I know you'll find it very groovy.
People are often asking me, Jenni, what is YOUR favorite science blog? OK, really no one's ever asked me that, but I'll tell you anyway. It's Ben Goldacre's Bad Science.
Goldacre writes Bad Science for The Guardian in the UK, and he also practices medicine. Because of that little ocean between us, I frequently don't know a thing about the people he's tearing limb-from-limb -- the Dreadful Poo Lady, for instance (how I wish we had a Dreadful Poo Lady I could write about) but that doesn't keep me from enjoying the way he picks apart stupid and questionable science and health claims.
When I started reading him, he beat up on science journalists pretty regularly. He was usually right on the mark, if maybe more generally damning than I liked. Now it seems his view of people like me is a little more nuanced. I noticed in a recent post critiquing scare stories about genetically modified potatoes, he mentioned that none of the stories were written by science writers. That suggested he thought a science writer might have done a better job. But anyway, even if he hasn't changed his tune in the slightest, he still is always on target, often funny, and always smart.
Hold on, I'm changing the topic completely here
This is a video everyone should watch. When I first saw Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly some 20 years ago, it led me to re-evaluate a lot of what I thought about media depictions of women, and the impact of those images on our lives.
Kilbourne has a new version of Killing, the third, and the sad news is, advertising images are every bit as disturbing as they were 20 years ago. Actually, with all that we ought to understand by now, they're far worse. The messages advertising continually sends women -- and particularly young women pits parents raising daughters against the entire culture.
Kilbourne says the average American sees 3,000 ads every single day, and yet, as she says in the video: Everyone in America still feels personally exempt from the influence of advertising. So wherever I go, what I hear more than anything else is, 'I don't pay attention to ads. I just tune them out. They have no effect on me.' Now I hear this most often from people wearing GAP T-shirts....
Her point is funny, and unmistakable. We're all influenced by ads, and usually we never even realize it. If it was just a matter of purchasing GAP T-shirts, that wouldn't matter, but ads are selling us a self-image that is just plain warped.
One note: since this blog is for a newspaper, the most conservative of all media, I should warn you there is some near nudity in this video clip... but, really, since all the images are drawn from advertising, you've seen it all before, and so have your kids. We're immersed in the stuff.
What's weird is, it's become so common, we really don't make note of it anymore.
First Published March 4, 2007, 4:29 a.m.
