Kaleidoscope science

Ever since my middle school days, when I was compelled to watch “Leprechaun in the Hood” by what I now imagine must have been near-Clockwork Orange-tactics, I have had a slightly biased vendetta against all of cinema.

Although I seemed entrenched in my anti-cinematic ways to friends and family, this weekend, film inadvertently married my amateurish love of science. In short (or, rather, in three hours): “Interstellar.” Having watched the movie and having now absorbed every retrievable word of Neil deGrasse Tyson on the subject, I have started to appreciate Hollywood’s imagination, especially when it takes the shape of clever and well-researched science fiction.

Two exemplar films, among many, educate, promote and twist science with their distinct conceptions of the cosmos, the biological world and the parameters of human ability. If America can’t stop watching, it might as well learn too.

In 1958, Irvin Yeaworth directed “The Blob,” a science fiction/horror film about a gelatinous goo, maybe redolent of that sebaceous cyst on your cousin’s back, that arrives on earth from outer space via meteorite. It promptly begins to consume people from a rural Pennsylvanian town who evidently have nothing better to do than make out on the roofs of their cars while parked in the woods. 

A cheesy (or should I say gooey?) flick, but definitely one with an underlying principle about the cosmos. If you just scoffed, hold on a second. The Blob is most definitely an alien, nothing new in the cinematic world, but he is also a non-anthropomorphic alien. The diversity of life on earth is astounding, from mammals to extremophiles, from mimosa plants to microbes, from Mother Theresa to Christopher Hitchens; so why shouldn’t the diversity of life in outer space be just as astounding, astonishing and unpredictable? 

The universe is so unfathomably vast that the rarest occurrences, occurrences like life, are but quotidian. One would hope that this extraordinary fact could spark some movie-making creativity. Maybe “The Blob” was just this, an attempt to think outside of the terrestrial box and inside the cosmos.

Besides the universe, there are puzzles to solve here on earth as well, notably this stumper: What in the world is an X-gene? I am talking, for those among my readers who are not Marvel Comic geeks, about the biological source of the X-Men’s superhuman abilities. "X-Men" as a movie franchise (2000-2016) has made over seven billion dollars and is known for staring both Gandalf and Jean Valjean. Well worth discussing.

The theory behind "X-men" is, believe it or not, theoretical biology. The X-gene is a dormant gene that codes for superpower-inducing proteins and that is virtually never expressed, but that is a part of human DNA nonetheless. Therefore, when a genome mutates in a specific way, activating the X-gene, the phenotypes associated with it are expressed. This process might be likened to atavism, the expression of ancestral phenotypes and genotypes that are preserved in one’s DNA but that do not usually code for visible traits -- especially not traits like wings and lasers.

The underlying question here might be something like this: How is it that our DNA (and our mutations of DNA) makes us who we are? Conceived in the turbulent 1960s, "X-men" may have social as well as biological implications.

The cinematic function of imagination -- that is, taking real scientific concepts and distorting them until they’re science fiction -- may be analogous to the function of progression in scientific disciplines. Trailblazers interpret the facts we do have and use them to push into the unknown. Maybe scientists move with a bit more prudence than "X-Men" did, but still, seven billion dollars means they were on to something.