The greatest scientist of all time

Last week I dragged a couple of friends to the Imagine Science Film Festival to watch a screening of the film "Creation" with me. Before the screening, the founder of the festival introduced himself and said a few words about the whole idea behind it - I remembered his name from numerous emails sent out to the Cornell Med email broadcast system: he was a grad student at Rockefeller who organizes a film club for grad students and post docs. It turns out he had gotten his PhD in Genetics and now he is film school and wants to become a film maker. These kinds of stories always inspire me: it's possible to be a scientist and love science and yet not wanting to be in the lab and do science day in and day out. Exactly my feeling. And just to give you a little insight into why that might be the case, you can watch this movie - Naturally Obsessed - for free on Channel 13's website: http://www.thirteen.org/embed-player?pid=0IbDG4CTzUuikqXGA0atytdwiHDU_Adg&share=true

Anyway, back to Creation. Despite what the title might suggest, this is a movie about Charles Darwin. It's fiction, based on facts: actually, on a book written by his great great grandson, who had found some family documents, letters, based on which he tried to recount the life of the greatest scientist of all time, particularly focusing on the impact his daughter's death had on him and his wife, and on the writing of "The Origin of Species". The movie was not the best I've seen, but it was good and I thought it gave a really nice mix of showing the science, the personal struggles, the environment of the time Darwin lived in, emotions of a very sensitive man (who knows if he was really like that, but I believe it).

What is now mostly accepted as fact - the theory of evolution - was a gigantic intellectual leap in the 1800's , when religion was all that people had to explain the world around them and to try to figure out their place in the world. It's almost impossible to imagine, with that knowledge that we have today. what it would have been like to live in that world and be able to think so far outside the box and come up with the theory of evolution pretty much by observation only. After all, Darwin did not have fancy equipment available to him; all he had were his eyes and amazing capacity to observe and connect the things that he observed. He did not know anything about Genetics, the building blocks of all life; he just noticed differences in beak sizes and shapes and the correlations between those and how the birds managed to get food or where they lived. It required the greatest amount of imagination and creativity: I am confident to say that never again will a man so brilliant in the scientific sense will live.

After the screening, there was a short discussion with the director of the film and two scientists - both highly successful Geneticists from big American universities - about the film and evolution and Darwin. It was really enjoyable: I thought the director had great insight into the science and he had mostly succeeded in portraying Darwin as sensitive and conflicted genius in a time dominated by religion. The scientists - one of whom recently published a paper in Nature about the genetic and molecular basis for how Darwin's finches got their beaks - did a really good job explaining their research in simple terms, which is not always the case, and I was pretty impressed.

Naturally -after all, we are in America - the question of intelligent design came up in the discussion. What about the people who still do not accept the principles of evolution; after all, it is still a theory. Well, the only thing I would have to say to that is that if you were ever to look at those databases I work with on a daily bases which include the whole genome sequences of many different species now (including us, Homo Sapiens) it is hard not to notice the amazing similarities between us and let's say mice. My favorite gene for the last 3 years has been this gene named Jagged1, which is a cell surface molecule in both mice and humans, and for that matter, in fruit flies, where it was originally discovered. In studying this molecule, I have had to compare the gene for Jagged1 in humans and mice at least, and there is amazing similarity - called homology or conservation in Genetics. The more a certain area in a gene in conserved, usually it means that that area is important for some function, which evolution has conserved for hundreds of millions of years, because it was something that was working well, contributing the the survival of the individual animal - be that a fruit fly or a mouse, or you and me - and so that individual would have more babies and would pass on that particular gene and so on and on, there is evolution for you. And once again, for Darwin, who had no idea what a gene was, or that in just 250 years, we would know the exact sequences of the building blocks of life in several different species he had studied, and yet, he had gotten in mostly right. How amazing is that!!

I really liked what Dr. Tabin said at the end: in the 1800's, it was a huge leap of faith for people to imagine that something other than God was responsible for our "creation" and for the way the world was, but today, with all the overwhelming evidence and science done behind us, there is no excuse for people to believe in fairy tales like that of creation and intelligent design. Very well said, Dr. Tabin!

After seeing and listening to all that, I spent two days listening to Immunology talks at our annual Grad School Retreat at Mohonk Mountain, and I noticed that I was looking at the science and the data a little bit differently, trying to think about it all in the context of the big picture of evolution. And then there was all the other fun to be had at Mohonk Mountain.