Show Notes
Today on the Science Talk podcast, Alexis Gambis, a New York University biologist and independent filmmaker, speaks about making Son of Monarchs, which won the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
The film is about a Mexican scientist who studies the evolution of monarch butterfly wings. It is a cultural piece about the politics of immigration, spirituality and shifting identities.
Gambis talks about science beyond the lab bench, bringing CRISPR technology to the big screen and how he is usually given to bold, innovative features that focus on science or technology and that depict a scientist as a central character.
In one scene in Son of Monarchs, the main character stands in a rowdy bar and raises his glass to “CRISPR and the genetic revolution.” There are several allusions throughout the film to how gene editing fascinates and terrifies us. Evolutionary science is the thread that ties the human story together.
From script to screen, the scientist-director meditates on the long journey to the finish line, securing funding and how science’s big stories can be weaved into art.
Gambis has been running a science film festival for 13 years and making science films for longer. His next project, El Beso, is a plunge into the life and science-fiction writings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an early 20th-century Spanish neuroscientist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Science Talk
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Science is an iterative process. Progress comes from people coming up with ideas that are sort of right and then new evidence and ideas coming in to update them to become even more correct. Underlying this process is a willingness by scientists to accept that they might be wrong and be open to updating their ideas. It turns out that social scientists have a term for this mindset. To find out more, I talked with two researchers who are studying this thing they call “intellectual humility.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today’s episode of Uncertain is about the ways that studies can leave us overconfident and how “just-so stories” can make us feel overly certain about results that are still a work in progress. And sometimes studies get misleading results because of random error or weird samples or study design. But sometimes science gets things wrong because it’s done by humans, and humans are fallible and imperfect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, we’ll talk with two researchers whose work probes the uncertainty surrounding how we perceive the world around us. It turns out that what we see may not always be a perfect reflection of reality.
Welcome to Uncertain, a five-part podcast miniseries from Scientific American. Here we will dive head first into the possibilities of the unknowing. Over the next five episodes, I’ll be talking with people like her: explorers who work in the realm of uncertainty. Through them, we’ll discover the ways that uncertainty can spark curiosity and scientific breakthroughs. But we’ll also find out how uncertainty can bite us in the butt and make science really hard. We’ll see how neglecting uncertainty can lead to overconfidence and how embracing uncertainty can allow for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the world. We’ll finish by examining how it’s possible to have confidence in scientific findings, even with their uncertainties.