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Animation of the inner life of the cell
I cannot really explain why I’m so fascinated with this eight-minute animation of molecular mechanisms within the cell? “The Inner Life of a Cell” was created for Harvard University biology students by XVIVO, a scientific animation company. Turn off the accompanying music-hall piano sound and enjoy the “slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space”.
There are many other cell biology and molecular biology animations out there (see e.g., this on DNA replication, from 2003), but this XVIVO-Harvard product is good, I think, because, as Jim Endersby says, it’s like “Terminator 2 meets a biology textbook”. It’s both good animation and pretty realistic cell and molecular biology at the same time.
If you want an explanation of what goes on during the eight minutes, read this blog post — and for a discussion of the animation work behind it, read this article in Animation Magazine. The short movie raises a whole array of questions about how animation technology can be developed for visual representations of science for didactic and other display uses, and also questions about the interface between art, animation technology, cell biology and molecular design.
(thanks to Jim Endersby, Cambridge for an inspiring mail earlier tonight)
10 Oct 2006 Thomas
Indeed fascinating. It’s interesting to note the various uses of 3D clips, so called “flythroughs”, in biomedicine. Just the other day, while visiting the Diagnostic Center in Malmö, I was demonstrated a 3D “flythrough” of the intestine. Data derived from CT-scannings and processed into 3D-graphics, were displayed on the computer screen in front of me. Had I not been accompanied by physicians in white coats, I could easily have mistaken the clip for a subterranean, volcanic landscape in some TinTin album or film version of Voyage to the Center of the Earth. I think that motion pictures and cartoons have trained our brains to read all kinds of unintentional narratives – in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” – into this kind of visual material.
…but the trouble is it’s all WRONG! Like showing what it’s like to be part of a packed noisy football crowd using a black and white still photo of a single supporter.
Perhaps they could have started with the full packed house and slowly stripped away 90% of the contents, revealing the remaining action at full speed (mostly happening faster than the eye could follow, DNA uncoiling at thousands of rpm…) before finally slowing it down and beginning the tour. While we’re at it, let’s zoom in some more and see some protein folding and a few complex enzymes at work, finishing up following a glucose through the Krebs cycle and DNA being packed away ready for a mitosis. Sorry guys.
But yeah, it’s time we had an Attenborough for the cell, for the microscopic. Misunderstood or taken for granted, like the rest of the ‘invisible’ that coats everything we see and touch.
Can anyone point me to a better model? Soft voiceover… ‘entire city complete with infrastructure - modes of transport, manufacture, disposal, energy production, recycling, communications, warehousing, policing/immigration, City Hall at the centre, managing the operations but responsive to the needs of central government…’ nice but not beautiful.
So what would YOU include in the storyboard of a series beginning with nematodes and ending with bacteria, viruses and a truly inspiring picture of the internal life of a cell.
Hi Nick (btw are you the Nick Foster who did animation software development work for the Shrek movie?). You’re right, there are a lot of things that the XVIVO animation has got it “wrong”, biochemically and biologically speaking; for example, the lack of crowding in the cytosol and the low speed at which molecular mechanisms seem to take place.
I guess they deliberately decided (together with Harvard biology faculty) to make it “wrong” for didactic reason. This kind of didactic simplification goes on in cell biology textbooks all the time. Some students believe a “real” ion channel looks like the neat colored model of it in their textbook illustration. From this perspective the XVIVO movie is not much worse than any standard biology textbook for undergraduates. They’re both working within a particular late 20C didactic paradigm.
If I were the animator, I think I would try to build in a reflexive dimension. What kind of data have been used? How does one get from experimental data and settings to research article interpretations of molecular forms and kinetics in the first place? How are these structural and kinetical data then used to build an animation model? In other words I would unpack the Kubrick version (I prefer to call it Kubrick-ish rather than Attenborough-ish), so the viewer could see how it was made — all the way from the laboratory to the animated movie. In other words, open the black boxes of both cell/molecular biology AND animation.
There are quite a few good comments on “The Inner Life of a Cell” around. See e.g. ferrold’s here for insightful remarks on the problems of realistic renderings of molecular movements.