The World's Fair

Last Friday, I had a photo shoot in my lab, where a firm called Corbis spent the day taking a variety of stock "sciency" photos. It was quite the machine in place, with a crew of about half a dozen, a group of well over 25 extras lounging around, lights angled at beakers full of coloured water (why are they always coloured?), and an atmosphere that I thought was usually only reserved for fashion photography.

Anyway, I did ask a few questions out of curiousity, and found out that the photoshoot was one of three locales to be shot over a 2 to 3 day period, where they would hope to create about 600 stock photos. Total cost of the 3 locale session was about $200,000 (yikes), but get this... each photo, each use, would retail in the $600 range. Man, we are in the wrong business folks.

But wait, even better is the movie industry!

The above is an image of a film crew for the movie "Hollow Man 2," which occured in my lab last summer. When I first was asked about doing this in my space, my initial thought was "Cool. Presumably we get compensated for this." Then I found out that it was a sequel of a movie that starred Kevin Bacon, and for some reason, I became more interested (I mean Footloose was one of the movies in my particular era). In some respects, I had the strange urge to go out of my way to introduce myself, and therefore lay claim to officially having the noteworthy one degree of separation of Kevin Bacon.

Yes, I know, very silly. But you know what was really silly? What was really silly was the fact that the first Hollow Man movie had a budget of US$90 million dollars, all the more ironic in that the day the film crew was there, was also the day that GenomeCanada (a major genomics funding agency) announced some competition results. All told, British Columbia was awarded a comparable $82.5 million (although that's Canadian dollars folks), which truth be told, is a lot of money in the public research arena.

Let me try to put this in another perspective. My colleague Brett Finlay, who is down the hall from me, was awarded (with a number of his colleagues), just under $6 million for a project titled "Functional Genomics of Energing Infectious Diseases. This is the same guy who headed the Canadian SARS Vaccine Initiative to such great success, and this is a project that speaks towards progress in the fight against things like SARS and Avian Flu Virus. Yet here he was with what is (my circles) a whack of money, and it all still seemed awfully and inappropriately minor when compared to the hollywood machine.

Oh well, I guess I could say that at least the movie was about science - sort of. Here was some of the scribbling they put on my white board.

Looks like these "humans" may actually spontaneously combust if presented with a flame. By the way, Kevin Bacon wasn't in this particular movie - instead, Christian Slater was in the house, but I didn't get a chance to see him - maybe next time.