THE CEPHALOPOD’S SYLLABUS: Hollywood Biology

BY MASHA DOLGOFF
University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee STEM major

Here in southwest Florida, we’re lucky enough to have vibrant sea life that includes a couple species of octopuses. These fascinating creatures, belonging to the animal class Cephalapoda, are known for their remarkable intelligence. Their ability to constantly expand their knowledge of their environment, along with my Hollywood Biology class, has inspired this column.

In this course, we evaluate the way real biological phenomena are represented in film and on television. Needless to say, science fiction takes a lot of creative license as far as the work of actual researchers is concerned, but it’s a lot more fun to take the cinematic abstraction in good faith and use it as a starting point to find out something new. Here are several blockbuster titles you might know and the unexpected ways they flow from test tube to screen.

If you could have any superpower, would you have one inspired by the animal world?

X-Men (2000)was the first installment in a film series about a team of mutant superheroes based on the Marvel Comics of the same name. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of their miraculous adaptations are borrowed from other enterprising branches of the animal kingdom.

The villainous character Toad, for example, has the ability extend his tongue up to 30 feet. While this quality is clearly inspired by frogs and other amphibians, the applications of long tongues for something other than just prey retrieval in other species might be less well known.

For example, if you’ve ever been awoken by a woodpecker hammering away at a tree by your window, you might have wondered how they accomplish all that cranial construction work without the avian equivalent of hardhat. Popular theories suggest that the secret lies in the stretchy organ, which measures up to a third of their total body length and wraps around the back of their skull to extend out of their beak every time they land a blow. The reasoning of some scientists is that besides reaching for insects, the tongue also provides cushioning for the brain inside the bird’s red-tipped head as it gets jostled from about 20 pecks per second in the type of impact that would most certainly lead to concussions in humans.

Maybe instead of wondering if we would rather be able to read someone’s mind or be invisible, we should consider how we could forever hang up the bike-riding helmet and accomplish safety in style using this versatile muscle.

Could a real time machine look like a gene splicer?

Jurassic Park (1993) warned us about the dangers of resurrecting long-gone species like dinosaurs for human entertainment.

A Texas-based company called Colossal Biosciences is now attempting to do something similar, albeit with more recent candidates and claiming more noble reasons. On April 7, the company’s efforts made headlines as they announced that they had genetically engineered an extinct species, the dire wolf, back into existence by modifying grey wolf DNA. Using CRISPR, a gene editing tool that works a lot like a “find and replace” function in a word processor, they tweaked 20 locations in the grey wolf’s genetic code to make it more closely resemble its long-lost relative.

Next on their wish list are animals like the woolly mammoth and thylacine. The thylacine, otherwise known as a Tasmanian tiger, was a striped carnivorous marsupial that helped keep Australia’s wilderness in check and was hunted to extinction in the early 1900s. Colossal has said that its reconstruction of the thylacine’s genome 99.9% complete, and has been considering the fat-tailed dunnart, its closest living relative, as a surrogate for the “de-extinction” of the animal.

Critics of the projects argue that the comeback kits are simply approximations of the original specimen, not a true reproduction, and that the initiatives serve as a publicity magnet that detracts from conservation of the species we still have around. The look of charismatic megafauna such as thylacines and dire wolves may also be a hidden “cuteness bias” for their restoration, as no one appears to be too keen to resurrect the litany of insects lost to the cabinet of curiosities of time. What do you think about the debate?

What happens when you shine a light on the most mysterious organ of the human body?

If you’ve been watching the buzzy biopunk series Severance on Apple TV+ that has gained pop culture momentum with its recently concluded second season, you might have wondered if the sci-fi memory-sequestering technology that lies at the heart of the plot is remotely possible. The show revolves around employees of a secretive biotechnology company opting for a procedure that allows them to isolate the memories of their professional and personal lives.

While the human brain is notoriously one of the most mysterious organs ever studied, breakthroughs have been made in the roughly jellybean-sized brain of mice using a technique called optogenetics. The technology allows neurons to be manipulated with light and was first developed by a team at Stanford University by breeding mice that can synthesize light-sensitive proteins with DNA borrowed from green algae. If the mice’s neurons are triggered to install the protein right before an event, the resulting strobe symphony can be recorded and played back to make them relive the memory.

For example, mice that are placed in a new and uncomfortable environment will suddenly revert to their extroverted state when “reminded” of their previous home with the dendrite disco. In humans, optogenetic therapy created a stunning result by partially returning vision to a man who had been blind for decades. Once again, DNA for light-sensitive proteins from algae were inserted, this time to bestow photoreceptor properties on inner retinal cells that normally serve as interpreters for the rods and cones that detect light and have experienced cell death in blind patients. Next on this exciting frontier is the possibility of treating Parkinson’s disease and other neurological or psychiatric disorders. And while we are perhaps thankfully far away from a reality in which our employer can exert mind control over us, we can thank the ability of our brain to perceive the wonderful world around us, however closely its machinations are guarded from us by the laws of nature and the universe.