A New Wave of Science Communication

From suspect WhatsApp chains to lengthy news articles on the subject, the bombardment of information about COVID-19 is relentless. Labocine, the so-called “Netflix for science,” is not shying away from the coronavirus. Instead the online platform is shining a different light on the pandemic by showcasing works that weave the seemingly disparate worlds of cinema and science.

Alexis Gambis, assistant professor of biology, film and new media, started Labocine as an initiative that aims to disseminate some 3,000 science films from almost 200 countries to a wider audience. The subscription-based video and research platform draws from its wide base of artists, scientists, filmmakers, and journalists to curate videos and articles that pertain to the monthly theme.

“Video has become a powerful tool for explaining scientific concepts, especially in these times of anxiety and misinformation related to the COVID-19 crisis. It may be overstated but a picture is worth a thousand words. We can better make sense of this terrible virus for example when we visualize it and see it in action using both scientific imagery and artistic representations,” he said.

Labocine is part of a large range of projects that includes Imagine Science Film Festival, which Gambis founded as a way of trying to promote a dialogue between scientists and filmmakers. The film festival, which has been running since 2008, is held annually and showcases science through fiction, documentary and animation over a week in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Paris.

The 2020 Imagine Science Film Festival, themed migration, included around 100 newly released films from 30 countries that were showcased online on Labocine. Of those, six films were made as part of an initiative named Symbiosis, where scientists and filmmakers were paired to make a film about the theme of crisis.

One of the Labocine issues from early in the pandemic, titled Epidemics and Microfauna, brought together dozens of videos, ranging from lacy experimental videos to short documentary pieces on various different diseases, viruses, and pandemics. The goal is to communicate science more expansively to viewers that are often being misled by their sources of information about COVID-19.

Working quickly with the network of hundreds of these collaborators from around the world, Gambis and his team were able to produce an entire issue on pandemics and disease to help illuminate the current outbreak of COVID-19 back in April 2020.

“We are informing the public about the current situation through a playlist of films provided by scientists and artists. Be it in an animation on washing your hands with soap, a documentary about microbial organisms, a fictional take on humanity during a pandemic or a compilation of stunning electron microscopy provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, all of these videos are brought together to create a cinematic experience that both educates and entertains,” he said.

Two Lenses

Gambis’s projects are a culmination of an eclectic career marrying the scholarship of a molecular biologist who spent most of his twenties with an eye to a microscope looking down at fruit flies and an upbringing drenched in the world of film. Gambis said his upbringing, with a mother as a filmmaker and a father as an engineer-turned painter, ingrained an innate fluency in bridging the worlds of science and cinema.

“As I was doing my PhD at The Rockefeller University, I realized that the lab could become a film set. There was a need to find ways in which we can have a more seasoned and less cliché way of thinking about science and film, beyond just science documentaries or science fiction,” he said.

This has been incorporated into the so-called Science New Wave, inspired by the French New Wave, that Gambis is central to. At the heart of the movement is reinventing how science is communicated in a more multidisciplinary approach that sees working relationships across all disciplines.

An example of how Gambis explores that interplay between his two spheres of interest is found in his latest work, Son of Monarchs. The French- Venezuelan’s second narrative feature film explores the relationship between evolution and immigration by depicting the protagonist who turns to the monarch butterfly to understand his hybrid identity living between Mexico and the US.

The idea behind these films, and a big part of the biologist-filmmaker’s message, is trying to put more science in fiction as a method of popularizing science and reaching a wider audience.

Informing the public about science, whether it’s about the history of genetics, the “poetry of evolutionary biology,” or the threat of COVID-19, is furthering the goal of Gambis’s life mission as biologist, curator and filmmaker.

“Ultimately, we all crave stories. The word fiction has been stigmatized with science because we think we’re misrepresenting science. But it’s the opposite, we’re paying tribute to science by incorporating it into stories that people can identify with,” he says.

A New Wave of Science Communication / Words: Naser Al Wasmi / Editor: Abigail Kelly