Lessons in cinematic chemistry and cyanobacterial beats

Cinematic chemistry

About 5 years ago, chemist and cinema fan John O’Donoghue of Trinity College Dublin began receiving requests for recommendations of movies and shows that feature the central science. Soon his list had grown large enough that he started giving talks about chemistry in popular programming. Now that project has led to a book, Onscreen Chemistry: The Portrayal of Chemical Science in Film and TV, which features science on big and small screens from the late 19th century until today. The hardest part, besides watching a massive amount of footage at 1.5× speed, O’Donoghue says, was knowing when to stop.

The book weaves together the story of chemistry in both fiction and nonfiction programming with the development of photography itself. The medium and the depictions grew up together, he says.

O’Donoghue noticed a surprising amount of chemistry in movies from the 1930s to the 1960s. “We definitely peaked a bit earlier than the other sciences,” he tells Newscripts. His favorite films include the 1943 chemistry love story Madame Curie and a 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that features a first-person view of the title character working in a laboratory.

In the later parts of the 20th century, chemistry’s prominence in film and TV declined, O’Donoghue says, in part due to associations with industrial accidents. Around that time, though, film itself may have led to an enduring stereotype—that chemistry labs are stuffed full of glassware containing colorful liquids. O’Donoghue posits this grew out of the novelty of color film. “They just kind of lost their minds in the ’60s, when they finally got the money to upgrade all the cameras and everything to color, and they just put color everywhere.”

Early 21st century programs like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Breaking Bad helped usher in a new era of more-prominent chemistry on screens. Now, O’Donoghue says, we’re in a “golden age” for on-screen chemistry with films like 2023’s Elemental, which O’Donoghue calls “the best children’s-focused movie for chemistry ever made,” and the TV series Lessons in Chemistry, which stands out to O’Donoghue in part because lead character Elizabeth Zott pronounces scientific words accurately.

Algal grooves

Could the next hot DJ be microalgae? University of Cambridge biochemist Joshua Lawrence and a multidisciplinary team have worked out how to make music from the electrical signals emitted by the cyanobacteria, also known as microalgae, Synechocystis.

Their efforts, described in the journal Applied Phycology(2024, DOI:10.1080/26388081.2024.2434476), were inspired by ongoing research into the electrical signals produced by living organisms. Lawrence and the team developed a way to convert tiny currents into audio signals and, eventually, music. It started as a proof of concept, which they used in an outreach project. Then they created a second prototype that their artist colleague Lena Kuzmich customized for an exhibit in Vienna.

Biomusic­—music generated from biological inputs—has existed for decades. But many previous efforts, Lawrence says, were influenced by variables beyond the organism’s activity, such as moisture in the room. The Cambridge effort is more closely tied to how the photosynthetic cyanobacteria’s activity changes, such as how the flow of electrons alters in response to light. “That process is regulated by the metabolism and metabolic activity of the cell,” Lawrence tells Newscripts. Their device captures what’s happening inside of a living organism, sends that bioelectric data to a frequency converter, and then uses a synthesizer to play notes based on specific bands of activity.

These biocurrents are diminutive compared with those that power many traditional electronic devices, so making music requires a highly sensitive system to record the voltage coming out of the cells. But this is difficult to pull off with a portable, adaptable device.

Lawrence says the project might be well-suited to producing ambient music. You wouldn’t have to depend on a computer or generative AI to create music without direct human input, he says. “I’m a biologist, so I’d quite like to hear something that’s a bit more organic.”

Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.