The crazy professor is a very familiar character: Professor Frink from the Simpsons; Dr Emmett Brown from Back to the Future; Jeff Goldblum in The Fly; Bunsen and Beaker from the Muppets. Scientists have always been portrayed as sightly out of tune with the rest of society. Sometimes this is unfair, but sometimes it is absolutely spot on.
The latest affirmation of our nerdiness was the Dance Your PhD contest in Vienna, in which researchers try to convey their research results using the medium of modern dance. Performers were divided between three separate classes: students, postdocs and professors and the performances included a tango representing the amalgamation of galaxies and a tap dance describing post-translational regulation of mRNA.
The classification seems oddly unnecessary. You wouldn't think that a long research career would be much of an advantage in the choreography of your performance.
As a publicity exercise, the contest has clearly scored highly (covered by Science, The Telegraph and The Guardian) but it clearly doesn't help those of us wanting to convey to the public the normality of a research career. And as for it's artistic merit, I'll let you be the judge of that (performance videos).
Tuesday, 11 March 2008
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