Our colleague Kate Jeffrey, who was one of the editors of Nature Medicine for most of 2007, went back to academia late last year, and it shows that she hasn’t wasted any time in getting involved in exciting proyects within and out of the lab.

The other day she told me about a scientific film festival that she is co-organizing. The idea is to screen fictional films that have a scientific storyline or main character. The festival will feature some already existing films but, more importantly, they want to showcase the work of aspiring filmmakers who may be interested enough in science to make a fictional movie about it.

I’m no filmmaker, but right off the bat I can think of a couple of ideas:

1) A scientist doing his second postdoc discovers that an experiment key to his whole project will not work. The film is about the aftermath of his disappointment, during which he entertains ideas such as dropping out of science, committing scientific fraud and starting a third postdoc. Surely there is a good drama waiting to be developed there.

2) The New Yorker published earlier this year a fascinating article on “”https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/07/080107fa_fact_elliott">human guinea pigs", who volunteer for clinical trials. There easily is a movie in the life of a ficticious guinea pig who is involved in a trial as unfortunate as TeGenero’s TGN1412 trial in 2006. The side effects would have to be not as severe as in that trial, but something that allows the director to explore human nature more fully — something like, say, infertility.

Anyway, congratulations to Kate and her co-organizers on such a great idea. I hope they get a lot of submissions from filmmakers inspired by the project.

By the way, have a look at the trailer they created to begin to advertise the festival: