Bard Science Journal

Alexis Gambis, Ph.d. (Bard ’03)  is a scientist and filmmaker. He was a biology major at Bard and went on to earn a doctorate in molecular biology at Rockefeller University before deciding to focus on science filmmaking. He is the founder of Imagine Science Films, a non-profit that organizes a science film festivals, and the founder of Imaginal Disc, a science film production company. He’s also in pre-production for his first feature film The Fly Room, which he plans to shoot at Bard this May. Bardians who are interested in acting in the film or working on the film crew should get in contact with him via theflyroom.com.

Bard Science Journal: You’re planning on filming part of your first feature, The Fly Room at Bard. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the movie is about and how Bardians can get involved?

Alexis Gambis: Yeah.So my first time working with Drosophila [the most frequently-used species of fruit fly in bio labs] was actually here at Bard in Mike Tibbets’ class. I’m very fond of my early days working with fruit flies , and then I had that long career working with fruit flies at Rockefeller, and I learned early in my Rockefeller Ph.d. about “The Fly Room”.

It’s the birthplace of genetics. It was a lab that came into being in about 1910, which was basically like a little nook [at Columbia} called “The Fly Room”.. It was headed by Thomas Hunt Morgan, who was interested in understanding the chromosome theory, because chromosomes and all that were very, very new. He was studying Darwinian traits and how the traits are encoded, using Drosophila as a model organism.

(photo of Calvin Bridges during his time at Columbia)

His first two students were Calvin Bridges and H.J. Muller. They were like in his Intro to Development Class at Columbia University. Anyway, long story short, they ended up being the founding group involved in discovering that genes are arranged in a certain way on chromosomes and that they encoded specific traits. They made chromosomal maps by doing recombination studies. I like to compare The Fly Room to The Dead Poets’ Society; it was really just three or four people doing their work and not knowing the significance of what they were doing.

And Calvin Bridges, who was one of the scientists, was (I like to compare him a little bit to James Dean) kind of this artsy scientist, who was a little bit disconnected from his family. His parents died when he was three, and he was raised by his grandmother, who was extremely strict. Anyway, he had this crazy journey where he wasn’t allowed to read or study and somehow applied for a grant to go to Columbia and made his way in.

The story of the Fly Room is really interesting because it’s about the birth of genetics but it’s also about this troubled man, who had all these problems with his family and his daughter and the fact that he also had like a sex addiction. He was always seeking love, and I thought he confused sex and love.

But the connection with Bard is that the film begins [Calvin Bridges’] daughter. I met her. She’s 94 years old and told me the story of her father and how she once spent the day with him in his lab. That day she also learning that he had been cheating on her mother. There’s a scene, where because he’s so irresponsible but has to take care of Betsy for the day, he takes her to this speakeasy in the Village, and she sees her father flirting with all these women, and that’s how she find out. I thought that it was really interesting that she told this story about her being so amazed by the genetics but also being so angry at her father. She had a deep confusion, even at 94, about how she felt about it. I thought it was really interesting to use the perspective of a 10-year-old girl as a way for people to understand what was going on. She becomes our vehicle into this story.

(Production still from the Fly Room)

She also told me the story about what she was doing when she heard about her father’s death. She was studying fashion at Pratt. She was so enamored of the colors and the dresses and that was why she hated her father’s fly room, because it was all black and white. It was this ill-lit room with bananas hanging from the ceiling and flies everywhere. It was like the opposite of what she was interested in. But she told me about one night, when she was out with her fiancé, and they were at a party. And that was the night that she got the news that her father had passed away. At that point in her life, she had no connection with her father, because her father had moved to California with the fly room when the lab had moved to Caltech. And that’s the beginning of my film. She reads in the New York Times that “One of the founding fathers of genetics has died” and that takes her back to the fly room.

[For that scene] I wanted a place that I felt comfortable shooting in. I mentioned it to Todd Solondz, who is one of my advisers, and he immediately suggested Bard for this liberal artsy setting, and I was like, “Oh. I actually went there.” I thought Manor would be a great place for the party.

So then I came up and talked to Jim Brudvig [Bard College’s Vice President for Administration] and I told him it would be a dream to make my first feature where it all began with Mike Tibbetts’ class  and studying film and just projecting my video artwork onto Blithewood and things like that. It’s almost like coming full circle. And he said, “That’s amazing. Go for it.”

I want to work with both Bard science majors and film majors and get a lot of people involved in the film. Not only as actors but also as crew members and science advisers. So I’m hoping that it’ll become this kind of network. That’s what I’m trying for, and it’s a lot to. So for the next few months, I’m going to be meeting with science majors and science teachers here and trying to create a dialogue.

So all that’s going to be happening in the next few months. We’re going to start shooting in May. There’s going to be a lot of crew members around. I even spoke to the people at Two Boots, who are really excited about it. We’re going to shoot basically right after the semester ends. So people who want to be involved should plan to stick around for an extra week at the end of May.

BSJ: How do people who want to be involved get involved?

AG: There’s a website called theflyroom.com . There you’ll hear about the story, and it has pictures and short films on [The Fly Room and Calvin Bridges}, and there’s a newsletter than you can subscribe to.

 (Production still from The Fly Room.)

BSJ: Why do you think that it’s important for there to be a dialogue between art and science?

AG: Well, I think that the processes of art and science are very similar. I say that from my experience doing both and from growing up in a household where I had been surrounded by artists my whole life. It’s not just the creating art, but also the living and the difficulties of balancing creating art with being productive, and it’s the same with science. They’re so similar but at the same time, they’re considered so separate in the public  eye.I found that really fascinating as a challenge. If you go back fifty or a hundred years ago, that was more the case. They were more connected; there was more philosophy about science, and artists were really interested in science.

I think that somehow we’ve moved into [separate] disciplines.  To be honest, even a class that’s like an art-science class that tries to show the connections between disciplines feels a little bit forced like they’re trying to show connections when the reality is connected. You don’t need a class or anything; it’s just the way it is. You can try and show the connections between art and science or you can just film scientists  in their daily lives, and it’ll become apparent that the scientific process is inherently creative.

I was also interested in visualizing science and making films about science that communicate science to the public, because in my mind, [film] is the best tool. People read and people listen to the radio, but film is such a common denominator.  Everybody responds to video. And you can reach all gamuts of the population.

And also, being in my twenties back then, working on fruit flies and nobody understanding why, it was a way of communicating with the public. And I was also terrible at following protocols and rules when it came to science. I was like always cutting my gel or forgetting to put my glove on and then putting my hand in ethidium bromide, and I was like, “Oh my god. I’m not the man for this.” But then I came up with this crazy idea of using fluorescent genes [adding genes that coded for fluorescent proteins and using them to map out different parts of the developing fly’s body], and everybody was like, “Is that possible? Are there too many steps involved?” But it was like painting and the genes were like my paintbrush. And it was all because I had this crazy idea but had to conform to the protocol to get it done. But the original idea came from this creative, almost unrealistic, goal and then figuring out how to do it.

BSJ: Can you tell us about your time at Bard?

AG: I came to Bard in ’99, and when I first came here I was interested in biology, but I, because you know in high school, biology and science were all about memorizing and just kind of learning all these facts and so I didn’t really…I knew that I liked biology but I didn’t feel like I could major in it, so I decided to be a film major. I wasn’t at all thinking about connecting science and film. And then I started taking biology classes and realizing that I was really interested in the aesthetics of science and how intricate and how artistic they were, and that was what appealed to me about biology more than the applications or the protocols or the statistics. I obviously had to learn all that in class, you know, with biostatistics and Matthew Deady and all that, but what really fascinated me was this beautifully faceted organism and how things operated and coordinated within it. And so then I started taking more biology classes, and I was still doing film, and I was thinking about doing both, but it was hard.

It was very difficult at that time to do both. Obviously with the advent of Citizen Science, the whole idea of non-majors working with science is more embraced, but when I was here, it was still new. Some teachers found it really interesting, other teachers found it amusing, like “Oh, that’s nice.”, and then some were fully against it. I got a whole range of reactions to it. But  I was doing theater also; I was like in a play. I was still doing film classes, but I decided to go the biology route. And that’s kind of how things started. I was still, y‘know, interested in film, but I knew at that time also that I didn’t have enough experience to make films. I always thought that film was a medium where you needed to have some prior experience in order to really make a film, and I was just kind of making these artsy videos. It didn’t really feel generative, so I was like, “Oh, I’ll get back to that in a few years”.

So I was a bio major, a combination of both bio and computer science, because I was interested in bioinformatics, which was new also at the time, and interested in how to rearrange genomes. After Bard, I went back to France for like a year, and I worked at the Pasteur Institute, and I was doing protein structure prediction, and then I did a masters in computational biology. I was contemplating med school, but I also worked at Rockefeller for a month or two and that was my getting to know Rockefeller. And then I applied for a Ph.d. program, and I got in.

BSJ: Can you tell us more about Imagine Science Films? 

AG: It really started with me being interested in film and science and thinking maybe I should create an organization that would bridge the gap. And I had never really intensely thought about being a festival director, but I thought that there was so much visual data that would be great for film making in labs. There were also so many people when I was there [at Rockefeller] who wanted to make small films, short films, and in 2003, there were new cameras coming out. There was more home video, and I thought what would it be like to give a scientist a camera and make like a lab home video.

Kate Jeffrey, who was then a post doc [at Rockefeller],  then helped me start it.  She had worked at Nature (one of the biggest and most prestigious science journals in the world) and started calling around saying, “We want to do this film festival.” And no one had really done it before, and so Nature was immediately interested in getting involved. We just happened to come across something that was needed, and it was just the right timing.

The goal was to go all around the city with it and not have a film festival that happened at Rockefeller. We were like, “No. We need to have it in bars. We need to have it in museums. We need to have it in cinemas. Let’s make this a two week celebration and have all kinds of films and have discussions- How is the science portrayed in the film? How is the scientist portrayed in the film?” It was such an ambitious idea. Obviously, we’re still getting there, but it’s really grown. The first year we had to look for films.

We went to this foundation, the Alfred P.  Sloan Foundation that is all about public understanding of science through media. They give out funding and grants, and film is one of their big missions. I told them my story, and I was asked to be one of the members on the Sloan Advisory Committee. I think I was, by like 50 years, the youngest.( I was 25.) It was great; I became like an advocate for that.

So that’s how it started. The film festival is like the initial mission of the non-profit {Imagine Science Films] but now we’re branching out with satellite film festivals and workshops.  And the big thing that I’m working on is the magazine [Imagine Science Lab, an online magazine that incorporates both scientific research papers and art and film] , partly so that we can have a year-round activity but also because I’m really interested in revolutionizing how science is communicated, and it’s not only through writing, and it’s also not only through radio or video, but it should be some kind of combination of all. And nowadays, we see a lot of efforts to do video or to do radio, but we want this magazine to be integrated, like a hub. And maybe sometimes we’ll have like a radio lab show that’s going to be associated with an article and then we’ll have like artwork or exhibits. It goes on and on-

BSJ: You could have songs!

AG: Yeah. That’s actually what I’m working on with Scientific American right now. They’re going to post these videos on their site, and with each one, there’s a recommended playlist that will go with the article. So it’ll be about consciousness and the mind-body problem, and then there will be a playlist for that.

And, obviously, because of my connections with magazines, not only are they the main funders of the festival, Science is a sponsor. Nature is an awards sponsor. There’s also New Scientist, Discover, Seed when it existed was involved, and Scientific American were also part of this collaboration. And because everything in my work has involved magazines, I thought, “Well, why not start my own and have them help us?” I also like the idea that both Science and Nature, who are like the two biggest science journals in the world and rivals, they live in harmony with us, because they’re both sponsors. It’s almost like in this film world, there’s no competition. It’s almost like a free zone where people can exchange ideas.

So that’s how Imagine Science started. We now have offices in Brooklyn. We have about three people that work full time, but we have a lot of volunteers and a lot of people that want to be involved. I was juggling Imagine Science with school, and that was really hard, but this is the first year that I’m out of school, so I’m going to devote a lot of my time to figuring out how to restructure things and get more people involved. And obviously, I’m interested in getting people from Bard involved, because I know that a lot of this is because of the education I had and the teachers I had here. So it’s almost like a note of trust I have, knowing that they’re Bardians. And I would love to have a connection to Bard.

For more info on Gambis and his projects, visit imaginsciencefilms.org, theflyroom.com, or alexisgambis.com.