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03/24/2005
Updated: 04/04/2005 JAMES CAMERON
Stealing ScienceAliens of the Deep, the Imax Attack, and the Aliens of the Christian Rightby C.J. "I'm an explorer," announces the young woman scientist sitting at the controls of an ocean diving "submersible" headed two miles straight down to the bottom of the sea. The film is Aliens of the Deep--a spine-tingling 3-D Imax documentary that transports you into a dark watery world where sunlight has never reached, a place where towering volcanic chimneys belch out black smoke plumes that reach temperatures far beyond boiling, around which are clustered living things that look like no fish or plant you've ever imagined. And the most amazing thing is that this is not science fiction. It's all real. And it's happening at one of the volcanically active locations somewhere deep in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. "I'm an explorer." Her simple declaration could be lifted out of my 1950s Weekly Reader, but this morning I'm sitting in this theater alongside 200 enthusiastic Black school kids, wondering if the life of an such an explorer of the natural world will even be a permissible option by the time they graduate high school. Alarmist? Consider this: On March 19, the New York Times science editor, Cornelia Dean, reported that several Imax theaters in the south have decided not to show Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, a kind of sister film to Aliens of the Deep. (Both films are produced by Titanic director James Cameron.) Dean reports that these theaters, many of which are in science centers, are "refusing to show movies that mention evolution-- or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth--fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures." Volcanoes of the Deep Sea makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes--apparently sufficient reason for Lisa Buzzelli, director of a Charleston, South Carolina Imax theater to reject the film: "We've got to pick a film that's going to sell in our area. If it's not going to sell, we're not going to take it. Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution. Being in the Bible Belt, the movie does have a lot to do with evolution, and we weigh that carefully." ***** Truth is, the religious dogma of the flat earthers really can't stand up to the excitement generated by these undersea films about what lies out there in the "reality-based" physical world waiting to be observed, explored and understood--especially the reality of evolution. And I can't remember a more thrilling experience in a movie theater than the 48 minutes I spent with James Cameron and his engaging young crew of scientists. In the Aliens of the Deep Educators Guide it describes the deep undersea trenches where this courageous film crew went to bring back this wonderful experience for us: "If you looked at the Earth from space, and could make the ocean invisible, you'd see huge ridges running like zippers along the floor of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. These are chains of underwater volcanoes where the Earth literally spreads apart at the seams as magma presses up from deeper within the crust to form a new seafloor surface. "Dives from the Aliens of the Deep expedition took place at several volcanically-active areas. In the Atlantic Ocean, dives were made at Lost City, Snake Pit, and Menez Gwen. In the Pacific Ocean, dives were made at 9 degrees North, at 21 degrees North and at Guaymas Basin." (See map located online here under Educators Guide [PDF] on page 5) They take us down to a completely black deep-sea environment where photosynthesis1 has never taken place, and chemosynthesis2 is the process by which life continues, or I should say thrives . The sulfurous emissions from volcanic seams in the seafloor nurture this rich "dark life." The film takes us there, right into teeming schools of a trillion white eyeless shrimps and crabs crowding around hydrothermal vents that spit black smoke from craggy grey spires. We encounter a grove of vertical six-foot high alabaster-white sea worms with bright red heads (or are they tails?). At one point, a creature I can only describe as a floating bridal veil passes before us with the propulsive rhythm of a caress. In the next moment, we're face-to-face with the ugliest fishlike thing I've ever seen whose jaw on-screen looks approximately 100 feet wide and headed for my midsection. As the submersible hovers over the spewing volcanic vents, the narrator announces that the 750-degree emission heat could melt the vehicle's glass window. My whole upper body jumps back. For my tastes, this is a meshing of art and technology and science that is just rare and wonderful. The kids on either side of me seem to agree, as we all squeal and go speechless by turns, living proof of Cameron's comment: "You turn toward the arts and somehow there's this thought that you can't do both, that the human brain just can't hold the arts and the sciences at the same time. That's just not true." A premise of the film and the expedition is that exploring the deepest levels of the earth's ocean can offer clues to the possibilities of life in outer space. So, besides marine biologists, planetary scientists, and geophysicists, Cameron has brought along astrobiologists (scientists who search for signs of life in space), and the film moves from the ocean- depths to a tripped-out (animated) journey to Europa, a moon orbiting Jupiter, where vast oceans are thought to lie beneath its miles-deep covering of ice. The whole theater erupted in applause at the end of this one. ***** Back to life on distressing and distressed planet earth. An alarming aspect of the whole episode with these Imax films is that theaters are making these self-censoring decisions largely on a pre-emptive basis, or in response to comments from a handful of fundamentalist Christians. The marketing director for one Texas museum, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, told the New York Times that they decided not to present the movie after prescreening it to a sample audience. Of the 137 viewers who participated in the survey afterwards, she reported that many liked it but a few called it "blasphemous," offering comments like, "I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact." In the case of Fort Worth, news got out about the rejection of the film, and it caused such an uproar that a few days later--in a welcome development--the museum reversed their decision, issuing a public letter stating: "We want to ensure that the public knows the Museum supports the position that evolution is a major unifying concept of science. We use scientific evidence in our wide-ranging presentations and interpretations of how life has changed over time." But the fact that the film was pulled--even temporarily--because a few Christian fundamentalists in a focus group objected is a warning of the anti-scientific atmosphere that is being imposed on the country. Until recently, one might have thought we dwell in a land where such bland and obvious declarations would not be controversial. Welcome to 9th century America, a place where the penetration of Biblical literalists into the body politic has reached such a level that the New York Times feels compelled to state for readers of a news article in their science section the unassailable truth that "There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science." They also report a National Science Foundation survey that reveals a bare 53% of the population agree with the statement "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." This "sets the United States apart from all other industrialized nations" where typically 80% accept the idea of evolution (in Japan it's 96% and even in predominately Catholic Poland it's 75%). 
This widespread American ignorance is not mainly the result of a movement "from below." For decades now these people who are grouped around Bush and the kind of people that they represent have been working and preparing a whole infrastructure in society that could move this society towards a theocratic state. In just the past few months, the pace of this crusade has accelerated to the point where even websites devoted to "theocracy-watching" can barely keep up. In science education, longstanding efforts to take material on evolution out of high school textbooks are starting to succeed wildly, alongside campaigns to sticker textbooks with warnings that evolution is just "one theory" of many. More insidious, the New York Times recently reported that a large number of biology teachers are quietly just skipping over discussion of the chapter on evolution to avoid tangling with zealous principals and parents. And if you live in a so-called "blue state," check out your state laws--you may be horrified to find that evolution is a banned word in the schools. In talking with an educator who advises science museums in the U.S., I found out that there are almost no exhibitions on evolution at science centers, which are the institutions most likely to house Imax theaters. In fact, he said you will not even find the "e-word" in the label text at these centers. "That's the problem, if you start leaving out the science you haven't got a leg to stand on when these fundamentalists come in and demand that you take out more of it." He explained that there are many such science centers scattered throughout the country, mostly in smaller cities and towns. They sprang up during the '60s and '70s in the excitement over teaching the sciences, and in the last 20 years many people in these communities have looked toward the centers as one way to deal with the deterioration of science curriculum in the public schools. But these centers do not typically have their own in-house collections or scientific specialists on staff, and are largely dependent on contributions from local businesses and ticket sales. This makes them highly vulnerable to the well-orchestrated public opinion campaigns from the extreme right. He also makes the heavy point that "This assault on science and critical thinking would be bad anywhere, but these science centers are among the few places where the masses have access to something that resembles science." And it's not just evolution that's under attack at these science centers. Many of their exhibitions are geared toward teenagers and health matters, but the question of contraception is never talked about, much less reproductive health or sex. "I visited the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science which had a terrarium housing a couple of live frogs, and the label text said, 'If you see these frogs one on top of the other, don't worry about it, they're not hurting each other.' Nothing about mating. It gets ridiculous, but it's serious because when you go into a forum with the imprimatur of authority like a museum or science center, there's some expectation that what's being presented is an accurate reflection of reality. So what people encounter there helps set the terms for them developing their own worldview. Science is not just some 300 factoids; it's a whole way of understanding the world. That's what concerns the religious right who fear the idea of people acquiring a critical and materialist perspective on the way the world works. The danger here is unfortunately not yet widely understood in the science center community." Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen science centers, mostly in the South, said Dr. Richard Lutz, the Rutgers oceanographer who was chief scientist for the film. The New York Times also reports that "religious controversy has adversely affected the distribution of a number of films, including Cosmic Voyage, which depicts the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to clusters of galaxies, and Galápagos, about the islands where Darwin theorized about evolution." There are so few Imax theaters in the U.S. that these controversies heighten the risks astronomically for making any science films that venture into subject matter which could be deemed offensive to the fundamentalists. And giant- format science documentaries "are generally not big moneymakers" anyhow, according to Joe DeAmicis, vice president for marketing at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. "It's going to be hard for our filmmakers to continue to make unfettered documentaries when they know going in that 10 percent of the market will reject them." ***** I'm thinking about all those kids whose teachers took them to Aliens of the Deep, and the highly placed forces who are right now preparing a deadly future for these youth--no science, no documentaries, no deep-sea diving. I'm dreaming about the power of art and imagination--can it ignite people to join the political battle to turn back this dangerous situation before it's too late? I imagine these kids running into their science class next week and angrily demanding that their teachers start teaching science. Start telling the truth about the world. Dare to say the "e" word. Or get the hell out of the classrooms! And, still dreaming, I contemplate what wonders could that theater full of kids be unleashed to create if the masses of people ran society? My educator friend sends an email saying that in the past couple days there's been a push among professionals on a science center list serve to get Volcanoes booked into more centers as a way of taking a public stand. An official from the Ft. Worth Museum reports to the list that the museum received 75 emails encouraging them to show the film, and that this was pivotal in turning around the decision. More food for thought. As I return home from the multiplex on the subway, my eye travels to a poster featuring a robot-type vehicle with an outstretched mechanical arm and prehensile metal fingers. I'm on automatic, thinking, "Cool, another explorer vehicle," when I notice that this robot is gingerly picking up a black briefcase left on a train platform. A new installment in the city's propaganda campaign to train every citizen to be a snitch in the "anti-terror" war. Their slogan, "If You See Something, Say Something." I mentally erase the offending poster, replacing it with a poster of a pencil with a cross-shaped eraser rubbing out pictures of the amazing sea creatures I have spent the afterrnoon with. I make a mental note: "If You Understand Anything About The Real World, Shout At The Top Of Your Lungs." You can see trailers and theaters where the films are playing at these websites: NOTES:1 Photosynthesis is the process in green plants and certain other organisms by which carbohydrates are synthesized from carbon dioxide and water, using light as an energy source. 2 Chemosynthesis refers to the synthesis of carbohydrate from carbon dioxide and water, using energy obtained from the chemical oxidation of simple inorganic compounds. This form of synthesis is limited to certain bacteria and fungi. March 19, 2005 A New Screen Test for Imax: It's the Bible vs. the VolcanoBy CORNELIA DEAN The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen. Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures. The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place. People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage," which depicts the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to clusters of galaxies; "Galápagos," about the islands where Darwin theorized about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from vents in the ocean floor. "Volcanoes," released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen science centers, mostly in the South, said Dr. Richard Lutz, the Rutgers oceanographer who was chief scientist for the film. He said theater officials rejected the film because of its brief references to evolution, in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the undersea vents. Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing it to a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax theaters. Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous." In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I don't agree with their presentation of human existence." On other criteria, like narration and music, the film did not score as well as other films, Ms. Murray said, and over all, it did not receive high marks, so she recommended that the museum pass. "If it's not going to draw a crowd and it is going to create controversy," she said, "from a marketing standpoint I cannot make a recommendation" to show it. In interviews, officials at other Imax theaters said they had similarly decided against the film for fear of offending some audiences. "We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public," said Lisa Buzzelli, who directs the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, a commercial theater next to the Charleston Aquarium. Her theater had not ruled out ever showing "Volcanoes," Ms. Buzzelli said, "but being in the Bible Belt, the movie does have a lot to do with evolution, and we weigh that carefully." Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for the producer Stephen Low of Montreal, whose company made the film, said officials at other theaters told him they could not book the movie "for religious reasons," because it had "evolutionary overtones" or "would not go well with the Christian community" or because "the evolution stuff is a problem." Hyman Field, who as a science foundation official had a role in the financing of "Volcanoes," said he understood that theaters must be responsive to their audiences. But Dr. Field he said he was "furious" that a science museum would decide not to show a scientifically accurate documentary like "Volcanoes" because it mentioned evolution. "It's very alarming," he said, "all of this pressure being put on a lot of the public institutions by the fundamentalists." People who follow the issue say it is more likely to arise at science centers and other public institutions than at commercial theaters. The filmmaker James Cameron, who was a producer on "Volcanoes," said the commercial film he made on the same topic, "Aliens of the Deep," had not encountered opposition, except during post-production, when "it was requested from some theaters that we change a line of dialogue" relating to sun worship by ancient Egyptians. The line remained, he said. Mr. Cameron said he was "surprised and somewhat offended" that people were sensitive to the references to evolution in "Volcanoes." "It seems to be a new phenomenon," he said, "obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science." Some in the industry say they fear that documentary filmmakers will steer clear of science topics likely to offend religious fundamentalists. Large-format science documentaries "are generally not big moneymakers," said Joe DeAmicis, vice president for marketing at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and formerly the director of its Imax theater. "It's going to be hard for our filmmakers to continue to make unfettered documentaries when they know going in that 10 percent of the market" will reject them. Others who follow the issue say many institutions are not able to resist such pressure. "They have to be extremely careful as to how they present anything relating to evolution," said Bayley Silleck, who wrote and directed "Cosmic Voyage." Mr. Silleck said he confronted religious objections to that film and predicted he would face them again with a project he is working on now, about dinosaurs. Of course, a number of factors affect a theater manager's decision about a movie. Mr. Silleck said an Imax documentary about oil fires in Kuwait "never reached its distribution potential" because it had shots of the first Persian Gulf war. "The theaters decided their patrons would be upset at seeing the bodies," he said. "We all have to make films for an audience that is a family audience," he went on, "when you are talking about Imax, because they are in science centers and museums." He added, however, "there are a number of us who are concerned that there is a kind of tacit overcaution, overprotectedness of the audience on the part of theater operators." In any event, censoring films like "Volcanoes" is not an option, said Dr. Field, who said Mr. Low, the film's producer, got in touch with him when the evolution issue arose to ask whether the film should be altered. "I said absolutely not," recalled Dr. Field, who retired from the National Science Foundation last year. Mr. Low said that arguments over religion and science disturbed him because of his own religious faith. In his view, he said, science is "a celebration of what nature or God has done. So for me, there's no conflict." Dr. Lutz, the Rutgers oceanographer, recalled a showing of "Volcanoes" he and Mr. Low attended at the New England Aquarium. When the movie ended, a little girl stood in the audience to challenge Mr. Low on the film's suggestion that Earth might have formed billions of years ago in the explosion of a star. "I thought God created the Earth," she said. He replied, "Maybe that's how God did it." UPDATE: March 23, 2005 Evolution Reference Hurts Volcano FilmBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) -- IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs. "We've got to pick a film that's going to sell in our area. If it's not going to sell, we're not going to take it," said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston that is not showing the movie. "Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution." The film, "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes. Buzzelli doesn't rule out showing the movie in the future. IMAX theaters in Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas have declined to show the film, said Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for Stephen Low, the film's Montreal-based director and producer. "I find it's only in the South," Serapiglia said. Critics worry screening out films that mention evolution will discourage the production of others in the future. "It's going to restrain the creative approach by directors who refer to evolution," said Joe DeAmicis, vice president for marketing at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and a former director of an IMAX theater. "References to evolution will be dropped." A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES CAMERONFilmmaker Employs the Arts to Promote the SciencesBy ANDREW C. REVKIN James Cameron, one of the masters of celluloid science fiction, has become fixated with what might be called "reality science" to the point where he has melded science and moviemaking into "Aliens of the Deep," a three-dimensional, Imax-scale exploration of geophysics and extreme biology at the bottom of the sea.  Disney Enterprises Inc./ Walden Media The 48-minute film, which feels like a cross between a breathtaking theme park ride and a "Nova" episode, opened last weekend. In a wide-ranging interview at a Manhattan hotel last week, Mr. Cameron, who at 50 has ridden enormous critical and box office success to a place where he can do whatever he desires, made a case that the arts and sciences can mix and must mix if the public is to become re-enchanted with basic research. He studied physics at California State University, Fullerton, but after recognizing that he was not a math whiz, he shifted toward English and, eventually, filmmaking. "You turn toward the arts and somehow there's this thought that you can't do both, that the human brain just can't hold the arts and the sciences at the same time," he said. "That's just not true." Mr. Cameron, who owns two of the four submersibles used to make the new film, canvassed universities and NASA research centers to hand-pick a crew of young biologists and geologists to join him in 40 dives up to two miles down to the raw volcanic seams in the seafloor that nurture "dark life," riotously rich ecosystems based on chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis. His goal, he explained, was to expose millions of people who would never be able to get into a submarine to the extraordinary diversity and resilience of life on (and possibly off) earth, and to make science "cool" again. "We approach it from the standpoint of the wonder and awe and mystery and these fantastic organisms and so on," he said. "But in general we just need to be doing so much more of this." Q. What's so interesting about the ocean? A. The deep ocean has the same surface area as all the continents of the planet put together. We've got five submersibles in the world that can reach those depths. Russia has two, which we used. Japan has one, the French and the U.S. That's like exploring all the continents of the earth with five Jeeps. We need to be more systematic about exploring all of that. There are so many biology and geophysics stories that can be told. Think about just the hydrothermal vents. For this film we went to known sites, and at every single site the biology was very different than other sites even though the initial geologic conditions were very similar. So much is not understood about the distribution of these animals - how they survive when the sites are repaved by volcanism, which happens periodically. And we don't know anything about what's going on below the Equator. The Indian Ocean is a big blank area for data. So here you have a tsunami that kills probably coming up on a quarter of a million people in an area where there's almost no data on the deep sea. If ever there was a clarion call for knowing more about what's going on in these regions - even setting aside the biology story, just the geophysical story - it is that event. Q. A lot of groups lately have been trying to generate a sense of urgency about the state of the oceans, making the case that we've depleted the sea's great predatory species - the tunas, cod and the like. But no one seems to be alarmed. A. People don't care about energy issues until they can't buy gas. They don't care. Then they start thinking about hybrid autos. That's the way it works. As long as we keep giving them farmed fish from mariculture sources they're not going to appreciate first of all the damage that does, and they certainly are not going to care about a bunch of apex predators out in the middle of the ocean until you just can't get them any more. The average person only reacts when they get directly pushed, a direct stimulus. At what point are people going to really acknowledge that global climate change is real and is really going to affect them in a negative way? The problem with that is that as these thermal loads build up, at the point at which it starts to affect you it's already way too late. By the point at which people knew the Titanic had hit an iceberg it was way too late, unfortunately. Q. What kinds of technical challenges did you face in making "Aliens of the Deep"? A. Imax 3-D is the ultimate immersive experience and if you want to take people to another world this is how you do it. The problem for deep ocean photography has been, How do you deal with an Imax camera? The film-based Imax system is a huge camera. It won't fit in a submersible, and you can't put a housing on it and put it outside the submersible at those depths. The engineering is insurmountable. We developed a system from scratch, all to do this very specific thing, to shoot Imax 3-D in the deep ocean. It was a partnership between myself and a guy named Vince Pace. Sony supplied us with the camera core technology. We built the motion control rig. We designed a special housing. It all took two years to build. We certainly have used it for all this documentary stuff and will continue to do that. I love the camera system and want to use it for my next theatrical feature, which is science fiction. Q. How do you think Hollywood has generally done in portraying science in movies? A. First of all they almost never get their facts right. Secondly they always show scientists as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains. One of the things we tried to do with this film was to show what scientists are really like, which is they're people. And sometimes they're really cool people, and they really care about thaw they're doing. They're not driven by a materialistic value system. They're seeking something else, something more important. That message speaks to me. I was in a situation where I could've kept making movies for $10 million or $12 million apiece or whatever, but it just wasn't satisfying. I'm doing my next film now because I've identified some really interesting challenges, both aesthetically and technically. Doing the film in 3-D, that makes it fun for me. To just do it as a payday wouldn't be interesting. Science doesn't pay that well unless you're working in rigidly applied science for a big pharmaceutical company or something. I'm talking about basic science - these guys who are out here trying to understand how the earth works and how life works. They're doing it because they're following the path of questions. They're just curious. Q. Do you think we've kind of lost track of the value of science in the modern world? A. I think there seems to be a disconnect on the part of the general public. They enjoy the technologies, which are the children of science. They certainly couldn't live life without their cellphones, which are based on semiconductors, which are based in quantum mechanics. They couldn't live life without their TV sets, which are based on electromagnetic field theory and every other thing. These things had to be figured out by people at a time when they didn't know what the applications were going to be. Why is that doing that? Faraday and Volta and all those guys. They didn't have stock in I.B.M. I think there's actually a backswing against science. I think we're seeing a weird turn back to a faith-based view of the universe as opposed to empiricism. When you've got a country where 50 percent of the people believe in creation over evolution, I think you've got a big problem because we owe our ascendancy as a species to science and technology. We're past the point of saying let's not do that technology thing any more. Even if we wanted to, we can't go back to the garden. It's not going to happen. We can't go back to an agrarian culture. There's too many of us, and we've trashed the earth and deforested it anyway. Right now we rely on the efficiencies made possible by simple things, like not having warehouses, where you have on-demand supply that's Internet based. Take that away and we die. So we're dependent on this stuff now. We've got to think our way out of this. If you've got climate change, if you've got pollution, if you've got wars being fought over energy, which are only going to get worse, and wars being fought over resources, which are going to be the story of the 21st century, you're going to need technological solutions and those are going to come from basic research. Without that, we're going to hit a wall as a civilization. Certainly the Maya did, not for the same reasons, but with equally devastating results. Q. How do we keep from hitting a wall as a civilization? A. My response to that is to make a film like this that inspires people about the sciences. Sure, maybe it's ocean science. That happens to be my area of interest, or space science and exploration. But science metaphorically is exploration even if it's done in a lab. If you have that curiosity and you see the natural world as this big detective story and you want to solve the case then you're a scientist. |
