Congratulations to my former colleagues at XVIVO. They have released the latest installment of The Inner Life of the Cell, and it’s a mind-blowing ride! Boasting a level of detail that I could only dream of in 2004 (when Inner Life began) “Protein Packing” sets out to update and correct a lot of things that were first shown in The Inner Life of the Cell, almost ten years ago. What can I say, it was a long time ago, a crazy time when we believed the world was flat, Revenge of the Sith was a good Star Wars movie, and kinesin proteins strutted around our cells like John Travolta on Saturday night.
Carl Zimmer does a great job comparing the animations, then and now, in his article in the New York Times, here, so I won’t get into that.
I’d like to take a moment to give credit, where it is richly deserved, to the animator Mike Smith, who, along with Helena Martin and Tony Bexley are the incredibly talented artists responsible for everything you see onscreen in “Protein Packing”. Making one of these animations is an enormous task. It takes it’s toll on the animator charged to manifest the mountain of science and data into an aesthetically pleasing whole. Mike’s care and attention to detail are ultimately what got those proteins to shake and move together and put a new level of understanding on the screen.
Like me, Mike has moved on from XVIVO, but I will be watching out for whatever he does next, it will probably be amazing.