WASHINGTON — Sci-fi drama “The X-Files” launched its 11th season Wednesday night, and a local scientist spent 10 days on set watching the filming. Dr. Anne Simon, who leads the virology program at the University of Maryland, is a longtime science adviser for the series. For the show’s 10th season finale, creator Chris Carter had a big request for her: Figure out a plausible way to kill off almost every person. Simon delivered, suggesting the very real CRISPR-Cas9 system for genome editing. The premise of the episode was that people who got a smallpox vaccine when th ... [Continua a leggere]
Archivio Stampa Anne Simon
Anne Simon—the virologist who served as a science consultant on the original 'X-Files' and helped write the upcoming miniseries—talks the science that made you want to believe.
Anne Simon grew up the daughter of Hollywood sci-fi writer Mayo Simon, who wrote classic cult films like Futureworld and the Saul Bass acid-tripfest Phase IV. He also got to interview Apollo astronauts and meet with some of the smartest scientists of his day. It's fitting, then, that the younger Simon ended up not only becoming one of the smartest scientists of her day, but also serving as a consultant on a little TV program called the X-Files, helping showrunner Chris Carter maintain an undercurrent of science over which the show's forays into the bizar ... [Continua a leggere]