What if diagrams in biology textbooks were animated and could be viewed from any angle?
Dr. Janet Iwasa, Molecular Animator, TED fellow and Assistant Professor in Biochemistry at the University of Utah, explains how she began creating 3D animations and the impact within current medical research. We are also joined by my friend and past guest Dr. Lina Dalberg, associate professor in Biology at WWU.
I hope you enjoy hearing our attempt to describe visuals with enthusiasm.
To view Dr. Iwasa’s animations, visit animationlab.utah.edu
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Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. And I am here with two great biologists — one who works with me, Dr. Lina Dalberg, who has been on a previous show, “Science of Smells.” Do you remember that?
Dr. Lina Dalberg: I remember that.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: It was amazing. You did great.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: It was certainly something.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yes.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Yeah.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Two years ago I had the honor and privilege to interview Dr. Janet Iwasa who is an amazing — what would you say? Data visualist? Animation visualist? Biology —
Dr. Janet Iwasa: I say molecular animator.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Molecular animator. And we talked a couple years ago, and it was like terrible audio, listeners. And this is my redemption song. Thank you for agreeing to talk to us again.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Absolutely. Welcome back to Salt Lake City.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yeah, yeah. It’s whenever I come to Salt Lake, I talk to you. I brought my good friend Lina Dalberg to come on this show and be my co-host today because I took biology in high school and then never again.
I’ve watched your animations and they’re so amazing and they’re so vivid, but to be honest, I do not know what is happening. Maybe you can help our listeners and tell them what’s your position, where do you work, what do you do?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: So I am an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah in the medical school. And my focus is on creating visualizations of molecular processes that are used for a variety of purposes. The main goal is to use them in research and research communication, but they’re also used in education and outreach.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: And Lina, you’ve actually used some of these animations.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Yes, and I use them when I’m teaching complex biological process. Often a textbook has a picture that’s static and there’s a lot of arrows, and so in your mind as a student
you’re supposed to see how scenario 1 leads to scenario 2 and then you’re supposed to just figure that out.
And so the animations are really nice because it shows how these processes are really happening at a molecular level.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: In the world of biology and science communication trying to communicate a lot of these processes, who else is doing work like you?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: There aren’t a ton of other people within academia. There are a couple people in academia that I can think of who are doing this, at least in the US. I don’t really know too much outside of the US. But there are a lot of people within different industries. So there are medical illustrators who are employed by different types of publishing companies, pharma, different places like biotechs, they have their own independent illustration companies working freelance. But within academia, I think it’s relatively rare.
What I remember most was when I was probably in a second year in grad school, UC San Francisco, which is a medical school. So there’s no undergraduate campus or anything like that. The lab right next door to us was setting a protein called kinesin which is a microtubule motor protein, it walks along microtubule.
I was in the Mullins Lab. We studied actin. The lab next door to us studied kinesin and microtubules. Microtubules are considered sort of the highway of the cell. So they stretch across — basically they can stretch from one side of the cell to the other, and there are proteins that walk along them that basically drag things like organelles and vesicles and all of these different things to basically transport them from one side of the cell to the other.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Now I’m remembering that you told me this before.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: [laughing] Yeah, it’s considered like a molecular super highway.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Okay.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Within the cell. But at any rate — and they grow and shrink. So things are constantly kind of growing and shrinking. So it’s very dynamic.
So the lab next door, they studied this motor protein and I had seen a lot of different presentations because pretty much everyone in the lab was studying this protein and so you see a lot of talks. And people would show these kind of like stick figure, circles, and lines with arrows and stuff kind of drawings. And sometimes people would use their hands to demonstrate how they thought it was walking based on their biochemical experiments.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: When I do it in class, I walk holding a yardstick.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: [laughing]
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Wow.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: I like do this jerky walk and walk down —
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Do you have a balloon at the end of the yard stick?
Dr. Lina Dalberg: I sometimes have a balloon at the end of the yardstick —
Dr. Janet Iwasa: [gasping]
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Because that’s what I’m trying to show. And then I go to the animation.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: And you have to walk like with one foot in front of the other.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: You have to be really jerky and sometimes fall off.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: I wanna point out to our listeners cause this is just gonna be audio not like our other video ones. But Dr. Iwasa is like walking — she’s moving her arms like she is crawling kind of like a really fast sloth.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: [laughing]
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: So I mean there is obvious animation that is happening in your brain or that the researchers are hoping that you’re doing in your brain.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah, right by doing this. But you know, they’re using the typical ways that biologists depict these things which is like stick figure drawings.
Anyway, so at some point around my second or third year of grad school, the Vale Lab and the Milligan Lab — so two different labs solved the structure of kinesin. So before then we didn’t actually know what kinesin looked like. And then after that, we had an idea of at least what part of it looked like.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: And so using that structure, Ron Vale decided to hire an animator to create an animation of this walking motion. And he hired an animator named Graham Johnson. And so Graham is actually a medical illustrator by training, a fine artist. He did some fine art before that, then had begun doing some work on molecular animation. And so he created this animation of kinesin which was then showed in a group meeting which I attended. And a graduate student gave this presentation and showed this animation which was like pretty much the first time I had seen a molecular animation.
For one thing I never really totally understood when people are talking about how it works, they were talking about how using energy by walking — and I think it never totally gelled, yeah, until I saw the animation. And it made me think that the animation was really intuitive. It was a really natural way of thinking about a dynamic three-dimensional object that’s, you know, doing something that’s kind of complicated. And it made me think, “Why are we drawing and bunch of circles and squares and arrows when we could try to be showing things in three dimensions and dynamics which is the way we see them in our heads, but not the way we’re trying to communicate?”
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: I kind of wanna bring my next question to Lina then because you come from this like family who does biology, right? And I wonder have your parents who have been in this field for so long, have these seen animations and what do they think about it?
Dr. Lina Dalberg: So, I don’t know. I imagine that they have, especially the animation of the kinesin molecule and also there’s a sort of partner one of the myosin molecule. And I think those are very famous at this point and they came out right when I was finishing my graduate program, I guess. Because I remember they came out and I was like, “That’s amazing,” and I feel like a lot of molecular biologists and structural biologists felt like suddenly there was this tool where we could, yeah we could watch the motion of a molecule. I imagine that my parents — full disclosure, also biochemists — and I bet that they have seen them, but it’s interesting because you can be so specialized in biology that if you’re not paying attention to one portion of it, you might not actually —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Have even seen them.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Have even seen them.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: We always talk about pop culture on this podcast. And we talked about how when you started learning, you know, you were kind of — what do I wanna say — inspired by this. And you were like, this is something that should be done. And you had said you went to go learn animation. And it was like right next to Pixar, so other people were doing animation but not necessarily science animation.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yes. I took a course, I’ve taken a few courses in 3D animation. And the first one I took was while I was still in graduate school. Like probably around my third year. And the course, you know, so as I mentioned UCSF, it’s a medical school. So there aren’t any like art classes or anything like that, you know? So I was trying to figure out where I could take classes to learn animation. And it turns out that San Francisco University, which was kind of like on the other side of the city, had these courses and I could take them for free as some kind of like exchange thing where like SFSU students —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: MOU or something?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah, yeah could take classes at UCSF and we could take classes there. So I took this class with undergraduates who I assume were probably like film or arts majors. And so, you know, the projects that we had were like — I remember we had to build like a living room with a sofa, chair, and like a lamp. And I had like wallpaper. It was very Victorian, like ornate. And whatever we were doing in class, that’s what I would do because, you know, I wasn’t going to be like, “No I’m only going to do biology.”
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: And like nobody else in the class would understand that.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: You were a good student.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah I was just doing everything as it was taught, and then I would go back to lab afterwards and start doing animation.
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Dr. Regina DeGraaff: When you started doing animation, when did that become part of your research? Because I think your website is called The Animation Lab? I mean you stole that name right away, Animation Lab, I mean that’s — there was nobody else that wanted that? [laughter]
Dr. Janet Iwasa: You know, I think we couldn’t get that Twitter handle. It’s like AnimationLab.utah.edu.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: But as a grad student, you’re doing this — I mean, I personally do this podcast. It’s hard to get administrators and bosses to really totally value science communication. And I think a lot of your work is — I mean, that’s a large portion of it. This is for science communication so that people can understand what these proteins are doing. So how did you navigate that?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah, so in graduate school I guess, you know, I had an NSF fellowship which probably — you know, I had that when I started grad school. So it probably helped that I had funding cause when I, you know, when I started doing animation, I had to ask for my advisor’s permission. And I had a small portfolio of animations I had started to work on and he say, “You know this is really great. And you should just take Fridays off to do animation for as long as you want.”
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: He sounds awesome!
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah, yeah. He was really great. And by the end of the grad school I animated pretty much everything my lab mates were working on. My advisor was using these
animations in his talks. And so it was pretty well-known within, at least a certain group of people at UCSF, that I was doing these things.
And you know, it wasn’t — I didn’t really need anyone’s approval besides my advisor because it was really, you know, kind of my time and kind of the lab’s time that I was using a little bit of. But I think it gave me — having this sort of protective time allowed me to really think about how animation could be used.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Mhm.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: And so by the end of grad school I had this idea of how animation could play a role, not only in kind of like outreach which there was an obvious place for that, but also within the research community.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Biology, we think of biology often in textbook as very static. But of course, biology is never static. And so I think you could almost —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Cause we’re alive. [laughing]
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Cause we’re alive. I keep telling my students that, if your cells are still, you’re probably dead.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: So [laughing] hopefully your cells are moving and all the proteins inside are moving. I think the — you know, to just think about my own research — when the cell synthesizes proteins, if they need to be in a certain compartment in the cell, they are often synthesized either at that compartment or moved into that compartment later and that —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Like a physical section of the cell.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: A physical section has to be —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Again, know nothing.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Yeah. So you can think of the endoplasmic reticulum is sort of a starting place for a lot of proteins that have to go different places. But in order to get proteins into the endoplasmic reticulum, there’s a lot movement that has to happen.
So there’s already an animation from Janet’s lab about how you get a protein into the ER. The process that I work on is actually the process of removing a protein out of that. And so that would — to me, I have lots of hypotheses about how different proteins interact with a misfolded protein that needs to be removed and degraded and gotten rid of before it causes a disease state in an organism.
We really don’t know in a concrete way what that looks like in the cell. And there are lots of hypotheses about which protein players are involved, which machines are involved. But how they’re actually interacting is essentially a black box. You could basically interrogate any question in biology and there would be an animation waiting to be made.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: I think, you know, the crux of the problem in biology is really that of scale. So molecules are generally smaller than the wavelength of visible light and so that means we can’t ever see them directly using light microscopy.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Mm.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: And so, you know, so there’s other ways of figuring out like what a protein looks like by using electrons or X-rays or, you know, things that are smaller. But that requires you to take out the protein, separate it from all the proteins in the cell, you might have to freeze it, or put it under some really — or concentrate it under really harsh conditions. And from that we can figure out the three-dimensional shape, what a protein really looks like. That tells us about the shape, but, you know, we have to do all these other experiments to figure out how is it moving around in a cell. We could use microscopy, but I think of light microscopy as like — if I was standing a mile away with a really huge spotlight, a beam of light, you could see the light and it would be like this big halo of light around me, but you couldn’t see me.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Mhm.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: You couldn’t make out my face.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: You couldn’t make out the shape of, you know, me waving my hand or anything like that.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Right. Or obscene gestures or something — we wouldn’t know!
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah. If the light, if I move the light around from a pretty big distance, if I ran around with it, you could probably see that light moving, right? And that’s kind of like what we do in light microscopy when we have a protein that has a glowing protein on it. And then we can kind of see it track it around in different parts of the cell and see it moving around. So we can get some idea of movement through that.
And then biochemistry, you can do different kind of experiments where you get rid of part of a protein and you see, can it still attach itself to this other protein? And if it can’t, you can say, “Well that part of the protein’s probably important for that.”
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Mhm.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Things like that. So we have all these different indirect ways of probing biology and none of them are going to give us a direct image of what it is that we think is going on, you know? So we have all these bits and pieces that can hint at a story. And so the trick of biology is really taking all this indirect evidence and then building that story.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Mhm.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: And you know, taking the data you believe and kind of ignoring the data you don’t believe, which there’s always some. And you try to tell a story that makes sense. And that story is always going to differ a little bit from one person to another, especially if you’ve been in a field long enough and you have some of your own data that maybe you haven’t even published, or just some ideas based on other things. Your stories are always gonna be different.
I call the animations, “visual hypotheses,” because we can’t ever see things at the molecular level at the scale of which I’m animating things. And so it’s really an idea, someone’s idea of how these things work.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: I’m trying to distinctly separate what you’re saying as a visual hypothesis and an actual model. For our listeners, can you kind of help differentiate between this visual animation and a computational model?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: So in biology, I guess the word “model” is not very strictly used. If you say “model” it could mean almost anything.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: It’s like, there’s this thing I made out of clay; it’s a model.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah. There’s no strict usage of that. So usually when I try to differentiate a computational — what you’re probably calling a “computational model,” I would say it’s a simulation.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yes, yes.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: So like molecular dynamic simulation where we’re trying to basically simulate the movement of every single atom within a model —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yes.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: That I would consider a simulation. The animations are not simulations. However, you could take simulation data and incorporate them into the animation.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Right.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: The problem again with biology is that — so there’s simulations you can do on different scales. At the finest grain, you have what’s called molecular dynamics. And that is like simulating every single atom in a molecule. You need a super computer to have like a nanosecond of some protein very little [laughing], you know, over this course of like nanoseconds.
Then you go a step higher and you have coarse-grain modeling where you take groups of atoms and you simulate those using sort of a coarser kind of simulation where you have a spheric object that kind of takes the place of like multiple atoms or a part of a protein. With that kind of simulation, then you can do larger scale simulations of multiple proteins interacting with each other.
The scale of most of my animations is even larger than that. So that’s typically more agent-based modeling where you have a protein that is an agent that can make decisions based on a set of rule. So that’s a type of simulation that you could do that I think is at the level of which most people I interact with, most cell biologists, are thinking about proteins. We’re not trying to simulate atomic level or even like cell protein level. You’re actually thinking about lots of protein in a cellular environment — and what are they doing, how are they interacting?
So what my animation is really what’s called keyframed animation where I am making every decision of where this protein is moving around and I’m setting a keyframe on how this protein is moving in space in time — and sometimes hundreds of proteins.
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Dr. Lina Dalberg: I have a question about the culture of science. I was looking at your website and often times if you look at a professor’s website, it’ll show the people who are in the lab who are doing the work. There’s the professor and then there’s people who are doing post-doctoral fellowships and then there are graduate students, and sometimes there’s a technician. And I was excited to see that you also have people working in your lab who are not doing lab work. It’s really only animators.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Mhm.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: And I am curious about the people who apply to lab.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah, so I have an animator. And I have a post-doctoral fellow. And so the idea was that, you know, so like we talked about, there aren’t many people in this field. And for me, so I really started training for my career starting in grad school, but I had post-doctoral fellowship that allowed me to focus. It was actually on the Origin’s life, so it was kind of with astronomers and geologists and biologists doing these sort of animations and —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: So you know how to deal with physicists like me?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: I definitely have talked to some —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: [laughing]
Dr. Janet Iwasa: But at any rate, so, you know, I had this opportunity as a post-doc which really helped me launch my career. And I know that there’s an interest within the scientific community to have more people who are doing things like me, but there are really not many opportunities to be trained to do that.
And you know, a lot of people — it’s kind of a time-consuming thing learning 3D animation and so it’s not something that, you know, that I think you could completely do in your spare time and then like have a career, you know? I think that would be very difficult.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Mhm.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: You really need some stage at which you’re training full time to do that. And so, I wanted to basically have a post-doc who is interested in having a career like mine.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: What’s your funding source for that?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: I should preface this by saying that this is very new and so I only started my group last fall. And my people really moved to Utah in January. So it hasn’t been a long time. And so I’ve been sort of ramping up projects and grants since then.
But we have two major ways that we’re funding our group. One is through grants. A majority of those are collaborative and they really are ranged, a really wide range of things. And so like I have two NASA grants, I have two I think collaboratory NSF grants, I have two NIH grants. So there’s a range.
And so like the NIH grants — there’s one on cryoelectron microscopy and how to basically train people to go from doing something else to learning how to do cryo-EM which is really a growing field. And there was another one on HIV which is about basically animating the science, the kind of biology of HIV.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yeah I just watched that video.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: So that’s a continuing project and we’re adding more to it. The NSF grants, there’s different kind of molecular machines that we’re working on. We’re working plant cytokinesis. NASA grants are mostly on the origins of life. So anyway, so we take on a lot of different projects with lots of different people. And we are doing a lot of the science communication visualization aspects of those projects.
So it’s not great for if someone really needs an animation in three months. That’s not a great
way of doing it. However, it’s a great way for us to really get involved in it. So it’s definitely the way that I think makes it feasible for most biologists.
The other mechanism is through contracts. So basically if people already have funding through some other means, they can get in touch with us and say, you know, “We would really like to have an animation to go along with our publication that’s coming out hopefully, preferably, within like two to three months minimally.” Or we could work with publishing companies. So we have a contract with a publishing company to create illustrations, or biotechs, or pharma.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Well I actually, I mean, I just kinda wanna follow-up on this idea of molecular models. As somebody who’s trying to teach biology to a broad group of students, I think that — one of the things that I talk a lot of about is how to interrogate a model. So when I have students learning how to read a textbook, I’m often telling them that the figures that they’re seeing in a textbook are important because they’re printed in color ink which is more expensive [laughing] than black and white ink, and they’re also spaces to ask questions.
So once you understand what the picture is showing you, then you can start asking the “why” questions. So, “Why is that red blob next to the green blob?” Or, “How do you think that the red blob could be interacting with the yellow blob and the green blob at the same time?”
I like the idea of the three-dimensional and four-dimensional models where you see things changing over time because it allows even more of those moments for students to just come in and say like — and what’s the next question. And I think that’s also one of the really great things for researchers who are always looking for the next question, is to say, “If this model is true, then my data should look like this.” Or, “If it’s not true, my data should look different.” And so this idea of modeling is really important.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: I want to close out our interview like I always do, talking about pop culture. And I remember you mentioning about you being inspired by The Lord of the Rings movies. Can you like talk about that inspiration? And then I would also like to ask, have you been asked to use your skills still for science, but more in a media aspect other than just being contracted?
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah, The Lord of the Rings — I was talking about agent-based modeling simulations before. And so this is something that I’m actively looking into, whether we can create software that would allow researchers to create agent-based simulations of molecular networks or systems.
And so that would involve figuring out what the structure of a protein is, and then giving it a set of rules so it can — based on what’s around it, it can kind of change its shape or whatever.
One of the reasons that I thought this would be possible to do was that I was attending these conferences, there’s this one called SigRA, which is about graphics and visualization within kind
of more of a Hollywood kind of context. And so, you know, at the conferences I go to there’s like booths by people who make microscopes and stuff like that. But at this place, the booths were like Pixar —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yeah.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: It was like, you know, all the big animation studios.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: My dream.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah. [laughing] It was —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Like DreamWorks.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Exactly. It was fun. You know, so there’d be people who were doing like motion capture and all this kind of stuff, like demoing it — the software. And I walked by a booth that had scenes from Lord of the Rings. And what they were demoing was this agent-based simulation software where you could basically simulate crowds using agent-based simulations where you could create an agent — in this case, like an elf or an orc or a human — and you could have them in different poses.
And they’d be these sort of autonomous agents where if something moves within a certain distance that was defined by you, let’s say five foot radius or something — if something walks within this radius, the agent would react.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Mhm.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: And you could make the rules of like, if it’s an elf they wouldn’t do anything. But if it’s an orc, they’re gonna raise their shield. Or, they’re at 50% chance of raising their shield, 50% chance of raising their sword.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: That’s like Sims on steroids.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah!
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Like, oh my god, I love it.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: So they had this and it was built with the kind of graphics, you know. So you could see the agent kind of undergoing, going between these different steps, making these decisions. And I, you know, watching the simulation — so then you can populate your scene with like a hundred of these agents and they look pretty good. They’re making these decisions, they’re kind of interacting with each other in this way that looks pretty realistic.
And my first reaction to seeing this is like, “It’s like proteins.” [laughing] You know, like
proteins are making decisions on what’s kind of going on around them and they have different kind of forms, you know. They have these different states that’s determined by kinda what’s in their vicinity. So yeah.
So I think there are things like that, that I think after I started like looking into all of these different kind of softwares and learning about 3D animation — I joke around that I became kind of insufferable to watch movies with [laughing].
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Yeah that’s what I was gonna ask you. We can kind of end with that [laughing].
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah. So my husband and I, we were watching Ratatouille in the theater. This was obviously a long time ago, but —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: I love Ratatouille.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: This was the time at which I was really going to a lot of these meetings. And so we were watching Ratatouille and there’s a scene where there’s like a plate of cheese. And it’s like semi-translucent. The light is kinda coming through it as like Swiss cheese, and it has holes in it, and it looks really realistic. And I was like thinking about how hard it must be to get the light to interact with the cheese in a way that looks so realistic.
And I’m like, “Ah!” And my husband’s name is Adam. I was like, “Adam, look at that cheese! It looks so good! Look at how the light is–” And he’s like, “Shhh!” [laughter] He’s like, “I’m trying to watch the move!”
And then at SigRA, I saw a presentation by people at Pixar who were talking about the cheese and how hard it was, and how, you know, they really had to think of the physics of how the light was interacting with —
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: You knew it.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: Yeah, and I was like, I knew it. You know — [laughter] — Exactly. I was like looking at that plate of cheese and I was like, that looks like a lot of work.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: Thank you again for like taking time out of your day. It’s late in the day at Utah for our listeners, and you came all the way to come see me. So thank you so much for talking with us again.
Dr. Janet Iwasa: My pleasure.
Dr. Regina DeGraaff: And thank you to Lina.
Dr. Lina Dalberg: Thanks for inviting me.
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Dr. Regina DeGraaff: We want to thank Dr. Janet Iwasa for thinking the time to talk to us, and also Dr. Lina Dalberg for being a wonderful guest host on this episode. Spark Science is sponsored by WWU and created in partnership with KMRE. Spark Science is recorded on location and in Bellingham, Washington at Western Washington University.
The producers are Suzanne Blais, Regina Barber DeGraaff, and Robert Clark. Student editors are Julia Thorpe, Andra Nordin, and Zerach Coakley. Additional editing is done by WWU Video Services.
If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, post a message on our Facebook page or tweet us at SparkScienceNow.
Thanks for joining us, and if you wanna listen to past episodes, visit SparkScienceNow.com.
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