Franke Program in Science & the Humanities

“Are we alone in the universe?” is one of those since the dawn of time questions. It has always been fundamental to our understanding of our place in the universe, though in recent decades it has become more the province of science than of the human search for meaning. Yet the search for alien life, scientifically driven as it is, is still a quest to answer some very human questions. In this talk, author Jaime Green will delve into the history and cutting edge of the field of astrobiology, showing how scientific discoveries drive and are driven by science-fictional imaginings, which together offer new possibilities for understanding ourselves, our world, and our place in the cosmos.

Jaime Green’s book The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named a best book of the year by Esquire and The Washington Post. Green is also series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing and a lecturer at Smith College and the Johns Hopkins University Master of Arts Program in Science and Medical Writing. She has her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Aeon, Vulture, Slate, Popular Science, Astrobites, and elsewhere.

Poster

In Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence, Paco Calvo, a leading figure in the philosophy of plant signaling and behavior, offers an entirely new perspective on plants’ worlds, showing for the first time how we can use tools developed to study animal cognition in a quest to understand plant intelligence. Plants learn from experience: wild strawberries can be taught to link light intensity with nutrient levels in the soil, and flowers can time pollen production to pollinator visits. Plants have social intelligence, releasing chemicals from their roots and leaves to speak to and identify one another. They make decisions about where to invest their growth, judging risk based on the resources available. Their individual preferences vary, too—plants have personalities.

Paco Calvo is a renowned cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, known for his groundbreaking research in the field of plant cognition and intelligence. He is a professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab).

Poster

In addition to being the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne and the only person ever to have won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Marie Curie welcomed other women into her lab. It was her lab from the untimely death of her husband, Pierre, in 1906, till her own death in 1934. She ran it, enlarged it, moved it into the imposing new Radium Institute, and peopled it with an international assembly of scientists, more than forty of whom were women, including her daughter Irène, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Dava Sobel is a former reporter for the New York Times and the author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, The Glass Universe, and, most recently, The Elements of Marie Curie. She initiated and edits the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American.

Poster

This film tells the tale of an adolescent girl who grew up in an “unseeable” Dalit caste group in southern India whose forced occupation is to wash clothes of other Dalits, the dead, and menstruating women.  She transcends her lot and becomes immortalized as their local deity, Maadathy.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker, Leena Manimekalai, a leading Tamil poet and award-winning filmmaker. With a strong repertoire of films with an impressive exhibition record covering over 100 international film festivals, she is an interventionist, and her forte is participatory filmmaking. Her tryst with censorship, both constitutional and extra constitutional, as a brown queer female body, as a poet, and as a politically unapologetic filmmaker is itself a metanarrative in her journey as an artist. She has an M.F.A. in film from York University and is currently teaching undergraduate students in the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

Co-sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center and Yale MacMillan South Asian Studies Council

Hummingbird weaves together the incredible stories of five individuals with life-changing Rare Genetic Diseases. Their inspirational experiences and journeys are illuminated in this 30-minute documentary film, which combines cutting-edge scientific research with critical advocacy in one accessible, engaging package. With topics ranging from music therapy to bone marrow registries, to anti-sense oligonucleotides, Hummingbird is a uniquely comprehensive look at the experiences of those living with a Rare Genetic Disease, and what we can learn from them.

Adrien Rolet is a graduating Yale senior who uses his love for storytelling to explore the inner workings of scientific practice. Originally from the United Kingdom, he has spent the last six years making documentaries around the world on a range of subjects, from ecological conservation to vaccine denial. A Franke Undergraduate Fellow, he created Hummingbird as a joint thesis project in Molecular Biology and Film Studies.