One of These Episodes is NOT like the Other
The astute among you will have no doubt noticed that this week’s episode looks slightly different from last week’s. The set is not quite the same and I dare say our performances not quite as polished. The reason for this, which you blog readers have been told by Brian Fleck, is that the Protective Armour episode is in fact the pilot for the series, and was shot what seems like eons ago, in January 2007 (the rest of the series was shot primarily over the summer and early fall). We were all newborn television hosts (we have since progressed to something akin to the toddler stage, methinks) working on a show that we hoped would be added to the CBC schedule. That “Hello, samples...” bit was my first ever bit of scripted television, and was the first line shot for the whole series, as a matter of fact.
This week’s episode is also notable for the fact that it features my “other job”. Here at Project X, all the hosts are indeed real scientists working in an academic environment, and Dr. Bob Hancock, who is featured in my peptides segment, is the guy I report to when I’m not doing the tv thing. I’ve been a postdoctoral fellow in his lab at UBC for just over two years now, where I work on teasing apart how the mammalian innate immune system works - the body’s front line of defense that keeps all sorts of germs out using things like the antimicrobial/host defense peptides that you saw in the show. We interviewed in him in one of our actual lab spaces, which I can tell you certainly doesn’t look quite as much like something out of CSI during the regular workday.
It’s certainly a funny feeling coming into the lab one morning and instead of sitting down at your desk, you're setting up in another room with a tv crew with your science co-workers peering in at you. It was the hardest interview I had to do because I already knew everything Bob was talking about making it hard to ask the questions that you, the viewer, might be asking yourselves. After it was finished, the crew went off to shoot some of the peptide-synthesizing robots and I just wandered back to my desk and started analyzing some data.
The alligator shoot was a whole other story - that was an adventure and a half! We flew down to Lake Charles, Louisiana, a small college town a little ways inland from the Gulf Coast, where we met Dr. Mark Merchant, a true Cajun and a guy with an endless supply of hilarious stories. We shot the lab scenes in the morning, and then as afternoon neared, we piled in a couple of vans and headed towards the coastal marshland reserve where we’d be trapping and bleeding a few gators.
The drive down was fascinating. The area had been devastated by Hurricane Rita and a year after the storm the effects were still glaringly obvious. At one point, we passed a field that looked as if it had a farmhouse on it. Mark told us that house was originally several miles away and had been carried along to its current position with the storm surge. We passed a few more houses like this. When the owners returned from evacuation, they had to drive around to look for their houses, spray paint their original addresses on them, and send in photos of those to their insurance companies to make a claim. Mark also told us how that parish was so sparsely populated it only had a single streetlight, but that got washed away too.
The boat ride itself was pretty intense – we were flying through the marshlands at top speed, and the misty rain that had been falling turned into a knife-sharp stinging barrage. I was wearing two pairs of tights, two pairs of pants, three shirts, two coats, and two pairs of gloves and still thought I would catch a bit of the old hypothermia.
Thirty minutes into the trip we hadn’t sighted a single gator (we did find a deer, though!) and were starting to worry, but just then, the unmistakeable flash of gator eye and POW! The airboat captain screeched to a halt alongside the gator, Mark leapt into action, and seconds later, he had captured a 3-4ft gator in his bare hands! A strong elastic was placed around its snout to keep it from snapping (they use duct tape for the big guys), and I got to measure and sex our find. It was a dude. You have to use little pliers to open a slit on the alligator’s underbelly and then look around to figure out whethers it’s a boy or a girl, these violent tussle-prone animals rather wisely keep their important bits tucked well inside.
After that, we started seeing a lot more gators, including a real whopper that measured in at around 8 feet! After that guy, we called it a day and drove back to Lake Charles, where we warmed our frozen selves at the all-hot-wing restaurant and plied Mark for more gator stories.
Well, so far on this show, I’ve been centrifuged, floated around weightless in a plane doing crazy arcs through the air, and gone alligator trapping. Will next week bring more Perils of Pauline-esque adventures, or will our heroine be allowed to simply sit back and enjoy some science? Stay tuned to find out!
