HHMI BioInteractive Short Films

Watch the story of how gene therapy restored the sight of a nearly-blind young patient. Told from the perspective of two researchers who spent over 25 years working to develop this breakthrough technology, this short film chronicles their successes and challenges, and illustrates how the method works to treat inherited conditions.

Keystone species and trophic cascades are fundamental concepts in ecology. This short film tells the story of how these concepts were first established through the pioneering experiments of two young researchers: Robert Paine and James Estes.

Forty years ago in Laetoli, Tanzania, a team of paleontologists discovered a set of 3.6-million-year-old fossil footprints of early hominids —likely our ancestors. The team was led by Mary Leakey, the pioneering subject of this animated feature. The film covers many highlights of her career and her relationship with her research partner and husband, Louis Leakey. Leakey described the discovery of the Laetoli footprints as one of her most important finds.

In 1938, South African museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer came across a strange blue fin poking out of a pile of fish. With its fleshy, lobed fins and its tough armored scales, the coelacanth did not look like any other fish that exists today. The coelacanth belongs to a lineage that has remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years—earning it the description of a "living fossil."

Our human ancestors in Africa likely had dark skin, which is produced by an abundance of the pigment eumelanin in skin cells. In the high ultraviolet (UV) environment of sub-Saharan (or equatorial) Africa, darker skin offers protection from the damaging effects of UV radiation. Dr. Jablonski explains that the variation in skin color that evolved since our human ancestors migrated out of Africa can be explained by the tradeoff between protection from UV and the need for some UV absorption for the production of vitamin D.

This animated short tells the story of Alfred Wegener, a German astronomer and atmospheric scientist, who came up with the idea that continents once formed a single landmass and had drifted apart. Continental drift explained why continents' shapes fit together like pieces of a puzzle and why distant continents had the same fossils . During Wegener’s time, the idea was met with hostility but after his death a large body of evidence showed that continents do indeed move. Today the theory of plate tectonics is a fundamental principle in geology.

Ten thousand years ago, corn didn’t exist anywhere in the world, and until recently scientists argued vehemently about its origins. Today the crop is consumed voraciously by us, by our livestock, and as a major part of processed foods. So where did it come from? Popped Secret: The Mysterious Origin of Corn tells the story of the genetic changes involved in the transformation of a wild grass called teosinte into corn. Evidence from genetics supports archeological findings pinpointing corn’s origins to a very particular time and place in Mexico.

The discovery of Archaeopteryx in a quarry in Germany in the early 1860s provided the first clue that birds descended from reptiles. But what kind of reptile? In the last 40 years, scientists have identified many shared features between birds and two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods.

Paleontologists have studied the fossil record of human evolution just like they have done for other major transitions, including the evolution of tetrapods from fish and the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. In this film, part of the Great Transitions trilogy, Sean Carroll and Tim White discuss the most important human fossils and how they illuminate key phases of human evolution, focusing in particular on three traits: larger brains, tool use, and bipedality.

In 1674, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at a drop of lake water through his homemade microscope and discovered an invisible world that no one knew existed. His work inspired countless microbiology researchers, including HHMI investigator Bonnie Bassler, one of the narrators of this animated feature. Leeuwenhoek was a haberdasher and city official in Delft, The Netherlands. He seems to have been inspired to take up microscopy by having seen a copy of Robert Hooke's illustrated book Micrographia. Leeuwenhoek started making simple microscopes and using them to observe the world around him. He was the first to discover bacteria, protists, sperm cells, blood cells, rotifers, and much more.