The Beginning

Alluding to the human fertilization process as a squadron of Rebel fighters attacking the Death Star may seem silly on paper, but it works in the video The Beginning. Biologists Don Ingber and Charles Reilly at Harvard's Wyss Institute set out to make a hyper-accurate film of how sperm fertilizes an egg. They used real data from research, converted into animation. The purpose was to engage non-scientists, so they framed the process as a Star Wars parody. It was a cheesy idea that turned out to be sublime in the rendering. But even more interesting, the process of animating the sequence uncovered something new about the morphology of sperm.

By combining insights from Hollywood animation studios and empirical data from biology, Ingber and Reilly set out to create a hyper-accurate 3D model of a sperm cell. Their goal was to see whether cinematic storytelling based on data could be a way to engage people who might be turned off by numbers and dry technical papers. As a bonus, their pursuit of engagement through animation resulted in a scientific discovery about how energy is distributed in a sperm cell to make it move.

The short explanation of the energy distribution and how it was discovered is at Motherboard.