SUU held an Honors Lecture featuring guest speaker Dr. Crystal Koenig and professor Lindsey Roper titled “The Science of Science Fiction in ‘Planet of the Apes’” on March 27. The lecture approached the films both from a scientific accuracy approach as well as the bioethics behind the films.
Koenig has intensively studied apes and so chose to focus on the 2001 “Planet of the Apes” film: how it mirrored real life, the science behind the film’s narrative and the film’s portrayal of apes. Roper, meanwhile, covered the other films in the series with an examining bioethics and what society was afraid of at the time. This included animal cruelty, experimentation, and human-animal hybrids.
Both presenters used scenes from the films as examples for their various points and ideas.
Roper’s section on cruelty and experimentation especially stuck with listeners.
Israel Contreras, a senior art major, said, “there are a lot of things that need to be fixed when dealing with ethics, especially with animal testing like inserting human cells into pig embryos.”
The next Honors Lecture will be Murder Mystery Dinner on April 12 and will focus on murder mysteries.
For more information on the Honors Program visit here.
Story by: Alex Schilling
eic@suunews.net
Photo Courtesy of Alex Schilling
