Biology professor goes Hollywood

Orr

hat do Hollywood alien invasions and University evolutionary biologist Professor H. Allen Orr have in common? Evolution, this summer's sci-fi comedy staring David Duchovny of X-Files fame.

During a scene from the movie the main character, played by Duchovny, struggles to understand why recently arrived alien life forms are evolving at breakneck speed. In the background, written on a blackboard in the laboratory, are the words: "Read Coyne and Orr paper. Drosophila."

Orr was surprised to learn that the technical paper he co-authored in 1989 (and updated in 1997) about the evolution of fruit flies was mentioned in the Hollywood comedy.

"I first heard about this via the grapevine," Orr says. "An evolutionary biologist at LSU called, telling me that two of his undergrads had just seen the movie and that I was 'in' it. My first reaction--like that of my co-author and former Ph.D. advisor, Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago--was that this was some sort of prank. But we kept getting more reports of the sighting and finally decided to see if it was true. And it was."

Orr and his wife, Lynne Orr, associate professor of physics at the University, decided to see the movie for themselves. Orr says that his wife was amazed by the reference. "I can only conclude that she hadn't appreciated that she was living with a movie star."

The paper, "Patterns of Speciation in Drosophila," may have been chosen for several reasons, surmises Orr. The paper's topic--an attempt to measure the rate at which new species appear and the amount of time it takes for one species to split into two--supports the efforts of Duchovny's character to determine how quickly the aliens will propagate.

The Orr and Coyne paper may also have been referred to because it has been cited in several evolution textbooks as one of the premier papers on evolutionary biology.

Both Orr and Coyne, who in a recent interview in the Chicago Tribune also seemed surprised by the movie reference, are enjoying the Hollywood recognition.

"It's one thing to have a paper recognized by your scientific peers," Orr says. "It's quite another to have it used by Hollywood as color!"

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