Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox. All other photos courtesy of the author
Anne Simon grew up the daughter of Hollywood sci-fi writer Mayo Simon, who wrote classic cult films like Futureworld and the Saul Bass acid-tripfest Phase IV. He also got to interview Apollo astronauts and meet with some of the smartest scientists of his day. It's fitting, then, that the younger Simon ended up not only becoming one of the smartest scientists of her day, but also serving as a consultant on a little TV program called the X-Files, helping showrunner Chris Carter maintain an undercurrent of science over which the show's forays into the bizarre and unexplained could run. (Well, most of the time. The infamous black oil, Simon admits, was pretty much made up.)
Simon came to work on the show through a friendship with Carter, who was dating a friend of her mother's around the time of the show's first season, and needed help keeping the show based in some sort of reality. "His brother had a faculty position at MIT, so he had the physics covered," she said. "But not the biology. That's where I came in." Simon—who at the time worked as a biochemist at the University of Massachusetts—was a natural fit.
Simon's currently the head of the Virology Department at the University of Maryland, and has two story credits on the upcoming X-Files revival, a six-episode miniseries being aired in January by Fox. She's also heavily involved with the rabid X-Files fanbase on Twitter, and will sometimes livetweet episodes, inserting commentary and behind-the-scenes factoids. As the show ramps up for its return, VICE chatted with Anne about how X-Files changed the public perception of science, how she helps the science dictate the direction of the show's storylines, and the fans who are obsessed with Mulder and Scully fucking.
VICE: What drew you to X-Files?
Anne Simon: Scully was really the first time a scientist on TV was being portrayed in a positive light. She didn't just believe. She wanted facts. She wanted to test her hypotheses and do experiments and not just blurt out things. There's the Scully Effect—you have all these fans saying that they became scientists because of X-Files.
How would you contribute to a script or an episode?
knew where he wanted to go with something. So for example, he asked me on the last episode on the first season: "How would you study a microorganism? What would be the first thing that you would do?" So I told him, "Well, you'd grow more of it." He'd say "How would you do that?" "Well it would take ten years..." Well you know television, so you'd already have it growing. What would you do next? Well, you'd put it under a microscope, sequence some of its ribosomal DNA... You wouldn't figure something you were studying was just an alien—you'd relate it to something. Back then, there were specific genes everybody would sequence and compare. So he goes, "What could they find that would instantly scream that it was alien?" So I came up with—and this continued until the revival—"Well how about an extra pair of nucleotides?" From there he'd send me the scripts and I would correct them. And he would use all my corrections. I did this for about five years before I told anyone about it.
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When you talk about ways to visualize science, do you think that's gotten better on TV and movies over time?
It's certainly improved in the movies. I haven't seen The Martian, but scientists are very happy about that. I think they take the time in the movies to get the science right. But on television it's very problematic. They don't have the time and they don't take the time. Chris takes the time. Which is why I always give my card to writers and tell them I'm available.
Can you think of an example where they didn't take your advice on something because they wanted a more powerful scene, or something like that?
The thing is it's all fantastical. I'm a fan of science fiction. This isn't supposed to be real. But we want what the scientists are doing to be real. The expression that I always use is that, "Aliens can do almost anything," So when you're trying to come up with something you just go, "Oh, the aliens are real smart, they can do this." There was an episode called "Redux," where Chris wanted Scully to figure out how she got infected by this alien virus. It was my idea to have a virus. So back then we had her do something state-of-the-art. Today it would be something else. It was called a "southern blot." And I used to do lots of them... And he had her doing this on the show. Almost every single step. So he asked me, "How long would it take to do it?" And I said three days. And he said she has three hours... Well, let's say she needs a blazing hot probe, which is a radioactive piece of DNA. We didn't think we'd get that statement past the censors .
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