I thought the bloggers of DI might be interested in a short video I recently had a hand in creating and during which I got to see behind the scenes at a sensory laboratory.
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Chemist Michelle Gallagher, while doing her post-doctoral research at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, became fascinated when she learned of a study that showed that dogs could be trained to sniff out skin cancer. This led her to conduct a series of experiments to determine if chemicals coming off of the skin could identify cancerous areas before they became visible.
I was contacted by ScienCentral.com [2] to shoot the video for a short profile on Ms. Gallagher’s work. We set the date and they emailed me a long and detailed shot list describing the experiment and the many angles I was required to capture. (The complete Call Sheet, as it’s called, can be seen on my new videography forum Fitness Video University [3].)
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Michelle is an affable young woman who, though passionate about her research, was very nervous at first, surrounded by my formidible videocameras and lights. Sunita Reed, the producer and voice of the clip conducted the interview from New York by speaker phone and was quick to put Michelle at ease; a difficult task when you can’t be seen!
We then went from the interview into the depths of the Monell labs. It was a mad scientist’s (and a filmmaker’s!) dream come true with test tubes, beakers and wires, huge humming spectrophotometers and strange smells everywhere! We hastily cleaned up an area to shoot, being careful to remove anything with a brand name on it. Although I had warned the scientists that this would be like shooting a movie and we would have to do several takes of everything, I don’t think they were fully prepared for how tedious and exhusting a shoot like this can be!
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We worked for three and a half hours, ended up with one and a half hours of footage and it was boiled down by ScienCentral.com to the one and a half minutes you see here. That’s quite a shooting ratio and will give you some idea of what it takes to put even a short news clip like this together.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1_IZd5HZ3g[/youtube]
Now that the video is posted and my excitement has worn off I begin to wonder…can it ever be too early to detect the possibility of cancer?
I remember reading somewhere that our bodies are constantly producing errant cells that could become cancer, but that most of the time our immune system shuts them down before they do any harm. What if Michelle Gallagher’s new process detects cells that NEVER would have become cancerous and we end up performing needless procedures and possibly scarring otherwise heathly people?
Creating this video has raised a serious question for me. Is it possible to take preventative medicine too far?
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