Institut Charles Sadron News

Julie Morgen from the Jardin des Science, the artist Guillaume Deloizon and the former director of the Institut Charles Sadron (ICS), Gilbert Weill collaborated to produce an interactive comic strip (in French) which promotes the heritage of the Charles Sadron Institute.

The comic tells the story of Blanche, a doctoral student working on polymers at the ICS when it was still located at the Orangerie. When she encounters difficulties in her experiments, she immerses herself in the archives of the institute and discovers an intriguing story of ducks: a scientific discovery by two researchers from the ICS (then called the Center for Research on Macromolecules (CRM)) which had created a national buzz with an experiment that seemed to proof that it was possible to modify the DNA of ducks by simply injecting DNA into the ducklings. This finding created intensive debates at national and international level and incited a lot of important follow-up work in the scientific community. However, it could never be reproduced and nobody ever understood what may have happened in the initial set of experiments… This story is a wonderful illustration how science progresses via surprising findings, but also its strict conditions on the reproducibility of results.

On his Twitch account, Guillaume Deloizon shows the different stages of the creation process of the interactive comic, from the initial drawing process to the final formatting. On some pages, clickable elements provide access to sources that have fueled the project as well as additional information.