My Crime Against Science

While channel surfing last week, I happened upon the film, Shattered Glass. It's the true story of young journalist's fall from grace as it's revealed that he's fabricated ridiculous news stories. The movie conjured up a dark memory of a crime I once committed against science.

I think it was my sophomore year in high school. I was working on a biology experiment. A friend had gathered a water sample from a local lake, and we placed it in an incubator for about a week. Assured that the sample would be teeming with microorganisms, we placed a splash of the water on a slide and had a look through the microscope. What we found was lackluster - some big chunks of dirt and a few random fibers floating about. Having sharpened a #2 pencil in anticipation of recording my discovery of a new lifeform, I just let my imagination take over.

The report I turned in featured a fantastic sketch of a bizarre octopus-like creature attacking an amoeba. My impressive hydra monster even had eyes at the ends of its tentacles.

A few days later I was called into my biology teacher's office. He had a very serious look on his face as he pushed my lab book across his desk. "Do you want to tell me about this?" I enthusiastically blazed into the story of dredging the sample out of the lake slime, then how I carefully monitored the incubation period. I think I even described the amoeba's frantic struggle to escape the micro-octo-monster's deadly clutch.

The teacher shook his head in dismay, then launched into a lecture about scientific ethics. He was right. I had stretched the truth...well, okay it was worse than just stretching. I still got a decent grade for the project, and I learned an important lesson about the fine line between fact and fiction. When creating fiction that's disguised as fact, don't get too carried away.

If I had just left those eyeballs off the tentacles.