How have people reacted to the portrayal of plant science in Avatar?
Did your colleagues notice any mistakes? A: There were a few little things that could have been done differently that only my botany friends would detect. I’ve had so many people tell me that when Sigourney Weaver used the pipette in the lab, she picked it up upside down. You would get air in it that way. I haven’t seen that, so I’m going to have to go again and look. The other thing people have criticized is the fact that Sigourney Weaver chose to make her character smoke. For me, if she chose to do that for her character that was fine—but anyone who works in a laboratory with samples involving DNA knows that tobacco carries the tobacco mosaic virus and it will contaminate your samples. In the laboratory, if we’re assuming she is doing something with DNA from a plant, she would want to either get rid of the cigarettes or use gloves. People have written to me from all over the place, going, ‘Did you tell her to smoke? She shouldn’t be smoking!’ And it’s just because it’s not good labor
