Scientists created a transgenic line of monkeys carrying a gene encoding green fluorescent protein integrated into their DNA for the first time in 2008, kicking off a new path for research of Huntington’s Disease and the original Glowing Monkey’s blog.
The original website actively existed for just ten months, in 2008/2009, but has the distinction of appearing in the first episode of Fringe.
Fringe aired from 2008 to 2013, across 100 episodes – kicking off in September, three months after the blog. The fantastical sci-fi-esque procedural series starred Anna Torv, John Noble, Leonard Nimoy, Lance Reddick, Joshua Johnson, Blair Brown and Jasika Nicole.
The site and series’s simultaneous launch doesn’t feel like a coincidence, given the blog’s interest in the same sort of fringe science that features in the series. The series also featured a fictional band from which a genuine album circulated on the Internet. But the consensus is that the timing for the blog and series was pure luck.
WALTER: “So much happened here, and so much is about to.”
(Fringe, episode 1)
The original blog content provided brief observations and links to articles on various scientific and science-adjacent subjects. This new incarnation aims to revisit many of the articles linked in the original blog as food for thought in a tabletop role-playing game context. Like a roll on a random table, the variety of subject matter in the original blog’s articles makes for interest seeds, hooks and nudges toward ways to run games, write adventures, or simply as hooks for investigations in procedural RPGs.
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