In January 2014, Thwacke! was approached by Victory Hill Exhibitions LLC to rationalize the science behind Marvel’s  Avengers for an immersive educational exhibit situated in New York’s Discovery Times Square. We built a team of multidisciplinary scientists raised on Marvel’s fiction and with a profound respect for Marvel’s 50’s era canon. More importantly, we were tasked with feats never replicated even within Marvel’s own universe. That is;

1. Formulating a synthetic Super Soldier Serum and Pharmacotherapy for Steven Rogers’ transformation into Captain America.
2. Explaining the secrets behind  Hulk’s reversible transformations and how gamma radiation altered his genome.
3. Discussing how Captain America’s physiology could survive below zero freezing temperatures.
4. And lastly, explaining how all of the above can go wrong to create the Red Skull and Abomination.

This was a creative feat for any scientist to undertake and Victory Hill could not have found another group as willing or eager to fit the bill. We framed these concepts within the most cutting edge technology developed in the past few years by drawing on innovations made in the past 2 years in genome editing to build machines that could hone in on individual genes to be switched on and off through molecular switches.

We were able to promote this collaboration through videos produced  through Stanford University and through panel discussions given at San Diego Comic Convention accompanied with additional coverage through media outlets such as  Nerdist, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe .