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Coma studies and jungle madness
"Days of Our Lives" was paving the way for science long before real-life eggheads had figured anything out.

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By Christine Kenneally

June 7, 2001 | In the form of elementary particles, black holes and other such nerdy delights, science in fiction has long been the province of Trekkers, computer programmers and clerks in secondhand-book stores. Indeed, much has been made of "The Real Science Behind the X-Files" and "The Physics of Star Trek," but the relative movement of time, just like sands through the hourglass, is a concept familiar to anyone who has watched "Days of Our Lives." Spurning the showoffy special effects and spaceship sets of other shows, "Days" does relativity on a domestic scale: Small misunderstandings last an eternity, pregnancies come to term in weeks and marriages evaporate faster than you can say "I made sweet love to the best man's twin brother the night before our wedding."

But gently flicking at the boundaries of space and time is child's play for "DOOL," which prefers psychosurgery to particle physics. In fact, the show sits firmly on the cutting edge of 21st century scientific research -- long before the completed draft of the human genome heralded the new sexiness of the biological sciences, "Days" was swapping brains, transplanting memories and shuffling identities galore. It was Stephen Hawking, clearly a "DOOL" fan, who said, "Today's science fiction is often tomorrow's science fact." Thus, here follows a brief guide to the real science facts behind the 35-year-old serial and its answers to some of the most important scientific questions of our day.

GENIUS

What is the one essential ingredient of any true scientific endeavor? The dodgy guy in the white coat: Los Alamos had Robert Oppenheimer, Celera has Craig Venter and "Days" has Dr. Rolf. With such crazy, bastardized vowels that he seems to come from eastern Europe (the entire geographical east of Europe, unfettered by national or linguistic boundaries), Rolf is a scientist's scientist. As comfortable with biotechnology as with psychotherapy, Rolf will operate on you as soon as he looks at you, and if necessary, he'll shoot you, too. Taking his orders from "DOOL's" crime boss, Stefano Dimera (a Svengali's Svengali), Rolf sails effortlessly from one experiment to another in the neurological wonderland that is Salem. His high-tech lab is impressively packed to the rafters with computer banks that look a little like stacks of stereo amplifiers.

OUR BODIES, OURSELVES. OR ARE THEY?

What will happen when human cloning gets off the ground? Months ago, the New York Times published photographic evidence of the dangerous side effects of this process. An obese mouse clone was pictured alongside its normal-size progenitor. Why was the clone obese? Scientists still don't know. But before the mouse was cloned, "Days" had us prepared. In addition to three kinds of Hope, two John Blacks, a couple of Marlena Evanses (Black's wife) and two Romans (Marlena's ex-husband), the show featured four versions of Kristen, Dimera's daughter. The beautiful Kristen's carbon copies varied just as inexplicably as the mouse's: One was a nun with buck teeth and another a gormless bumpkin.

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