Sam Neill Inspired a Generation of Scientists

Sam Neill, and The New Zealand star, who died aged 78 in Sydney, Australia, on Monday, had a long and varied CV. He played everyone from an international spy (Being) and chief investigator (Peaky Blinders) for a famous witch (Merlin). He even played a literal incarnation of the devil (Omen III: The Final Battle).

But throughout his career, Neill was also known for scientific roles in films like The Dish and Event Horizonand there is no one more celebrated than Dr. Alan Grant, the villain paleontologist is the undisputed hero of Jurassic Park.

As fans paid tribute to Neill, remembering both his achievements and the impressive transformation of his farm animals. New Zealand’s beautiful vineyardOne clear theme emerged in honor of Dr. Grant.

“How many of us were inspired to become scientists when we saw Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler?” he wrote Lucky Tran, director of science communication at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, in a post on X that featured a photo of Neill and costar Laura Dern examining a sick triceratops in a scene from. Jurassic Park. Thomas Ronge, a marine geologist with the Scientific Ocean Drilling Coordination Office at Texas A&M University, he shared on Bluesky that the sci-fi blockbuster led him to study paleontology and that although he moved on to another field, “I will always be Dr. Grant at heart.”

Speaking for myself, I can say that when I saw it Jurassic Park when I was 9 years old I had a great dream of becoming a classical scholar like Alan Grant (or maybe an actor, like Sam Neill). What was it about this guy who had kids clamoring to enroll in STEM programs?

“My favorite movie stars were brilliant scientists who used their intellect, not guns or physical strength, to overcome obstacles,” Kevin Holloway, who worked as a neuroscience researcher at the University of Oregon in the late 1990s, tells WIRED. “They also had a clear will and absolute conviction in their beliefs.”

Like Grant, he says, Neill was “the perfect example of the ‘man of science’ (to which) all others are measured.” In the end, Holloway didn’t do a PhD, and now works as a nurse “in diabetic foot care, advanced wound care, and street outreach”—yet she “absolutely” credits Neill with Grant for leading her to science.

Jurassic Park he came to the movie theater when Jim Porter was 23 years old and was finishing his elementary school and geology camp in the western US, he remembers. “I read (Michael) Crichton’s book and went there, then I saw the movie in a small theater,” he says, noting that the work was “very different after that.” He loved Neill’s “compelling and compelling portrait of a scientist whose goal was to understand and restore Earth’s history rather than exploit it,” saying it “strengthened my work as a naturalist.”

It wasn’t just Grant’s differences as a researcher that made him so desirable to many. He was also a powerful role model for the violent, violent extremists of the 1980s and 1990s.

“He’s as confident as a scientist as he is very kind,” says Jamie Anderson, who earned a DPhil in archaeological science from the University of Oxford in 2018 with a phone call. Jurassic Park his favorite movie. He mentioned “the way they take care of their children even though they have been insulting him” and how Dr. Sattler treats him “as an equal and someone he’s proud of” that is why Grant made “the most lethal male antidote in many other action films, especially since that time.”