5 Things Matt Damon Has in Common with the New Mark Watney Plant

The hero of The Martian, one of the films up for Best Picture at this weekend's Academy Awards, isn't unusual because he's a scientist—he's unusual because he's a plant scientist. Books and movies rarely even try to make botany seem cool. Yet Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, is definitely meant to be cool. "I am the greatest botanist on this planet!" he declares after being abandoned on Mars. Real plant scientists are thrilled to see a cool botanist on the big screen. Chris Martine, a professor at Bucknell University who studies plant reproduction, called the movie "perhaps the finest paean to botanical science (and botanical field work) that Hollywood has yet presented." And he marked the occasion fittingly. When Martine discovered a new plant species in the Northern Territory of Australia, he named it after Mark Watney. The plant, Solanum watneyi, is a kind of bush tomato, a flowering ...