The Secret Lives of Martinos Folk It’s Gonna Be a Lot Less Spooky Around Here If you were in Building 149 of the Martinos Center on any given Halloween in the past decade, you might have come across a possibly startling scene: a nine-foot, anthropomorphic volcano wandering the halls; a moth-man with large, glowing eyes posing for photos; or maybe just a huge globule of gluten kicking back with friends. If you happened to see one of these, or some other, similar tableau, don’t be alarmed. Your eyes were not, in fact, deceiving you. Since joining the Center in 2008, a certain biomedical researcher and Halloween aficionado—let’s call him the Masked Scientist—has shared his unabashed love of the holiday with his colleagues here, crafting ever-more elaborate costumes and often debuting them in Building 149 before heading off to Salem, Cambridge or downtown Boston to celebrate with friends. He has called on his extensive engineering background, not to mention his boundless imagination, in designing and constructing the costumes, employing sculpting and 3D-printing skills and incorporating an array of mechanical and electrical elements. The results, as you might imagine, have never been anything less than astounding. The Masked Scientist declined to meet for an in-person interview for this story, but he agreed to answer a question or three from the safety of his secret lair, a subterranean laboratory done up in the Gothic style. First: Why does he do it? What compels him, year after year, to devote extraordinary amounts of time and energy to the presumably dying art of hand-tooling costumes with lots of tiny, moving pieces. Ultimately, what keeps him going? “That’s simple,” came the reply, written on parchment in an ornate, Old English script. “Every time I’m confronted with another seemingly insurmountable project-related challenge, or another astronomical expense for supplies and hardware, or just the prospect of losing weeks of sleep and the stress of leading a double life (scientist by day, Halloween fanatic by night), I just have to remind myself of three simple words to make it all okay … ‘Dude, it’s Halloween.’” “Dude, it’s Halloween,” indeed. To be sure, for many in the Center, the Masked Scientist’s big Halloween reveal,
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