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EMBO reports 4, 12, 1104–1107 (2003)
doi:10.1038/sj.embor.7400040
What the public thinks it knows about science
Popular culture and its role in shaping the public's perception
of science and scientists
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
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A. Bowdoin Van Riper is in the
Social and International Studies department at Southern Polytechnic State
University, Marietta, Georgia, USA.
e-mail: bvanripe@spsu.edu
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Popular culture probably does more than formal science education to
shape most people's understanding of science and scientists. It is more
pervasive, more eye-catching, and (with rare exceptions) more memorable. No
genetics textbook can hope to compete with Jurassic Park, and no lecture
on biophysics can match the sight of Dr Frankenstein pulling lightning down
from the stormy sky to animate his creature. What messages about science, then,
is the public likely to draw from popular culture? This essay discusses some of
the most common, but there are of course many others. Science is complex and
multi-faceted, and so is popular culture's portrayal of it.
The idea that natural laws are constant across space and time is the
philosophical foundation of modern science. Mainstream popular culture takes a
more relaxed approach, flexing the laws of nature when required. It creates
exceptions to natural laws, or ignores them altogether, whenever they threaten
to conflict with the story being told. Most suspensions of natural law in
popular culture are casual and—except to audiences with scientific
backgrounds—obscure. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but
action heroes like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (1971) and Sylvester
Stallone's Rambo (First Blood, 1982) barely flinch when they fire
bullets that seconds later knock a villain off his feet. There is no air in
space to carry sound waves, yet spaceships routinely blow up with a thunderous
roar or make a 'whoosh' sound like an express train when they pass. Light
travels at around 300,000 km s-1, but in a Star
Wars-style gun battle, the heroes can dive away from a laser beam after it
is fired. Ecosystems on Earth require large populations of prey to sustain even
modest populations of predators, but the ecosystems of alien planets include
abundant predators and scant prey. There are, of course, sound dramatic reasons
for such scientific transgressions. Action heroes are meant to be superhuman,
soundless explosions would feel as wrong as a red ace of spades, and lasers
that behaved like real lasers would turn futuristic gunfight scenes into an
incomprehensible jumble of beams.
The preference of popular culture for drama over scientific reality is
especially apparent in its treatment of faster-than-light (FTL) travel. This
treatment ignores two key implications of the special theory of relativity: the
apparent impossibility of accelerating a spaceship (or any object) to the speed
of light, and the slowing of time that would take place within the spaceship as
its speed increased. Spacecraft in Star Wars (1977) and Star Trek
(1966), as well as in countless other science-fiction tales, routinely travel
faster than light while ignoring these effects. Their crews cross interstellar
distances in a matter of days and return to find that time has passed no more
quickly at home than it has aboard ship. These fictional explorers treat FTL
travel as unremarkable. Explanations, if provided at all, consist of casual
references to 'hyperspace', 'jump gates', 'space warps' or simply the 'drive'.
Such comments imply that technology has overcome the effects of relativity, or
that science has replaced Einstein's view of the universe with one in which FTL
travel is possible. Both interpretations lead to similar optimistic
conclusions: either the universe will be found to conform to human needs or it
will be made to conform to human needs.
Natural laws may be flexible in popular culture, but the relationship
between genes and the characteristics for which they code is rigid. Popular
culture routinely glosses over the complex interactions between genes, and the
equally complex interplay of genes and the environment that Richard Lewontin
has dubbed the "triple helix". By treating single genes as if they
invariably and inevitably produce specific traits, regardless of other
influences or even of transplantation into a different organism, popular
culture has deemed that our DNA is our destiny.
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No genetics textbook can hope to compete with
Jurassic Park, and no lecture on biophysics can match the sight of Dr
Frankenstein pulling lightning down from the stormy sky to animate his
creature
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Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park and its 1992 film
adaptation by Steven Spielberg is a classic expression of this idea. Crichton's
manufactured dinosaurs are reconstructed using DNA from fossilized dinosaur
blood, patched where it is incomplete with DNA from extant species of frogs.
Grown in ostrich eggs, hatched in a laboratory and raised in an environment 100
million years removed from the one in which their ancestors evolved, they grow
to adulthood fully functional and lethally well adapted. Despite being raised
without older members of their own species to imitate, they duplicate the
behaviour of their ancestors as well as their anatomy. Hadrosaurs' tendency to
collect into packs and velociraptors' ability to hunt cooperatively are,
evidently, fully programmed into their genes. The only exception to this
perfect reproduction is the dinosaurs' own reproductive system. Here, the
interpolated frog DNA has manifested itself with crisp perfection. The
dinosaurs are, like the frogs from which their DNA patches came,
hermaphrodites. The biological implausibility of such a change, like the
physical implausibility of FTL travel, is glossed over quickly and
casually.
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Popular culture routinely glosses over the complex
interactions between genes, and the equally complex interplay of genes and the
environment...
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Similar assumptions about the simplicity of DNA coding appear in stories
about humans augmented with genes from other species. Max, the transgenic
heroine of James Cameron's television adventure series Dark Angel
(2000), carries both human and feline DNA. She looks like a normal, although
exotically beautiful, young woman in her early twenties, but has the enhanced
senses and superhuman agility of a cat, as well as a female cat's tendency to
go into heat once a month. Mole, another transgenic character introduced later
in the series, carries the DNA of a desert-dwelling lizard and looks like a man
with the head and hands of an iguana. Designed by his human creators to be a
desert warrior, he has a man's intelligence (and love of cigars) and a lizard's
ability to thrive in hot climates with little water.
Popular culture's assumption that specific genes invariably produce
specific traits extends beyond the physical appearance of the organism. Dr
Harry Wolper, the scientist-hero of the novel and film Creator (1985),
works to clone his dead wife because he believes that the clone will not just
resemble but be his lost love. The 1997 film Gattaca, a cautionary tale
about a society in which prenatal manipulation is routine, posits a future in
which physical perfection—beauty and athletic ability, as well as freedom
from disease—has become the norm. The idea that qualities as complex and
culturally dependent as personality, beauty and intelligence can be created by
plugging the right genes into the right places in the genome of an individual
is, at best, debatable. It is fully consistent, however, with popular culture's
vision of genetic engineering as a technology that borders on magic—able
to transform any living thing into any other.
Until Copernicus and Darwin showed otherwise, humans imagined themselves
as the centre of the Universe and the pinnacle of the living world. Until
genetics and primatology revealed the truth, humans believed that a wide gulf
lay between them and the 'lower animals'. These changes in attitude have,
however, been partial and incomplete at best. Many members of the public
continue to assign humankind a unique, privileged place in the natural world.
Popular culture regularly reinforces the view that humans are special.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) envisioned the course of
evolution as a ladder, with Homo sapiens occupying the uppermost rung.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) envisioned it as a bush, with Homo sapiens as
one of hundreds of individual twigs. Ernst Häckel (1834–1919)
substituted a towering tree for Darwin's bush, but placed Homo sapiens at the
tip of its thick trunk and relegated 'lower animals' to the lower branches.
Scientific opinion has swung steadily towards Darwin's non-directional model
since 1920, but popular opinion has always favoured Häckel and Lamarck,
and the privileged position that they assigned to humans. Popular culture's
depiction of evolution describes it as linear and progressive, with Homo
sapiens as its final, finest product. The Smithsonian Institution's Museum
of Natural History, for example, displays a multi-story mural entitled 'The
Tower of Time', which arranges the history of life into a narrow vertical
column. As the viewer's eye travels up the column, single-celled organisms give
rise to marine invertebrates, fishes, amphibians and so on to humans at the
top. The most famous visual metaphor for human evolution is a parade of
increasingly modern-looking human ancestors walking left-to-right across the
page—a direction, as Western cultures read from left-to-right, that
implies progress.
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Popular culture's depiction of evolution describes it
as linear and progressive, with Homo sapiens as its final, finest
product
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Fiction, too, routinely depicts the history of life as progressive, and
humans as the pinnacle of that progress. A character in the film Jurassic
Park (although not in the book), argues that dinosaurs "had their
shot" and that "nature selected them for
extinction"—language implying that dinosaurs failed and were
replaced by something better. The mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger in the
animated film Ice Age (2002) seem to understand that the advent of
humans, even Paleolithic hunters, means that the days of their own species are
numbered. Dozens of science-fiction stories—Spider and Jeanne Robinson's
Stardance trilogy of novels, the television series Star Trek: The Next
Generation (1987), the films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and
Mission to Mars (2000)—suggest that the evolution of life on Earth
has been shaped by benevolent aliens. All assume that the goal of the project
was to produce intelligent, self-aware, tool-making humanoids: us.
The idea that humans are the final, most sophisticated product of
evolution also permeates popular culture in other ways. Human-like beings,
created by humans rather than God or Nature, are typically depicted as deeply
flawed and sometimes as lethally dangerous. HAL 9000, the super-intelligent
computer in 2001, goes insane and murders four of its five human
'masters'. A similar machine in D.F. Jones's Colossus trilogy of novels
attempts to precipitate a nuclear war, as does the SkyNet system in the
Terminator films. The lethal androids in the Terminator series
are human in appearance, but dedicated to the destruction or enslavement of
real, flesh-and-blood humans. Human clones receive similarly rough treatment in
popular culture, as do animals raised to human-like intelligence: the
super-intelligent dog in Olaf Stapledon's novel Sirius or the
megalomaniac laboratory mouse in the cartoon series Pinky and the Brain.
Human characters who acquire superhuman powers through human agency, such as
H.G. Wells' Invisible Man, are, typically, portrayed less sympathetically than
those who acquire them 'naturally' through accident or mutation; for example,
the comic book superheroes Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Popular culture's
underlying message seems to be the same in each case: any human attempt to
improve on or even replicate humans is an act of unforgivable arrogance and an
affront to Nature.
The rise of modern medicine, with its chemical 'toolkit' of vaccines and
antibiotic drugs, temporarily made heroes of physicians and researchers in the
1930s, 40s and 50s. Film actor Paul Muni, for example, recreated the discovery
of the germ theory in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935) and Edward G.
Robinson vanquished syphilis in Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940).
Popular non-fiction books like Paul de Kruif's The Microbe Hunters
(1932) dramatized the work of less familiar researchers, and Sinclair Lewis's
novel Arrowsmith (1925; filmed in 1931) revolved around a fictional
counterpart. Slightly later, Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin and
Jonas Salk's development of a polio vaccine brought them popular, as well as
scientific, acclaim. Magazine articles, advertisements and other media also
proclaimed doctors and medical researchers as cultural heroes, who protected
ordinary citizens by doing battle with the diseases that threatened
them.
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Stories about 'crazy' ideas and their defenders have
been common in popular culture for centuries, supplying drama when the hero is
ridiculed and a satisfying ending when he is vindicated
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The diseases that these doctor-heroes battled—syphilis, polio and
bacterial infections—were a routine part of everyday life in the first
half of the twentieth century. Since the late 1960s, however, the biological
threats featured in popular culture have grown steadily more exotic. Fictional
doctors and medical researchers still appear as heroes, but their adversaries
are rarely the 'everyday' diseases of the late twentieth century—heart
disease, cancer, or AIDS. Instead, they face diseases from the African jungles,
from secret government laboratories or even from other worlds.
Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain (filmed in
1970) concerns a small team of scientists struggling to understand and contain
a mysterious virus brought to Earth by a returning space probe. Stephen King's
apocalyptic thriller The Stand (1978, revised 1991) is set in the
aftermath of a devastating plague that kills virtually the entire human race.
The movie Outbreak (1995), based on Richard Preston's sensationalistic
non-fiction bestseller The Hot Zone, focuses on a similar team battling
an Ebola-like disease carried to California by infected African monkeys. Within
the last year alone, the television dramas Third Watch, ER and
Law and Order have all featured stories about incipient epidemics
of exotic diseases. The common thread in all these stories is their high
stakes. Cancer, heart disease or tuberculosis might kill tens of thousands
annually, but their exotic, fictional counterparts are able to kill millions in
a matter of weeks. The scientists' battle with them is, therefore, not just a
battle for a higher quality of life but for the survival of the human race. One
scene from Outbreak, prominently featured in the advertising campaign,
shows a computer projection of how the disease will spread if left unchecked:
red shading flows like blood across a map of the United States.
The verses of "They All Laughed", a popular American song of
the 1930s, list famous historical figures—Christopher Columbus, Henry
Ford, the Wright Brothers—who were ridiculed for ideas that are now taken
for granted. Even then, 70 years ago, the theme was far from new. Stories about
'crazy' ideas and their defenders have been common in popular culture for
centuries, supplying drama when the hero is ridiculed, and a satisfying ending
when he is vindicated. The formula is particularly common in stories about
inventors, but it also appears regularly in stories about scientists.
Victor Frankenstein, in both Mary Shelley's novel and the dozens of film
adaptations, is opposed by learned men who insist that electricity cannot bring
life to dead flesh. Ian Malcolm, the mathematician who predicts that the
dinosaurs of Jurassic Park will escape human control, is dismissed by
the park's creator as a Cassandra. Theodore Honey, a research metallurgist in
Nevil Shute's novel No Highway (filmed in 1951 as No Highway in the
Sky), tries in vain to convince the aircraft-maker that employs him of a
potentially fatal metal-fatigue problem in their new airliner. All three, of
course, are proved right—as are the based-on-fact heroes of films like
Madame Curie (1943), The Story of Louis Pasteur and And the Band
Played On (1993; about scientists grappling with the early stages of the
AIDS epidemic).
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong or inaccurate with such
stories. The history of science is studded with ideas that won wide acceptance
after initially being dismissed as outlandish: the heliocentric universe, the
kinetic theory of heat and plate tectonics, for example. Popular culture
departs from reality, however, when the hero's outlandish idea always proves to
be correct, and orthodox scientists' dismissals of it always turn out to be
wrong. Popular culture also—for obvious dramatic reasons—compresses
the process by which a new idea is accepted. Max Planck's famous dictum that
new ideas triumph only when their opponents die off has no place in popular
culture's view of science. Neither does Linus Pauling's observation that a
scientist needs to have lots of ideas, as most of them will be wrong.
Especially in the movies, new ideas are almost invariably right, and triumph
over entrenched scepticism in a matter of weeks, days, or even hours. When a
brash, young fictional scientist predicts that a great white shark is hunting
close inshore (Jaws, 1975), a volcano is about to form in downtown Los
Angeles (Volcano, 1997), or a comet is about to hit the Earth (Deep
Impact, 1998), audiences can be sure that the scientist will soon be proven
right.
Ultimately, we all wish that people had a better grasp of basic science,
and that they could—when they saw it happen—recognize when dramatic
license is being taken with the laws of nature. The question, of course, is how
to achieve that goal. Simply complaining about the scientific inaccuracies in
popular culture is not a solution. Done privately, it accomplishes nothing;
done publicly, it is less likely to open someone's eyes than to reinforce their
belief that most scientists are humourless drones.
A better solution is to accept popular culture's treatment of science
for what it is—entertainment—and use it as a springboard for
dialogue with the public. Popular culture does occasionally get it right, and
every case where it does so provides a 'teachable moment' in which a concept
can be vividly reinforced. Ben Bova's novels Mars and Moonrise, and
their sequels, are scientifically literate depictions of conditions on other
worlds. Gattaca raises serious questions about genetic discrimination
before mutating into a conventional thriller. Carl Sagan's novel Contact
(and its movie adaptation in 1997) offers a knowing portrayal of
government-funded 'big science'. Even the many cases where popular culture gets
it wrong can be useful. A step-by-step explanation of why the physics and
astronomy in Armageddon (1998) are nonsense would, for example, make a
serviceable introduction to the basics of orbital mechanics.
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Popular culture does occasionally get it right, and
every case where it does so provides a 'teachable moment' in which a concept
can be vividly reinforced
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Popular culture can be a shared frame of reference, within which
scientists and the public can discuss both science and its social implications,
but it can only serve that role if scientists are willing to take it
seriously.
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References
Gould, S.J. ( 1995) Full House: Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. Harmony House, New York, USA.
Haynes, R.D. ( 1994) From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Landau, M. ( 1991) Narratives of Human Evolution. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Nelkin, D. & Lindee, M.S. ( 1996) The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon. University of Michigan Press, Michigan, USA.
Plait, P. ( 2002) Bad Astronomy: Mistakes and Misconceptions Revealed. John Wiley & Sons, New York, USA.
Skal, D.J. ( 1998) Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. W.W. Norton, New York, USA.
Van Riper, A.B. ( 2002) Science in Popular Culture: A Reference Guide. Greenwood, Westport, Connecticut, USA.
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