It's that summery time of year, when the sun is shining, vacations are pending, and over 125,000 science fiction fans are gathering in San Diego for the annual Comic-Con extravaganza. The Science and Entertainment Exchange will be there, too: we are partnering with Discover magazine on a Thursday evening panel, July 22, from 6 to 7 PM, on the science behind science fiction.

Everyone loves a gripping story, and anything involving family secrets seems to have particular power. The Star Wars series was hugely popular not just for its eye-popping special effects and epic mythology, but also for its tangled familial relationships. Darth Vader is Luke's father? Leia is his sister? It's positively Dickensian in its intricate genealogical scope.

Nurse is remarkably sanguine about this twist to his family's history, regretting only that he never had the chance to talk about his origins with his biological mother before she died. "And then there is the final irony that even though I am a geneticist, my family managed to keep my genetic origins secret from me for over half a century," he writes in the addendum to his Nobel Prize autobiography.

By Marty Kaplan

To two neighborhoods, actually. One is Los Angeles, where the Science & Entertainment Exchange has recently set up shop, and which the Norman Lear Center, which I direct, also calls home.

The other ‘hood is more metaphorical. The Exchange is in Westwood, located at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute; the Lear Center, based at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, is housed in Beverly Hills. But both of us are also in Hollywood, an industry that permeates the region, both literally and virtually.

In particular, both the Exchange and Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S), a Lear Center project on which I’m the principal investigator, have a shared mission: improving the accuracy of the scientific information depicted in entertainment.

For HH&S, the focus is medicine and health. Funded initially by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our scope includes all topics relevant to public health and safety and studied by the CDC, ranging from avian flu, obesity, and West Nile virus to autism, bioterrorism, and violence. Subsequent support from other agencies – the National Cancer Institute, the Division of Transplantation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health – enabled us to expand our scope to topics like clinical trials, organ donation, patient safety and medical errors, and workplace injuries. More recently, support from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has enabled us to address health issues like malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis in a global context, and funding from The California Endowment has added a focus on the environment, income inequality, and other social determinants of health.

What do we do with these topics? We try to make it as easy as possible for writers and producers of television series and movies to depict those issues factually. Any entertainment industry professional, at no cost, can enlist our help to connect them to clinicians, researchers, first responders, field workers, patients, victims, families, agencies – to experts across the country and around the world on any public health and safety issues that come up in their storylines. These experts, in turn, provide technical assistance and advice to those shows and films. They don’t tell writers what they have to do, but they do tell them what’s true, and they do their best to help those writers tell their stories without sacrificing either accuracy or entertainment value.

The reason our funders support this work is the tremendous influence that entertainment has on audiences. Research consistently shows that audiences believe that the medical and health content of entertainment storylines is accurate. What viewers take in when they watch television and movies does more than capture their imaginations; whether the makers of entertainment intend it or not, their creations constitute a kind of unofficial curriculum about how the world works. Writers do what they do in order to attract viewers, not to conduct public health communication campaigns. But because their stories have such a powerful impact on audiences’ knowledge, beliefs, and behavior, we do our best to help them make smash hits and blockbusters that don’t needlessly misinform their consumers.

And now the National Academy of Sciences, through the Exchange, has come to town. The broad portfolio of the NAS means that industry professionals will now have access to science and engineering experts on cutting-edge topics including extraterrestrial life, computer technology, climate change, and multiple dimensions. And where the subject matter expertise of the Exchange and of HH&S converge – in Institute of Medicine topics, and in life science basic research – we have fashioned a way to route industry queries to one another’s networks of scientists, wherever the most appropriate expertise is located.

So welcome to the ‘hood, NAS. Hollywood will profit from the cool science you can connect it with. And society will benefit from the audiences exposed to the knowledge you can broker to them. As we say in show biz, break a leg.


- Marty Kaplan holds the Norman Lear chair in entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, where he directs the Norman Lear Center, a nonpartisan research and public policy center studying and shaping the impact of entertainment on society. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard in molecular biology, and a Ph.D. from Stanford in modern thought and literature, he was Vice President Walter Mondale’s chief speechwriter, and he worked at Disney for 12 years as a motion picture executive and as a screenwriter and producer.

Variety and I09 have both posted articles in the last few days about the unique relationship between the film TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN and the US ARMED FORCES.

Director Michael Bay and the movie's producers were able to get the full support of every branch of the US Military except the Coast Guard in making this latest installment of the franchise. By offering their expertise to the filmmakers, the military brought an informed perspective that will start a unique conversation with the audience. When heroes on screen show us how it's really done, we naturally want to emulate them. And the discovery that the cool protagonist you saw on screen did something real that you too could do, well, that gets people excited to be a part of something in which they may not have otherwise had an interest - like the military... or science.

The pentagon's decision to consult on TRANSFORMERS was in part an effort to advertise and glamorize military service. Here at The Exchange, we're thrilled to see this kind of synergy because, in many ways, our mission is one-and-the same as theirs: promote recruitment and interest in our cause through mainstream media.

In TRANSFORMERS, we have a major action extravaganza that consulted with the experts to make things, bigger, faster, louder, better, and more explosive because the reality is that oftentimes fact is a wilder ride than fiction. This film, along with many of Mr. Bay's motion pictures, makes an important statement about the value of getting things right for the screen: the glory of spectacle (and no one has mastered this art better than Bay) only grows stronger with realism. And what better way is there to celebrate the achievements of our servicemen and women - or the most brilliant science minds on the planet - than to honor them as heroes onscreen?

Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that the Science and Entertainment Exchange officially launched with an exclusive, invitation-only symposium at the Creative Artists Agency. But it was actually last November when over 300 writers, directors, producers, production designers, and executives, along with scientists, engineers and health professionals, convened to hear about the latest cutting-edge research in rare and infectious diseases, climate change, cosmology and astronomy, genomics, brain and mind (neuroscience), and robotics/artificial intelligence.

Hi everybody. This is my first posting here, and I’m excited to write about science in film, a topic important for both scientists and film people. I’m a physicist who’s also a lifelong science fiction and movie fan. That helped when I wrote a book about science in film called Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World. In the process I watched a lot of films and that has given me plenty to write about.

Today I want to track science-fiction films over the years by comparing two classics with their recent remakes: The Day the Earth Stood Still from 1951 (Robert Wise, director) with the 2008 version under the same title, directed by Scott Derrickson; and The War of the Worlds from 1953 (Byron Haskin, director) with the 2005 version War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, director).

The new versions have wondrous CGI special effects that didn’t exist years ago. The original WOTW showed only a Martian’s skinny arm and hand, whereas the later version shows animated full-body aliens along with their truly evil-looking giant war machines striding across the landscape. Ditto for TDTESS 2008, where the alien spacecraft is more eye-catching than the flying saucer in TDTESS 1951. Also spectacular in TDTESS 2008 is the scene where a swarm of nanomachines attacks a tractor-trailer as it barrels down the highway.

But the early versions had good points too as shown by IMDB user ratings for both films, which are actually higher for the originals than for the remakes. One difference is that the originals are shorter than is now typical, which made for tight plotting. There’s not a wasted second in the 92-minute runtime of TDTESS 1951. The action develops at a headlong pace, making the film exciting despite its relatively primitive special effects (it isn’t even in color). Although a 2-hour science-fiction film (WOTW 2005 runs 116 minutes) offers time for great special effects scenes, maybe we’ve lost something by giving up the discipline of making a story work within 90 minutes or so.

That’s a matter of cinematic judgment, but another issue is that the scientific presentation has also changed. Both versions of WOTW follow the original H.G. Wells story of Martian invaders. But in WOTW 1951, Gene Barry is a physicist who frantically tries to use science to stop the aliens. The film provides some scientific exposition as Barry and his colleagues examine the origins and physical makeup of the aliens, seeking their weak points. In WOTW 2005, there are no scientists; instead, divorced father Tom Cruise desperately tries to save his family and himself as an alien invasion brings the world crashing down. The human power of this scenario makes it a valid cinematic choice, but this is a science-fiction story without much science, making it closer to the fantasy or horror genres.

There are differences between the versions of TDTESS too. In both, the alien visitor Klaatu warns humanity that it is in line to be eliminated because of its behavior. But in TDTESS 1951, Klaatu (Michael Rennie) insists that we stop using nuclear weapons or face eradication by an interplanetary civilization, whereas Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) in TDTESS 2008 wants to wipe out humanity because we are despoiling our planet. Each reflects fears involving the science of the time. In the 1950s, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the possibility of nuclear annihilation dominated everything. Now that nuclear fears are less overwhelming, we worry instead whether our own activities will make our planet unlivable.

Because they display contemporary scientific concerns, whether by conscious choice or simply by echoing current trends, even science-fiction films made as entertainment can become part of the serious discussion of these issues. But removing any touch at all of scientific exposition doesn’t bode well for the science part of science fiction. True, it’s not easy to blend exposition into a dramatic story, yet creative filmmakers have done just that. Jurassic Park (1993) did a credible job of explaining cloning, and A Beautiful Mind (2001) managed to put a mathematical theorem on screen in an entertaining way. And filmmakers might just find that filling part of their 2-hour time slots with a bit of science will pay dividends for today’s sophisticated audiences.

Last week saw the release of the science fiction/thriller, Moon, starring Sam Rockwell as an astronaut named Sam Bell, who is wrapping up a three-year stint at a mining base on the moon operated by the fictional Lunar Industries. His only companion is a robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), whose facial "expressions" consist of emoticons displayed on a screen. Three weeks before he is scheduled to return home to his wife and three-year-old daughter, Sam discovers that everything at his cozy lunar base is not what it appears to be. Or is the isolation finally messing with his sanity?

What do Happy Feet, Polar Express, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Beowulf, and The Strange Case of Benjamin Button have in common? They are all films that employ the latest advances in motion capture technology -- or rather, what was cutting-edge in motion capture back in 2007, when those films were first being made. Scientists continue to come up with breakthrough technologies to make Hollywood's special effects even more magically convincing.

There’s one scientific question that rivals all others. Okay, it may be more a philosophical dilemma than a scientific one, but it has kept scientists and thinkers, the world round, busy for millennia. Apparently, it pits Stephen Hawking against Aristotle, if you believe Wikipedia. To know the answer would be to understand existence. I am talking, of course, about the question of the chicken and the egg. Which came first?

Now, as much as the National Academy of Sciences would surely appreciate my weighing in on this, I won’t be doing that here. I raise the question as a means of segueing into my first post here on the Science & Entertainment Exchange blog.

If there’s one question we get asked most on CSI: Miami, it’s about where we get the inspiration and the science for our stories. “How in the world did you come up with all of that?” In attempting an answer, I think of the chicken and the egg. Which came first: the idea of the murder or the science our CSIs needed to solve it? That answer is about as futile as the one for the chicken and the egg. It … kinda … all depends.

Sometimes, we’ll come across a scientific discovery or advanced forensic technique that is so cool, so new, or so far out there that we create a story just so we can use it. Reconstructing a murder weapon from multiple stab wounds. Using an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (fancy pacemaker) to determine a victim’s final moments alive. Recreating a “virtual crime scene” from stitched-together digital photos. When we find scientific possibilities like these, it’s as if we’ve stumbled on to a secret that we can’t wait to tell.

More often, the idea for an episode begins with a scenario, particularly one where someone ends up dead. Dude covered in blood has amnesia. Girl blows up in a fitting room, trying on a dress. Man runs through party, engulfed in flames. These are created from the ether, imagined. But science is science. You can’t just sit in a room and make that part up, try as we might. However you can find yourself saying: “wouldn’t it be cool if we could….” And through research and talking with experts (plug: the Science & Entertainment Exchange is a great first step in finding that expert), we usually find some scientific basis for what we need to tell our story. And inevitably, it’s cooler than something we could have made up. You hear about shows being “ripped from the headlines.” Well our story ideas spring as much from scientific journals as they do from the front page of the daily newspaper.

In breaking an episode this season, we had our CSIs try to solve a murder that occurred a year ago or more. The catch: we needed our heroes to have always had the evidence in their possession. The problem: How do you hold on to evidence for over a year and not look like total inept chumps? A writer in the room started, “wouldn’t it be cool if the technology to discover the evidence didn’t exist a year ago?” Turns out, not only would it be cool, it actually is possible. We found an article touting a new fingerprint analysis technique. It reveals a print’s unique chemical signature and uses that to separate prints obscured beneath others. Latent fingerprints are made up of oils from your skin and whatever other substances that may have been picked up through touch. Thus, the chemical make-up of your print is as unique to you as its pattern. Before this discovery, separating layered fingerprints was impossible. By using this technique, called DESI (I’ll spare you the big words that make up that acronym), our CSIs would be able to isolate chemicals and tease out an image of each unique print. And one of those prints would belong to our killer.

I’m not sure which was the chicken in this anecdote and which was the egg, but the circular nature of the relationship was the same. The story came first, which created the need for the science, which beget really cool science, which told a really cool story. What’s more, our CSIs look like brilliant crime-solvers. Now, it helps that our CSIs just happen to work in the most advanced and well-equipped forensic lab this side of Las Vegas, but that’s for another post.

There was an additional unexpected benefit from highlighting the practical application of this recent scientific discovery. The scientist and the school behind the DESI found themselves in the spotlight amongst their peers, being recognized once again for their work. By some crazy confluence of events, their scientific curiosity became the lynchpin to an episode watched by millions around the world. A win for both science and entertainment.

A quick post script: After the Exchange’s symposium last November, I was inspired to report back to the writers with all the mind-blowing things I witnessed. Like 3-D television … surely that could make its way into our show’s A.V. lab. I’m still trying to figure out how we might use Lawrence Goldstein’s presentation about nerve cell transportation as the inspiration for some new tool in the lab. And Bonnie Brassler’s talk about bacterial communication … I don’t know where to begin, but to say we’re CSI: Miami! If any show can turn that science into feasible forensic entertainment, it’s us! Keep an eye out. These ideas will eke themselves, one way or another, into the entertainment we love to watch. They’re too cool not to.




Photos: http://mattandkatherinekammeyer.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/chicken-and-the-egg.jpg

Ah, the hangover. Most of us have had one of these at one time or another after sucking down one too many at a bar or party. But what is this miserable reminder of the dangers of excess and what might we do (besides the most obvious solution: easing up on the sauce) to avoid this unfortunate consequence? With THE HANGOVER’s strong showing at the box office over the weekend, we thought it might be an interesting to look at the science of the hangover.

We all remember a noble friend in college warning us - "Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, never fear." Drink enough of anything, and clearly the mantra becomes moot. But is there any scientific basis for this commonly held notion?

“Yes!” is our unexpected answer. One of the contributing factors to hangovers is congeners, toxic chemicals formed during the fermentation process. Not all alcohols are created equal when it comes to concentration of congeners: vodka has the least, followed by gin, while scotch whiskey, brandy, rum, and single malt scotch have four to six times more congeners than gin. Per the British Medical Journal, you're more likely to get a hangover from drinking brandy, followed by red wine, rum, whiskey, white wine, gin and vodka. And it really is not a good idea to mix booze, since this makes it harder for your body to process all the varieties congeners. Do congeners lead to hijinks with Mike Tyson, babies, and tigers? Not a doubt in our minds.

As for taking "a hair of the dog that bit you" to remedy a hangover, this does work at easing the symptoms of a hangover, but ultimately it just postpones the inevitable. Drinking lots of water before retiring for the night can counter alcohol's dehydrating effects -- another contributing factor to hangovers -- and drinking coffee the next morning might only make it worse, since both alcohol and caffeine are diuretics.

Of course, if you seriously find the formula for heavy drinking with a lesser hangover truly life-changing, you might want to consider a greater issue in your life… Ultimately, the best defense is not to over-indulge in the first place. "Moderation in all things," as our good friend Epicurus once said. One leaves one's college years behind, and discovers the joys of quality over quantity.

In November of 2007, Jerry Seinfeld lent his multitude of talents to BEE MOVIE, in which he played a young bee, wanting more in his life than the dull drone of the hive. Striking out on his own, his spunky character had a series of misadventures including an unlikely relationship with Renee Zellweger. As it turns out, in the real world, worker bees are leaving their homesteads in America at an alarming rate.

In 2008, a survey made by USDA-ARS indicated that over one third of American bees have been lost to “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD), in which worker bees suddenly turn into deadbeat dads, abandoning the hive for destinations unknown. Why? Though the time-tested “midlife crisis” excuse is always a possibility, no one actually knows.

In 2007, The National Academy of Sciences released a report on CCD titled Status of Pollinators in North America that identified several possible explanations, though none could be confirmed as a cause. While love of Renee Zellweger was not explored, it also certainly has not been ruled out either.

Most recently, the NAP website reports that Spanish scientists have isolated and treated Nosema Ceranae, a parasite that some believe may contribute to CCD, though there is no word yet on the treatment’s effectiveness on Renee Zellweger.

So, why should we care about a bunch of bees? Well, mainly because most of us like eating and would prefer to continue the practice. In a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein, it has been said that “if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

I was interviewed the other day by a journalist who asked me the following questions: Why is science outreach important? What does it matter whether people know anything about what is going on at the forefront of esoteric areas like cosmology? My response was colored by a recent experience giving a lecture to inaugurate the International Year of Astronomy at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

I was lecturing on “The Impact of Modern Cosmology on Culture.” And the point that really hit home as I prepared my lecture is the fact that the existence of the Big Bang really deeply permeates the modern Zeitgeist. The discovery in 1929 that the Universe was expanding, combined with Le Maitre’s realization that Einstein’s General Relativity required a Big Bang (a fact that Einstein ridiculed until he realized it was correct), meant the Universe has a beginning.

The fact that this remark may seem trivial reflects how deeply it has become a part of our cultural makeup. Until Hubble, the conventional scientific wisdom was that the universe was essentially static and eternal. Nowadays, however, no one doubts a universal instant of creation, whether or not they call it a Big Bang. It is so much a part of daily life that a popular television show can adapt the name and still be popular.

Now, does it matter that the television show The Big Bang Theory has nothing to do with the Big Bang? Not to me it doesn’t. Any more than The Thomas Crown Affair used art as a mere backdrop for an action adventure. Science needs to be more heavily integrated into our culture, for reasons I will comment on in a minute, and if one way to begin the process is for it to be a poorly stereotyped backdrop in a television comedy, that is okay. I could certainly hope for better, and maybe one day I will witness it. But for the moment, somewhere out there some kid will wonder what it is those two nerds are really talking about, and maybe that will lead him or her to pick up a book…

Indeed that is the real reason for outreach. Science has produced some of the most remarkable intellectual leaps that humans have made, and we need to celebrate these as we do art, literature, music, and theater. It is simply tragic that we do not share the scientific enlightenment as broadly as we share our other cultural developments. Not because any of these may have practical spinoffs, but because by celebrating these we celebrate what is truly best about being human.

So, I write books in part to return the favor that was done to me. When I was a kid, I got turned on to science by reading popular books by Einstein, Gamow, and others. And if I can now turn a kid onto science, whether or not they pursue science as an activity, I find that immensely gratifying. Because if science gets more ingrained in our collective cultural consciousness then I think the some cultural spinoffs of science—things like a truly global appreciation of ideas independent of myopic cultural jealousies—may actually have a chance to make the world a better place in which to live, think, play, and create.

Pixar's new movie, UP, raked in a healthy $68 million in ticket sales over the weekend, and seems poised to be another hit for the Oscar-winning animation studio. It's the tale of an elderly curmudgeon named Carl Frederikson (voiced by Ed Asner) who decides to get away from it all via a unique mechanism: he strings an enormous bunch of helium-filled balloons to his house, lifting it high into the air.