Science 28 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5906, p. 1315
DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5906.1315

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News of the Week

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
Science Goes Hollywood: NAS Links With Entertainment Industry

Jon Cohen

Movie stars. In Titanic, a concocted, impossible night sky irked astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

CREDIT: 20TH CENTURY FOX/PARAMOUNT/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA--Near the end of the movie Titanic, actress Kate Winslet stands on a plank of wood and looks up at the night sky. "There was one sky Kate Winslet should be looking at," astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said at an unusual gathering of 350 Hollywood moguls and prominent scientists who met here on 20 November to launch a new collaboration called the Science &Entertainment Exchange (SEE). "It was the wrong sky. I was pissed off." Tyson, who heads the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said he met Titanic director James Cameron by chance and pointed out that the stars on the left side of the screen mirrored the stars on the right. "He said, 'The last time I checked, the film made $1 billion.' "Tyson says he replied, tongue in cheek, "Imagine how much more you could have made."

Aligning the stars correctly may not have helped Titanic's bottom line, but Tyson's gripe does reflect a sense within the scientific community that movies and television too often botch the science--even when it would take little extra effort to get it right. With that in mind, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) launched SEE, which it hopes will "be a service to all of Hollywood" by connecting scientific authorities to the people who produce, write, direct, and animate films and TV shows, explained NAS President Ralph Cicerone. The operation will consist of a "simple office" in Los Angeles to, as director Jerry Zucker put it, "bring our two best friends together who haven't met."

Although Hollywood is not suddenly shopping for scripts that dramatize the world of science--which many here noted rarely provides a gripping narrative--Zucker (Airplane, Ghost) and his producer wife, Janet, saw that too much distance separated the two endeavors. The Zuckers became intimately involved with the scientific community when they helped push through a 2004 proposition that created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to pursue stem cell research with state funds. Then one of their employees introduced them to Cicerone, and together they dreamed up SEE. A key part of their plans for SEE, which they demonstrated here, is to hold salons that enable the entertainment community to learn about cutting-edge scientific advances and discuss them with the researchers at the front. For now, NAS is bankrolling SEE's first-year budget of $490,000 from its endowment, but NAS and the Zuckers are looking for other funders.

Strange bedfellows? NAS head Ralph Cicerone (left) teamed with the Zuckers (right) to create SEE.

CREDIT: KARI WILTON

SEE held its glitzy inaugural--replete with fluorescent Pyrex beakers as centerpieces on the lunch tables--at 2000 Avenue of the Stars, a high-rise in Century City with spectacular views across the city. The daylong gathering featured a short film by the Zuckers that spoofed the sometimes tense relationship between Hollywood and science, but they repeatedly urged the attendees not to waste time grousing about problems. Instead, they organized six interactive salons led by leading researchers in climate change, robotics, astronomy, genomics, neuroscience, and infectious diseases. "We're not here to complain about the way you depict scientists," said Cicerone. "We want to establish a partnership. We think there really is a synergy. Certain aspects of both science and entertainment do overlap." Jerry Zucker noted that both, for example, "are very creative fields with lots of personal passion," and he joked that scientists "are just like you and me except they got perfect scores on their SATs."

The gathering brought together an eclectic who's who from two wildly different walks of life. In addition to Tyson, scientific speakers included Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steve Chu, J. Craig Venter of human genome fame, and neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. Hollywood attendees included cartoonist Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy), writer/producer Lawrence Kasdan (Big Chill, Raiders of the Lost Ark), and director/writer Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry). Valerie Plame Wilson, who became an accidental celebrity after the Bush Administration revealed that she worked in covert operations at the CIA, also chaired a session as a favor to the Zuckers, who are making a movie about her book, Fair Game.

Reviews of the get-together were largely two thumbs up. "I'm very pleased to see them doing this," said Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (who is working on a science-fiction movie, Interstellar, with Steven Spielberg). Kasdan said the day was "incredible," noting that the strong turnout at the various salons shows that the entertainment industry wants deeper ties to science.

Will SEE have what Hollywood calls legs? "I'm an experimental scientist," said Venter. "This is an interesting experiment." Venter did not mention that most experiments fail. And the entertainment community is no stranger to grand ideas that fizzle out. Then again, this is Hollywood, which is in the business of turning dreams into reality. And many scientists seem eager to help make that reality more real.