A new programme will serve as a point of contact for members of the entertainment industry seeking advice on scientific accuracy (Image: Stock.Xchng)

Scientists may have less to cringe about when they go to the movies, if a new initiative designed to foster cooperation between scientists and the entertainment industry is successful.

The new effort, called the Science and Entertainment Exchange, is a project of the US National Academy of Sciences, and will be run by science writer Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse.

By bringing scientists together with Hollywood-types, the project aims to improve the scientific accuracy of what the entertainment industry produces and also help scientists communicate more effectively with the general public.


The project is “vitally important”, said Seth MacFarlane, creator of the television show Family Guy, at a press conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Other entertainment industry figures were also at the event, including Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi.

Science ‘undervalued’

Married film producers Janet and Jerry Zucker, who were among the driving forces in setting up the Exchange, started paying more attention to science when their daughter was diagnosed with diabetes after becoming ill.

“They gave here a shot of insulin and this was like a miracle, because she was laying there on the examining table, and within a few hours she came alive again, her lustre came back,” Janet Zucker said.

The experience motivated them to get involved in the fight for increased funding for stem cell research in California, and more recently to help set up the Exchange.

MacFarlane, who is a member of the Exchange’s advisory board, said he feels that in recent years science has been “undervalued and degraded”. “This idea that intelligence is somehow not cool or not American or something to be scorned has been kind of embraced by a lot of people,” he said.

Point of contact

Just exposing entertainers to more science will help improve the situation, he said, noting that he just finished making a Family Guy episode based on the possibility that there are multiple universes, prompted by a documentary he saw on the subject.

“I didn’t really know that that was a real thing, that it was possible [and] being theorised about,” he said. “So we did a story about it.”

Aside from serving as a point of contact for members of the entertainment industry seeking advice on scientific accuracy, people involved in the Exchange hope that it will help create new partnerships between scientists and entertainers to promote scientific literacy and inspire the next generation of scientists.

After Wednesday’s press conference, the Exchange organised a symposium, sponsored in part by New Scientist, in which scientists and entertainers were to discuss hot topics in science like climate change and genomics.

See also this blog, which describes a panel discussion about science and cinema involving MIT physicists and Jumper director Doug Liman, who is also an Exchange advisory board member; and our Science fiction special: The future of a genre.