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

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

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.

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

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.

Popular culture routinely glosses over the complex interactions between
genes, and the equally complex interplay of genes and the
environment...

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 H