"Movies are Fiction. Does it matter how they show Scientists?"

The portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind and other scientists in movies

http://whyfiles.org/147sci_in_film/2.html

http://whyfiles.org/147sci_in_film/3.html

http://whyfiles.org/147sci_in_film/4.html

excerpts:

"Peter Weingart, a professor at the University of Beilfeld (Germany), studies how scientists are portrayed in films -- fact and fiction. A central goal, he says, is to look at how "science is depicted as a 'strange' and 'extra-social' activity.""

"Movies also reflect headlines, says David Kirby, a postdoctoral researcher in science and technology studies at Cornell University. "Films incorporate a lot of the anxieties that are present in American society at the time they're made." In the 1950s, after James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, he adds, "people started talking about DNA and a lot of horror films picked up on this anxiety" with features on mutants, killer shrews and the Dr. Bizarro scientists who created them."

" The film may confirm the preconception, says University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of journalism Sharon Dunwoody. Like other communications researchers, she tries to pin down how media affect beliefs. "When the original Jurassic Park came out," she says, "some scientists reacted with horror. Their perception was that the movie painted science as a force indifferent to social good; here's some guy who just wanted to have dinosaurs, without any thought to the larger social issues, he just does it. I saw it the minute it came out, I loved it, it made science seem exciting and creative. Wow! The idea that you could get dinosaur DNA out of insects entombed in amber, maybe it's not possible, but it's plausible; it made science seem like a fabulous adventure.""