Why novelists need scientists, and vice versa

Mairi Macleod, contributor

What would you do if you met a dinosaur? (Image: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features)

?My ignorance about science is a very liberating thing,? says Sophie McKenzie, prolific writer of teen fiction. ?I never think, ?That can?t be done?.?

You?d think that this statement from McKenzie, the author of two series of novels with a genetics theme, would inflame the scientist sitting to her left. But Alistair Elfick, who works in synthetic biology and genetic engineering at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and was a fellow panellist at this week?s "The Scientist in Fiction" discussion at the Edinburgh Book Festival, was full of praise for literature and film that spreads the word about science.

?Work like Sophie?s gives us a forum to start thinking about how genetic engineering and cloning may impact on different versions of the future?, he says.

McKenzie?s first book, Blood Ties, is about two teenagers who discover they are clones of other people. Her interest was in the emotional consequences for the characters, rather than the process itself. She turned to discussion forums where scientists were debating the ethics of creating clones of human beings and discovered this an excellent source of material: ?One guy said, ?What?s it going to be like for kids growing up knowing that they?ve been created as a copy of another person??? She asked herself: "Why would people do that? To replace a dead child? Your son or daughter dies, say as a teenager, and maybe you?re too old to have more children naturally. Why wouldn?t you clone that dead child and create a new child that will look very similar to the one that you lost?"

Fiction has another effect too, says Elfick: it can inspire scientists about the future. As McKenzie reminded us, no one took much notice of the mobile telephony that was all the rage in Star Trek in the 1960s, but how ahead of its time was that?

So how do fiction writers and film-makers find out about science and scientists? McKenzie made sure she did her homework for her books. When she was writing The Medusa Project series, which follows a group of teenagers who were implanted at birth with a gene for psychic abilities, she asked a scientist; ?How do I get a gene into an unborn child?? And she was told, ?Wrap it in a virus.? So she did.

It?s not just the ins and outs of science that need to be researched. David Kirby, who was chairing the panel, is a senior lecturer in science communication at the University of Manchester and the author of Lab Coats in Hollywood, which documents scientists working in the movie business trying to teach actors how to behave like a scientist.

He recounted how one palaeontologist at the Smithsonian Institute, the world?s leading expert on iguanodons, was approached by the producers of the film Jurassic Park. Excited, the palaeontologist thought they wanted to consult him on iguanodons. Instead, they talked for three hours without even mentioning these duck-billed dinosaurs - they just asked him about how paleontologists behave in different situations. ?As a palaeontologist, if you walked around a corner and saw a T. rex, what would you do?? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scientist replied that rather than get out his notebook, ?I would do what you would do: drop a load in my trousers and faint!?

That kind of realism might be at odds with some famous characters we?re familiar with in fiction - take Victor Frankenstein, for example, or the larger-than-life archaeologist Indiana Jones. But, as Kirby pointed out, scientists are just people like everyone else, who pay the bills, worry about their kids and have to take the dog for a walk. Nevertheless, there is one crucial difference between scientists and the rest of humanity, he says: the motivation to do science. And in his Hollywood world, that?s what actors playing scientists want to know about - what motivates scientists to sit in the lab all day, to do the endless graft, to meet with the frustration and failure in search of the truth.

He related another story, this time about the celebrity scientist Brian Cox, who worked on the movie Sunshine, which is about a mission to restart the sun. The film?s actors wanted to know what made him a scientist, and one of the things about this film was figuring out what would motivate a scientist to go on what was essentially a suicide mission. Cox told them that nature is more beautiful than anyone can possibly imagine, and what he loves about doing science is experiencing the unknown and then finding an explanation for it, and that?s what would motivate him to do that sort of scientific work.

If fiction, in the form of books, film, TV or whatever, can get that sort of sentiment across, then I reckon it can?t fail to motivate us to get excited by science.

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