Recent scientific advances have proved inspirational for film-makers, but actual real-life science is rarely depicted. A few notable exceptions are described in this chapter. Representing real-life scientists and their work in the movies is problematic, however, due to the inherent nature of film-making. Misconceptions about the scientific method and the motives of scientists, for example, can be introduced as a result of the conventions of story-telling.
Real life stories
Fictional scientists have been the protagonists in many films, but real-life scientists have featured on relatively few occasions. A number of medical docu-dramas in the 1930s traded on the success of the mad scientist horror films of the time, as did films telling the life stories of scientists and inventors; the latter forming a small sub-genre of the biographical picture (biopic). The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) dramatised the life of the French discoverer of treatments for bacterial diseases such as rabies, for example, while Doctor Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) told of how the German scientist discovered a cure for syphilis. These two films formed part of a series of biographical films produced by Warner Bros, which also included treatments of the lives of Zola, Reuter and Juarez. The inventor Thomas Edison was portrayed in two films of the same period: Young Tom Edison (1939) and Edison the Man (1940). Edison's life had an added attraction for film-makers in those days, as he had invented the kinetoscope, along with making other early cinematic innovations.
The story of the discovery of the important radioactive element radium in 1898 was told in Madame Curie (1943), an MGM movie starring Greer Garson as Marie Curie and Walter Pidgeon as her husband Pierre. The film did very well at the box-office, and demonstrated how science could be made accessible to a mass audience. However, it was followed by a decline in the science biopic, with few real-life scientists being portrayed in movies for many years. MGM had looked to finance further biopics featuring scientists, but none of the proposed projects came to fruition. A Hollywood scriptwriter named Julius Finkelstein, for example, offered Louis B. Mayer a script in 1953 concerning the discovery of DNA - the momentous scientific breakthrough that had occurred in that year. (1) The script offered promising dramatic possibilities, particularly the conflict between James Watson and Francis Crick working in Cambridge and Rosalind Franklin who had left England to work in Paris, but the script was deemed too technical to work for a 1950s audience. Unlike today, when scientific breakthroughs are quickly picked up by the media, it was not until the early 1960s that DNA started to enter the popular culture. (2)
The story behind the discovery of the structure of DNA was eventually made in 1987 as Life Story: The Race for the Double Helix. A completely different audience existed for this film in the 1980s, who were less likely to be put off by references to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Life Story was shot in many of the authentic English locations by the BBC, and was first shown as part of the corporation's science documentary series Horizon. (3).
Life Story opens with Jim Watson (Jeff Goldblum, in the first of many oddball scientist roles) arriving in London. He locates Maurice Wilkins (Alan Howard) at King's College in London, and tells him that he wants to help unravel the structure of DNA; a molecule he believes carries the genetic code. He is at first employed in Wilkins' laboratory as an X-ray crystallographer. This technique allows structure at the molecular level to be pictured, and was to provide the important data needed for the construction of the first 3-D model of the DNA molecule. Rosalind Franklin (Juliet Stevenson) had previously worked in Wilkin's lab on DNA X-rays and was also pursuing this goal, from her new workplace in Paris. Wilkins then directs Watson up to Cambridge, to the laboratory of Francis Crick (Tim Pigott-Smith) at the Cavendish laboratory. As a reviewer noted after the film's first television transmission,
The room in the film where Watson and Crick constructed their double helix model was the same room in which they had worked 34 years previously. It is still only a short stroll down a back-alley to The Eagle public house, where much biological discussion took place. Crick's expertise was in constructing models from X-ray photographs, but the data that Watson and Crick used to make their breakthrough were Franklin's X-ray crystallography results, given to them by Wilkins. Watson and Crick beat Franklin, now working in France, to the model of DNA. In common with the earlier unfilmed Hollywood script, Life Story concentrates on the competition between the Cambridge pair and Franklin in Paris. The dramatic tension comes from this race-to-the-winning-post scenario. Although the competitive angle is often important, its exaggeration is one of the ways that film representations distort the picture of how science is conducted on a day-to-day basis in real-life. In addition, William Nicholson's script draws upon Watson's personal account of the discovery. (5) It therefore predominantly takes Watson's point of view, which serves to portray Franklin in a relatively unsympathetic light. Watson and Crick are portrayed as free-thinkers, engaged in inspired discussion in the open air, amidst nature, or over pints of beer at The Eagle, in opposition to Franklin, seen hunched alone over reams of data in a dimly lit room. Juliet Stevenson's moving portrayal, however, does reveal some of Franklin's dignity and dedication, along with the tragedy of her untimely death through cancer, which robbed her of a share in the Nobel Prize of 1962. Fictional scientists in movies are often based on real-life models. This has become more noticeable, with many scientists maintaining a high media profile, because during the 1990s scientists in the movies have been increasingly represented as regular people, with everyday problems, who just happen to do science for a living. They are now rarely completely mad, totally evil, or, even, hopelessly inept eccentric outsiders. The 1990s have also seen an increase in prominent roles for women characters with scientific training. Positive and believable scientific professionals, for example, have been played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs (1990) and Contact (1997), and Gillian Anderson in The X-Files (from 1993). This reflects the increased contribution of women in many areas of science. The disparity between fiction and real-life, however, is often more marked for women scientists than men. Male scientists can look the same age as a real-life senior professor, but the female scientist is almost inevitably young and blond. (6) Woman scientists in Hollywood are always the "world expert" in their field. However, to reach this level takes many years of study and productive research work. In Outbreak (1995), Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo play an ex-husband and wife team, who are both world experts in tropical diseases. Hoffman, however, appears to be over twice the age of his ex-wife (Russo is 27 years younger than Hoffmann). A comparable position in real-life to Russo's character is held by Dr. Diana Lockwood (age 43) at the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine. She did a six-year medical degree, a further MD, three years in junior hospital work, two years of pathology and general medicine, a few years of laboratory research and a couple more years of field work in the developing world, before becoming a noted expert in her field. (7) Similar disparities in age occur between real-life equivalents and the entomologist character (Mira Sorvino) in Mimic (1997), the meteorologist (Helen Hunt) in Twister (1996), the vulcanologist (Anne Heche) in Volcano (1997), the palaeontologists (Laura Dern and Julianne Moore) in the Jurassic Park films, the marine biologist (Saffron Burrows) in Deep Blue Sea (1999), and the nuclear physicist (Denise Richards) in the James Bond film The World is Not Enough (1999). The perceived need for glamour in Hollywood often overrides concerns for realistic or appropriate-age casting when it comes to female scientists. (8) Heroes and villains Although scientists may be represented as real people with real motives, what they do in movies rarely reflects the day-to-day reality of scientific work. This is essentially because most scientific work is too boring and routine to make for compulsive viewing. Therefore, Hollywood will rarely give us insights into what scientists actually do, or into scientific methodology. A screenwriter once said that, "The scientific method is antithetical to storytelling". (9) This is due to the inherent nature of good storytelling, in particular the need for individuals to be compelled to act, the need for villains, and the need for movies to move along with physical action. The limitations of film as a visual storytelling medium therefore present extreme difficulties to any film-maker wanting to realistically represent science. (10) In reality, scientists are not compelled to act. They may compete or be driven, but are not forced to work. Michael Crichton outlined how narratives often work best when characters have no choice - the reason he used a ticking-down clock device in The Andromeda Strain (1970) to compel his scientists to complete their investigation as a race-against-time. (11) Movies also tend to concentrate on stories of individual scientists, or a couple working together, solving scientific problems. In reality, science is a collective exercise involving many people. In the area of genetics, in particular, research is done by large research teams, involving people with different expertise, often working in different countries. In the movies, however, a hero must emerge. (12) Movies often invoke stereotypes of scientists as modern-day wizards. Stephen J. Gould has said that the worst stereotyping of science in the movies is that which portrays it as a reductionist enterprise. Scientists are seen to break down complex totalities into units, such as human behaviours being explained by genes alone. Conversely, complex entities are built up from simple units, like the dinosaurs cloned from bits of DNA in Jurassic Park. This gives a false impression about both the nature of scientific research and the complexity inherent in nature. (13) Scientists have recently expressed concern about negative images of their profession in the movies. The scientific and medical establishment, for example, is often featured as narrow-minded and disdainful of the public, or any amateurs or individuals who want to rock the boat. Scientists act unethically or without concern for the wider implications of their actions, while doctors are uncaring. However, Michael Crichton has pointed out that all professions tend to be seen in a negative light in the movies. (14) Politicians are corrupt, businessmen are crooks, lawyers are unscrupulous and so on, because of narrative convention. Dramatic narratives require heroes and villains. Therefore, this is a bias that will be introduced into representations of real-life science, because one side of a case will be presented favourably, to the detriment of the other. Movies need a human personification of evil in some form, which cannot be achieved without distorting the truth about science.
The docu-drama can raise public awareness about scientific and medical issues, but can be problematic in that the narrative by convention takes a particular point of view. The film Lorenzo's Oil (1993), for example, deals with a couple's real-life search for a cure for a fatal genetic disease, called adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), which is killing their son. No therapy in modern medicine existed at the time for ALD, which is a degenerative disease of the nervous system caused by the accumulation of certain long-chain saturated fats in the bloodstream. The symptoms are similar to multiple sclerosis, and lead to a breakdown of the nervous system, paralysis and death. The disease is hereditary, due to a gene on the female chromosome, affects young boys only, and is usually fatal within two years. Lorenzo's Oil was directed by George Miller, and starred Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon as the couple, Augusto and Michaela Odone, who set out to find their own cure for ALD. It was criticised by the scientific and medical communities, however, for raising false hopes for ALD sufferers and their families by promoting an unproven cure in an unrealistically favourable light. The events depicted in the film begin in 1983, when the Odone's return to the USA after spending a period abroad, due to Augusto's job as an economist with the World Bank. After being back in Washington D.C. for a few months, their four-year-old son Lorenzo shows the first symptoms of ALD. They are referred to Professor Gus Nikolais (Peter Ustinov), who represents the medical establishment in the film. When Nikolais' dietary suggestions do not result in a lowering of the saturated fats in the boy's blood, the Odones start to research the disease for themselves. Augusto suspects that another type of fatty acid might bring Lorenzo's fat metabolism back into balance. The Odones persuade a biochemist in London, Don Suddaby (who plays himself in the film), to synthesise the pure oil (erucic acid), which is a natural component of rapeseed oil. The oil is given to Lorenzo in late 1986, and he subsequently shows signs of improvement. The film ends with a series of real-life children saying they are taking the Odones' cure, while a toll-free phone number is flashed up for the public to get further information. A caption explains that Lorenzo Odone is now 14 years old. (15) The film is truthful to the story told from the point of view of the Odones. It is their personal story and in this respect is an honest film. George Miller, who has a medical degree, saw the potential of the Odones' case for a docu-drama that would appeal to a mass audience. In dramatic terms it is necessary to side with the Odones, while Miller clearly has a great deal of respect for the way they took on the medical establishment. The film excels in showing their race against time to find a cure. The film also presents the audience with a great deal of factual information about ALD. The film was criticised, however, for presenting a potentially damaging negative picture of the medical establishment. Medical professionals in the film are portrayed as obstructive, uncaring or pompous, sending out a message that they are not to be trusted. This gives added weight to the promotion of the Odones' oil at the end of the docu-drama. The film is highly manipulative during the scenes when the Odones' oil is given to the boy, for example in the use of emotive opera music and gentle lighting - in opposition to the clinical indifference of the hospital settings. In reality, although approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, clinical trials have revealed problems with erucic acid treatments, including disruption of blood clotting in about half the patients who took it. In addition, the oil did not alter the onset of disease when given to boys with the ALD gene prior to the onset of symptom. Therefore, the film may have given false hope to ALD sufferers. The clinical trials were conducted by Hugo Moser, at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, who is portrayed in the film, under the fictitious name Gus Nikolais, as being obstructive to Odone's search for a cure to ALD. Doctors explained the fact of Lorenzo's long survival (he was 14 at the time of the film's release, but almost completely paralysed), as natural variability in the disease's severity. The oil, it was concluded in clinical trails, was not a cure for ALD (as stated in the film). At best, the oil could temporarily relieve symptoms in the later stages of the disease. (16) The film has also been criticised for the assumptions, based on genetic determinism, that drive the story. Nelkin and Lindee argued that the guilt of passing on bad genes was seen to unduly motivate the parents, who are driven to expiate the sins of their "poisoned blood". This type of representation re-enforces notions of fatalism and determinism, while downplaying a range of environmental factors that contribute to the onset of disease. (17) The medical docu-drama is therefore fraught with difficulties for film-makers seeking to realistically portray science and medicine. (18) It also raises important questions about whether film-makers have any responsibility, when telling stories concerning medical genetics, to present a balanced view. The Legacy of Mengele The representation of genetics in the movies has been influenced by tragic historical reality. The presence of the Nazi physician Dr. Josef Mengele, for example, has punctuated this book's tour of genetics and the cinema. Along with other Nazi physicians, his actions have cast a dark shadow over genetics during the latter half of the twentieth century. Mengele was born in Günzburg, Germany, in 1911. After gaining a Philosophy doctorate at the University of Munich and a medical qualification at the University of Frankfurt am Main, he was appointed a research assistant at the Third Reich Institute of Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity in Frankfurt in 1937. Here he worked with Professor Otmar von Vershuer, a leading advocate of eugenics and a pioneer of twins research. Mengele was first admitted to the SS in 1938 and in 1940 was attached to the Race and Resettlement Unit in occupied Poland. This was followed by active service in the Medical Corps, during which he was injured and subsequently awarded an Iron Cross. Mengele arrived at Auschwitz on 30 May 1943, as one of the camp's doctors. The extermination of Jews was underway at that time and Mengele acted as a selector at the camp gates, deciding who should die and who should live to work as slave labour. This role, which earned him the nickname "the Angel of Death", also enabled him to select the subjects for his horrific medical experiments. Mengele had been drawn to Auschwitz by the camp's potential for research and human experimentation. All the twins who passed through the camp's gates would become subjects in his experiments, whilst he also selected dwarfs, mongoloids, hunchbacks and other individuals he considered to be of interest genetically. The subject's deaths were part of his crude experimental protocols. He would personally kill them, for example, by injecting chloroform into their hearts. Mengele's experiments were of several types, involving drug testing, sterilisation methods and genetic investigations. In the drug and germ tests, often done in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies such as I.G. Farben and Bayer, twins were given diseases and then experimental cures, with one twin acting as a control subject. If one twin died the other was killed and comparative autopsies done. (19) The Nazi doctors experimented with a number of sterilisation methods, including injections of formalin, irradiation and surgical castration. Mengele's genetics experiments can be seen as part of a wider Nazi eugenics programme. (20) Mengele wanted to establish a genetic basis for the formation of twins, in order to double the birth-rate of the Aryan race. "Good" genes could be promoted in the population, by increasing the birth rate, while "bad" genes could be removed through enforced mass sterilisation, murder and genocide. Three thousand twins arrived at Auschwitz, but only 157 survived. However, being a twin increased your survival chances, especially if you were a child, as you were one of Mengele's valuable guinea pigs. Film of the camp's liberation shows that many of the children who managed to survive were twins. (21) Mengele fled Auschwitz in February 1945, hid in the countryside for three years, and escaped to Argentina in 1954. In 1959, at the time West Germany first issued a warrant for his arrest, he moved to Paraguay. He died in 1979, on a beach in Embu, Brazil, and was buried locally under one of his known aliases, Wolfgang Gerhard. Forensic testing of the remains in 1985 confirmed that the body was that of Mengele. DNA from the bones matched DNA from the blood of his son. (22) Concentration camp survivors have recalled Mengele as an obsessive amateur who understood little about real science, but was free to experiment without constraint or the hindrance of compassion, ethics or morals. He carried out experiments in an abnormal fashion, often ignored results and showed disdain for rigorous scientific methods. His pseudo-science was carried out on human guinea pigs, kept as if in a zoo. He collected deformed individuals and a gruesome array of body-parts in his personal museum. (23) In these descriptions he connects strongly with the image of the archetypal mad scientist; an image that has coloured representations of mad scientists in the movies ever since. Many of them, for example, are thinly-disguised Nazis. Mad scientists in horror movies prior to WWII anticipated Mengele, while mad scientists after WWII could not fail to be aware of him. David Skal, writing in Screams of Reason, identifies a mythic dimension to Mengele, which is evident in many post-WWII movie mad scientists. Themes relating to human experimentation, for example, increased due to Mengele's dark grip on the imagination. (24) Dr. Josef Mengele is explicitly portrayed in The Boys from Brazil (1978), by the matinée idol Gregory Peck. In real-life, Mengele was said to have Hollywood looks, being compared, for example, with Clark Gable and Rudolph Valentino. (25) In The Boys from Brazil he is pursued by a Nazi-hunter modelled on Simon Wiesenthal, who in reality tracked Mengele to South America. The brilliant scientist who succeeds in cloning Hitler in this film is far removed from the Mengele described by concentration camp survivors. (26) Mengele is the sadistic torturing dentist (the White Angel) in Marathon Man (1976), concealing his past as a concentration camp killer. He is present in The X-Files as the Nazi scientist Victor Klemper, a fictional colleague, who continues his unethical eugenics experiments in America after WWII. Scientists echo his studies in The X-Files, when they create human hybrids, or inject subjects with an alien virus to test an experimental vaccine against it. (27) Mengele's presence hovers over Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner, who experiments with bodies and dictates how long his charges can live. Mengele was fascinated with eyes, the central motif in Blade Runner, particularly in the hereditary condition known as heterochromia, whereby an individual has eyes of different colour, for example, one blue and another brown. (28) Mengele hoped he could find out what made eyes blue, the preferred eye colour of the master-race. The eye in which the city is reflected at the start of Blade Runner is blue. Tyrell, like Mengele, is not a loose cannon or an isolated Frankenstein figure engaged in unethical medical experiments, but a respectable member of his society with views acceptable to that society. In Mengele's case, his scientific work was a logical extension of the eugenic policies of euthanasia and sterilisation enacted by the Nazis soon after they came to power. Mengele's misguided eugenic concerns inform the narratives of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), where men and beasts are interchangeable, and Twins, where genetics is used to create a baby "pure in body and mind". His unethical and sadistic medical experiments are also reflected in Alien Resurrection (clones tattooed like camp inmates, all but one deformed by medical experiments), Species, Species II, D.N.A. and many other films touched upon in this book. Mengele was never bought to justice and so never faced his surviving victims and accusers in court. In the film After the Truth (1999), the premise is that Mengele comes back to Germany in his old age to stand trial. (29) This German film project attempts to come to terms with the legacy of Mengele. The film is structured as a courtroom drama, with flashbacks to the concentration camps. In the dock, Mengele is given the chance to tell his side of the story. Jewish groups expressed concern about this, worrying whether the film risked giving younger audiences the idea that a defence can be mounted for the atrocities committed. However, the film represented a sincere attempt to try and understand how the unthinkable became thinkable. Narratives are important in helping us to understand the lessons of the past, as well as the implications of events happening in the present. Nothing has more potential for shaping our lives in the coming years than recent developments in genetics. Movies have a role to play in helping us to think about how science affects our lives. An awareness of the limitations and inherent biases of the medium can help both film-makers and audiences delve more profitably and thoughtfully into film narratives, helping us explore the implications of scientific advances on society. Notes Chapter 9: Are Movies Impeding the Progress of Biotechnology?
References:Complete bibliography of book, including all names on multi-author publications and details of edited books.
Chapter 1: It came from the laboratory.
Chapter 2: Dinosaur Resurrection.
Chapter 3: Confronting the Clone.
Chapter 4: Cloning the Alien.
Chapter 5: Danger: Genetically Modified Organisms.
Chapter 6: Designer Babies.
Chapter 7: All in the Genes?
Chapter 8: Real-life Science.
"A montage of sunshine on water, willows, ducks, punts, ancient spires,
all rinsed down with choral synthesiser effect brings us to Cambridge. 'Do people live here; mere mortals?' asks Watson". (4)
October 1999 SFN.