Science at the movies

摘要

When scientists appear on the big screen, if at all, they tend to be going mad or else paying for their hubris - think Dr. Strangelove, Jurassic Park and A Beautiful Mind. This month, two new film festivals - the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York - aim to correct this impression. Privileging fiction over documentary, they show how to tell stories grounded in real research. The Imagine festival, sponsored by Nature, began as a series of screenings at New York's Rockefeller University by biologist Alexis Gambis. Illness is the villain in many of the chosen'short films, from Jen Peel's medical thriller Muerto Canyon, about a deadly virus in New Mexico, to Toddy Burton's The Aviatrix, about the superhero alter-ego of a woman struggling with cancer.