The Character of Science: Recent Episodes
Wellcome Connecting Science
This is a podcast on how we can use sci-fi TV/movies as a barometer for how we feel about science. In each episode, our guests touch on the implications of fiction becoming reality, and how movies can be used to communicate the science that is changing our world.
Many companies are now taking advantage of rapid advancements in genetic technology to offer (and heavily market) new services in reproductive healthcare. This episode will consider these recent developments alongside the 1997 film Gattaca. This film depicts a society with a genetics-based hierarchy where parents can choose the genetic makeup of their children, but only if they can afford it. Using Gattaca as a starting point we discuss the implications of new genetic technologies being only available to certain sectors of society.
Gattaca serves as a good starting point to think about inequality of access to genetic testing. If genetic testing is only available to those who can afford it, might this lead to an echelon of society who can, in effect, opt out of genetic risk? How can the rhetoric of choice serve to stigmatise those who have children with genetic conditions? Many of those working in genetics will focus on the patient in front on them. They wish to do right by them and offer them choices that they feel will improve their lives, especially when those choices are as emotionally loaded as pertaining to the wellbeing of their future children. However, how to we ensure that such choices do not end up perpetuating social injustice?
Focusing on the 2013 film Ex Machina and the 2015 film The Martian, we will discuss what effect the simplistic representations of scientists in popular culture as either heroes or as villains has on the publics’ view of science.
Jon Roberts is joined by Dr Stuart Vyse , psychologist and writer, consulting editor for Skeptical Inquirer magazine where he also writes the 'Behavior & Belief' column, author of 'Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition' and 'Superstition: A Very Short Introduction,' and Dr Kanta Dihal, a senior research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where she leads the Global AI Narratives and Decolonizing AI research projects.
In this episode we’ll discuss the 2011 film Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh and staring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Lawrence Fishburn. It explores, arguably with frightening prescience, the global response to the outbreak of a novel and highly infectious virus, nearly a decade before anyone would think of a virus before a beer when they heard the word “Corona”.
Joining host Jon Roberts are Elizabeth Stokoe, Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University and member of Independent Sage, Adam Kucharski, Professor of Infection Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Heidi Larson, Professor of Anthropology, Risk and Decision Science and founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, also at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
A quick note: this episode was recorded in October 2021, pre-Omicron variant and by the time you are listening to it the world situation may have changed yet again. Here we explore what it felt watching this film with a distinctly 2021 perspective when it truly felt like life was imitating art.