San Francisco
SEX, spies and videotape would seem to fall outside the concerns of
eminent physicists. But Leon Lederman, particle physicist and winner of the 1988
Nobel Prize for Physics, has bucked the trend by using this unholy trio as the
building blocks of his latest project.
Lederman鈥檚 burning ambition is to create a TV series that will do for
scientists what LA Law has done for lawyers, and Hill Street
Blues for the Chicago police. He wants to shatter forever the image of the
scientist as an isolated, nerdy boffin.
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Armed with grant money and a script for a pilot episode, Lederman is trying
to persuade Hollywood鈥檚 TV executives that the public will be as loyal to a
drama series about scientists as they are to their favourite soaps.
The idea has been circulating among his colleagues for a decade, says
Lederman. But with the recent success of complex series portraying the lives of
people in other professions, the physicist saw a niche for a grand but realistic
portrayal of scientists. But there was a hitch: although Lederman has spent
years entertaining his undergraduates, he knew that the production of a
full-scale drama was outside his expertise.
Then, while working on a TV series about the Nobel Prize, Lederman met the
writer Adrian Malone. Malone welcomed the idea of changing the stereotype of a
scientist. 鈥淭elevision writers always use some old man in a white coat and
glasses like the bottom of Coke bottles,鈥� he says. With $100 000 from the
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and two private
foundations to pay for research, the pair and their colleagues set out to change
that dowdy image.
Malone鈥檚 pilot programme strays a long way from the laboratory, although the
action surrounds a private research institute called 鈥淕RALE鈥濃�擥eneral
Research At the Leading Edge. True to life, the purse strings are in the hands
of a nonscientist with a shady past. Malone refuses to give too much away, but
reveals that the show includes night-vision espionage scenes in the Middle East,
young over-ambitious scientists, greedy industrialists鈥攅ven two love
stories. 鈥淚t鈥檚 important to show that scientists have haloes, but they also have
warts,鈥� says Lederman. 鈥淥nce in a while they even have sex.鈥�
While the drama will, Malone hopes, keep the audience enthralled, he intends
to work in some complex science as well. 鈥淲e鈥檒l be asking the viewer to work
quite hard.鈥�
So far, the script has had a 鈥減olite no鈥� from two production studios.
Undaunted, Lederman is trying to raise enough money to film a few episodes. The
message he wants the series to convey is that science may start at the lab
bench, but it touches every aspect of modern life: from law and ethics to
politics.
Lederman鈥檚 own decade-long struggle to conquer the small screen is yet more
proof that science can take you anywhere, he says. 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got everything there.
The starry-eyed physicist, the impossible odds, and in the end, some hope. It鈥檚
a pretty good story.鈥�