Science and technology in the news media is usually greeted in boosterish terms, whereas films and novels are important outlets for the expression of society’s anxieties about rapid scientific and technological advance. Science fiction, according to Crichton, serves an important functional role in society. As to negative portrayals of science, such images are inevitable since when audiences go to the movies they want to be scared and frightened.
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Scientific inaccuracy is also to be expected, since a movie about modern day dinosaurs is crafted as fantasy. In Jurassic Park there are both “good” and “bad” scientists, just like in real life. Such characterizations make for good plots. All professions look bad in movies, explained Crichton: doctors are uncaring, lawyers are unscrupulous, cops are crooks, and politicians are corrupt. BIO planned to counter the feared massive audience effects with a carefully orchestrated PR campaign, delivering fact sheets to news organizations and schools holding media briefings where genetically engineered foods would be served, and soliciting letters to the editors of local and national newspapers (Day, 1995).Ī few years later, in 1999, when Michael Crichton was invited to address the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he told scientists and industry members to relax, and quit worrying about the possible public impact of science fiction blockbusters.
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“The only characters who aren’t inherently evil are the dinosaurs who survived ‘Jurassic Park.’” Christensen alleged that the Jurassic Park series unfairly portrayed science as used solely for profit. “Nearly everyone in the book with a briefcase or a lab coat is an insensitive myope, a thoughtless theorist or an evil genius,” wrote Eric Christensen of BIO in a newsletter to the industry. BIO worried that the film series, with its depictions of greedy corporate scientists and dinosaurs run amok, sensationalized the motivations behind biotech research, and that the movie might turn the public against important biotech research. In 1995, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) went on a public relations offensive, not in reaction to the protests of environmental organizations opposed to genetically-modified crops or religious leaders’ concerns over cloning research, but in anticipation of the release of The Lost World, the film sequel to Michael Crichton’s 1992 blockbuster Jurassic Park.
Can a Blockbuster Film Shape the Public’s Understanding of a Science Controversy?
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