Battlestar Galactica. Star Trek. Doctor Who. Television is good at science fiction. It's not so good at science fact. Some of the most popular shows today, like House and CSI, sacrifice accuracy to entertainment. While that might make fans happy, it makes scientists cringe.
Canadian series ReGenesis, entering its fourth season this year, tries to give both science and entertainment equal weight. Peter Outerbridge stars as David Sandström, who leads a team at the fictional North American Biotechnology Advisory Commission, exploring social, political, and ethical issues related to science.
Dr. Aled Edwards is a scientific consultant for the show, and it's his mandate to keep the show's writers from taking storytelling shortcuts that lead to those instant lab results on House or absolute certainty on CSI. "ReGenesis is the most accurate scientific drama out there, no holds barred, for sure," he claimed in a recent interview.
He finds it difficult to watch those other popular programs, but isn't offended by their use and misuse of science either. "It's almost like watching a cartoon, where Batman or Superman or House is the same. When I watch Superman, I don't get upset: 'Hey, men can't fly!'" he laughed. "When I watch those shows, I turn off my scientific brain. I say I'm watching mindless entertainment here. Because if I put on my scientific brain, I'd get upset. So I just watch it and think this is not science, this is not medicine, this is television."
While he's proud of ReGenesis's devotion to basing its fictional stories on fact, he doesn't lay claim to documentary-like accuracy either. "None of these scientific programs are ultimately the truth because we have boring jobs. I sit on my ass all day in front of the computer. The action takes place in the head and you don't see anything. There's no shooting. But it's fun for people to start to realize what we do."
Besides his position on the faculty of the department of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, Edwards is a structural biologist who heads the Structural Genomics Consortium. That non-profit organization has a mission to place human protein information in the public domain with no patents, allowing it to be freely used by other scientists. His involvement with ReGenesis stems from that work.
"I spend a bit of my time doing public outreach, because to understand the complexities of whether information should be kept proprietary or free, or the value of the information, or why Canadian taxpayers pay me to do it, people need to at least be familiar with the words," he said. "But you don't normally talk to the majority of Canadians because they just tune out when they hear the word 'science.' So I figured I'd bait and switch. Get them watching TV and before they knew it, they might even learn something. That's why I did it. So I helped the guys do their stories on the precondition that they stick to as much reality as possible. "
Part of his outreach efforts led to a couple of recent public forums, one in Vancouver and one in Hamilton, called "Revealing ReGenesis: Explore TV’s Experiment with Gene Science Fact and Fiction."
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