Hollywood's changing take on the scientist

FOR most of the 20th century, popular movies portrayed scientists as mad, bad or dangerous to know. Their branches of research may have changed over the years (poison gas and death rays in the 1920s, medicine with good intentions gone wrong in the 1930s, nuclear physics in the 1950s, biology/genetic engineering since the 1980s), but the folklore remained the same. The cinematic Who’s Who of mad doctors, including Caligari, Rotwang, Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau, Cyclops and, of course, Strangelove, epitomised the stereotype: they worked alone, had unusual hairstyles, did not publish (too paranoid), were usually disabled, and were wont to say…