The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers Review
When the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory premiered in 2007, posters promoting the comedy declared that “Smart is the New Sexy.” The series featured two brilliant but socially awkward scientists who inevitably receive real world lessons when the attractive Penny moves in next door. Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter have since come to personify the definition of “geek” in terms of both their high IQ and love for science fiction, comic books, video games and steady diet of take-out Thai food. Just as The Big Bang Theory has found mainstream success, so to has the term “geek” developed into a badge of “coolness” instead of the derogatory nature of the word in years past.
The PBS series Nova, meanwhile, has taken its love for science and developed a documentary-style webseries that likewise reinvents the image of scientists as more than a bunch of socially awkward lab rats. Entitled The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers, the collection of short online videos spotlight such traditional “geeks” and “nerds” as theoretical physicists, microbiologists and mechanical engineers and showcase them in a different light by focusing on their out-of-the-lab personas. The theoretical physicist thus becomes a jazz saxophonist, the microbiologist a professional wrestler and the mechanical engineer a bona fide daredevil.
The series launched in 2009 and over twenty-five professional scientists and engineers have received the Secret Life treatment since its premier. Each have their own page on the PBS website and are featured in a small handful of videos that center on their career, area of expertise and outside hobbies. One of the most popular components of The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers is “10 Questions” in which the spotlighted scientist is asked about both their profession and secret life. While the inquiries include brief discussions on “Who’s you favorite scientist?” and “What’s the biggest misconception about your field?” they also contain such offbeat queries like “Erector Sets or Legos?” and “Have you ever been blinded by science?”
The scientists featured run the full gamut of possible careers—from anthropology and earth sciences to physics, engineering and technology—and practically any academic profession within the parameters of the title can be found within The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers. The same is also true with their out-of- lab hobbies. Microbiologist Rachel Collins of St. Louis, for instance, is a professional wrestler on the weekends. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, likes to juggle, while experimental psychologist Laurie Santos enjoys taking photographs of animal feet. Then there’s mechanical engineer Nate Ball, who took up “free running,” which involves running up a wall and doing a back flip off of it, during graduate school.
“I’d go with the Olympic gold medal,” Ball responds in his “10 Questions” video when asked if he would rather win an Olympic gold medal or a Nobel Prize. “But only because there’s no Nobel Prize for mechanical engineer.”
Other scientists are asked equally amusing yet informative questions. “I would definitely be a bonobo,” Laurie Santos answers in regards to what kind of primate she most relates. “Bonobos are kind of more of the ‘hippy’ primate.”
When asked what famous scientist would make a good wrestler, meanwhile, Rachel Collins picks Charles Darwin. “He had so many people ready to fight him for his theories,” she explains.
“Being in the studio with the scientists is the best part of the process,” producer Joshua Seftel told Cogito in January 2011 about filming The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers. “We ask them to bring props and objects that relate to their work and their secret life. We’ve had people juggling, shooting bows and arrows, demonstrating beauty pageant waving, jamming on electric guitars, doing back flips, and Ninjitsu fighting to name a few.”
As well as being entertaining, The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers also helps to cast members of the profession in a more positive light to the segment of the population that may have a less ideal opinion in regards to scientists. “I’m not sure how truly negative the image of scientists is,” Seftel comments. “I do feel like many non-scientists have this idea that scientists are practically a different species, and that science is some kind of indecipherable language. This is partly due to the way the media treats science. And perhaps it’s partly due to the way science is taught in school. But there are many scientists who would strongly disagree with the idea that scientists are different than anybody else.”
Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter of The Big Bang Theory are obviously extreme examples of scientists whose personal idiocies are played for laughs on the CBS comedy. The success of the series, however, demonstrates a growing social acceptance of not only “geeks” but the scientific profession as well. The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers, meanwhile, showcases the every day aspects of such practitioners and transplants their professions even further into the mainstream.
In the end, The Big Bang Theory teaches us that we are all “geeks” to some degree at heart, while The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers shows that the traditional geeks of society are actually just like the rest of us.
As the saying goes, “Smart is the New Sexy” indeed.
Anthony Letizia (February 7, 2011)
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