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Ann Merchant is the Deputy Executive Director of Communications at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. She leads the institution’s creative engagement activities, including the Science & Entertainment Exchange, a program that connects entertainment industry professionals with top scientists and engineers. Since 2008, these collaborations have borne fruit in hundreds of films and TV series, including many from Marvel Studios and “The Big Bang Theory”. Ann joins the podcast to explain how Dune screenwriter Jon Spaihts and other film creators have integrated scientific inspiration with creative storytelling.

Tom: Welcome to the show, Anne.

Ann: Thank you very much, Tom. I’m excited to be here.

Tom: I want to start by asking you if somebody had bumped into you as a teenager and told you would spend over 30 years of your adult life working at the National Academy of Sciences. How would you have reacted to that news?

Ann: I’m sure I would have laughed out loud for an extended period. First, of course, I would have said I have no idea what the National Academy of Sciences is or does. Right. And then I would have laughed.

Tom: What were some of your aspirations at that time when you were just in those formative moments in high school imagining, boom, where you’d be down the road?

Ann: Well, I grew up in a small town on Cape Cod and went to a public high school. So, my primary aspiration was not to spend my life in a small town on Cape Cod. The expression that we used to use was getting over the bridge. I wanted to get over the bridge and stay over the bridge. So that was my goal. It’s a low bar, but it was an important bar for me.

And then, you know, I wanted to be a writer, a writer of great fiction. I didn’t really understand what that meant because, again, my bar was low when I went to a public high school. I thought that, um, you know, Agatha Christie was great fiction. I didn’t really have much opportunity to explore what that looked like.

Tom: Well, you did make it over the bridge. I did. Headed off to college. Tell me about So, your encounter there in that environment of high achievement, professors teaching all sorts of things, what happened in college for you?

Ann: So, I went to Johns Hopkins and that was the first time I had ever lived in a city.

Now, this was Baltimore in the 70s and so that was the first time I had ever experienced a city. urban life. And I do remember because I was, my major, I was in the writing seminars. And I remember when I interviewed at Hopkins, my high school grades were not very good. I was a kind of a wild child.

And so, I didn’t go to a lot of my classes. And I think my highest grade When I was a junior in high school, it was an F plus in art. I remember them asking me at my interview, so we’re very curious, we drew lots to interview you, to ask why someone with these grades believes that they can’t do it.

Will be admitted to this school the audacity of youth like just you know you’re so young and stupid and I said Well, I mean have you looked at my SAT scores and my achievements? I mean, I don’t think that those grades adequately reflect my abilities like you idiots You’re just so stupid. I’m sure my mother was in the other room.

Just thinking. Oh god, please don’t embarrass me

Somebody in, in that admissions process must have championed me. I was lucky because I was not applying for medical school. It was at a time that they needed women, and I got in. And then I had this sort of very rude awakening in my first writing seminars classes, when I realized, as I was surrounded by people who had been to boarding school, who had received private school educations, who had been to much better high schools than I, as they are talking about things that I had no idea what they were referencing.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been admitted to Hopkins and to have had my world opened. I did take some science classes because it was required. You had area requirements, and I did not have a natural interest in science, but I really did well. I liked college. I really enjoyed my time at Hopkins, but I can’t say that I was naturally drawn to science.

So even if you’d asked me. And I would have laughed in college whether I would have imagined myself at the National Academy of Sciences. I still would have laughed. Let’s fast forward several decades. You’ve made your career at the National Academy of Sciences. You’ve been interacting with scientists, policymakers for a very long time.

Tom: What have you learned from your experiences of being there in that kind of context for all this time?

Ann: I think one of the things I’ve learned is that scientists are incredibly passionate about the work that they do. I don’t think that there are a group of people that are more singularly devoted to the everyday getting up and thinking about the work that they do.

And that was something that I so appreciated about the people that I met at the academy and then of course beyond the institution. And you don’t see that in a lot of professions. And I think you know, that’s something very special. Many people, or maybe even I, as I imagine scientists, is a little bit like robots, like giant brains that do this logical work.

Tom: Tell me a little bit about the scientists you interact with, like, what are they made of? If you were to open them up, would there be a bunch of computer chips and gears and whatnot? What are they like on the inside? What are they like in those sorts of personal encounters?

Ann: So, there is varied as any group of people that you would find.

There’s a reason for some of the stereotypes that we see. I work in a building with Lots and lots of Ph. D. level scientists, and some of them absolutely fit that stereotype. And then you find exactly the opposite. And I think that you’ve got to take a scientist as they come, just as you must take a real estate agent, or a lawyer, or a, it, I mean, they’re as varied as anybody.

Tom: Tell me about the circumstances that led to the creation of the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

Ann: When I started at the Academy, as I said, I was in the publishing division. And for a long time, I was the marketing director and going out and stumping for the individual reports and books that we were publishing, including trade books that were meant to appeal to a more general reading audience.

And we didn’t have a communications function. Most science institutions didn’t have a communications function. Now we talk about science communications, and it sounds like a, well, we’ve been doing this forever, but that’s not true. You know, science communications weren’t a thing for a long time, but I think that science as an institution kind of looked around one day and said, huh, people are not listening to us.

It used to be that we could just say a thing and people received that thing. They believed it, they took it on and, and then we started to realize, well, they’re not listening. They’re not listening when we talk about evolution. They’re not listening when we talk about genetically modified foods or climate change or whatever it is.

It’s that now these things are controversial and that these have become. problematic in the public sphere. So, the Academy at some point began to realize that these reports that we were putting out, they weren’t landing all the time either. And so it was in that process that we had come up with a proposal for the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

And I don’t take credit, I certainly didn’t invent. Science advising in Hollywood, and I didn’t come up with this idea all by myself. I really credit Neil Gerstenfeld. He really inspired me from work that I knew he had done, and I queried him a lot in thinking about what the science and entertainment exchange could be.

Tom: So, was there any precedent of scientist advisors in the kind of Hollywood screenwriting community? Was there any kind of model to even start from?

Ann: So, as I said, Neil had given me a really good idea of how this could work because he had been tapped by Steven Spielberg to join the world building team for the film Minority Report.

He and a group of other scientists had sat down and really thought through, well, what could this world that Minority Report was built on, what could that look like? What were some of the scientific principles on which it would be based? How would it operate? What were some of the parameters? And I asked him a lot about that process and how that give and take worked, what made it successful.

So, it all just came together actually relatively quickly. easily, in a surprising kind of way. So, was there a model for it? There were models for it. Other people had tried to do this. People had tried to monetize it. Most of those models had not really worked. And I can kind of see why they didn’t work.

Tom: So, before it was more of like a fee for hire of like science advising was something you go out and get essentially a science consultant for your show and you guys went a different took a different approach. So yeah, tell me a little bit about what was the approach as you envisioned it as it started?

Ann: So, yes, we had seen that people wanted to be agents for scientists and they wanted to monetize that. I think that the other problem is that we had seen that for the most part there was always this emphasis on accuracy. And the A word is a dangerous word. No one wants to talk to the accuracy police, the finger wagging scientist who says, you That’s not the way it works.

Because that, I think, was always the way previous interlocutors had been perceived. So, we really tried not to go in as that group of people.

Tom: Did you articulate your goals, or maybe even your hopes, as the program started? What did you think success would look like?

Ann: So, I think the other thing I should say is that Janet and Jerry Zucker were instrumental in making introductions in Hollywood. They were our champions. I don’t think we could have made this a success without somebody who was an insider.

We really needed that. So, I think at that moment we truly understood success looked like making these kinds of careful bespoke introductions, not just going out with, Advertisements on the sides of buses, but one by one personal introductions that made this a safe space for the screenwriters that we wanted to work with.

So that it didn’t sound like it was a studio talking to a giant science institution. These were two people who could trust each other. And I think that made a big difference. Big difference. We’ve always done small events. We’ve always done individually curated conversations. And we always like to say, you know, one stale coffee, one bad ham sandwich at a time, one individual conversation at a time.

We have over 15 years grown this program into 4, 800 consults and 700 events, a program that has impact.

Tom: Can you tell me an anecdote maybe of one scientist and or one entertainer who got introduced into the program and step by step what their experience was and what resulted from it?

Ann: So, I think that John Spates is an interesting example.

We met John when he was a younger writer and didn’t have a lot of credits to his name, but we knew he was an a very talented writer who had a lot of ambition and was probably going to really have a good career ahead of him. We met him early on. He came to one of our salons. He came to our first writer’s retreat.

And from that point, we have worked very closely with him. He comes to us all the time for connections to scientists. And he has. moderated panels for us. So, you see the evolution of somebody that is very close to the program. You see that work translated into, I mean, as you know, he has been the screenwriter for Prometheus, for Passengers, for Dune, for Doctor Strange.

And these are all very science specific kinds of scripts. And you see the evidence of those conversations that he has with scientists in all the work that he does. And that kind of long-term relationship has been satisfying for him, satisfying for us, and I think that you see how well it translates into the movies that he does.

There are small things that you see, we do sometimes little tours, and we had taken Jamie Paglia, who was the showrunner for, this was a long time ago, for Eureka. And we were going through, I think we were at SpaceX, and Jamie said, who’s that young woman over there with the pink hair? We said, oh, well, she’s a, I mean, she’s quite literally a rocket scientist.

And he said, oh, I guess I hadn’t pictured scientists or engineers as like young women with pink hair. Within about a month, you saw a character on Eureka, a young woman, rocket scientist, with pink hair. So sometimes it is as simple as that.

Tom: Tell me also about a, a scientist, and how participating in your program has influenced them in the way they work.

Ann: So, I think an interesting example might be Jeff Kahn at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins. And Jeff, he’s such an interesting person. He’s done a lot of work with the academies. He’s now a member of the National Academy of Medicine. At the time he was at Berman, but he was not leading the institute.

He now is the director of the institute, and he has done a lot of consults. And I think it has really changed the sort of layered way that he thinks about interacting with different audiences and publics. I know one of the things that he does, he works with a theater of war, which is a very interesting group out of New York City that takes classic plays and rewrites them for a more modern time to start a public conversation around things that tend to be controversial, whether it’s about the pandemic or about PTSD as soldiers return from conflict, whatever it might be.

We did something with them on climate change that takes the current day controversy out of it as they only reflect on what it might’ve been like for those ancient characters. And I think it’s through working from someplace like The Exchange, as Jeff has done all those interactions, that opened his way to think about art and science to connect with audiences.

Tom: The program, I guess, has been running for 14 years now?

Ann: We launched in November of 2008. Yeah.

Tom: Do you run the program differently? Then you did in the early days or, or has this been more of a refinement process in terms of how you facilitate these interactions, making these introductions, doing these retreats?

Tell me a little bit about the changes over time.

Ann: I think we’ve certainly learned over time that. We had to be more proactive. When we first conceived of this model, we thought of it as 1 800 I need a scientist. It’s too many digits, you can’t dial that, but there is a toll-free number, 844 NEED PSI, and you can.

Dial that and you can get a side. And we learned quickly that if we were to do that, it really would only result in a lot of conversations around black holes and murder. And it also would just be boring. You know, it would just be waiting to be asked a series of questions around things that weren’t all that interesting and that we knew there was this big giant world of science that was incredibly compelling.

But they don’t know what they don’t know. And so, we have pivoted to include a much more proactive side of the program to do events. And I think that we were able to introduce a whole world of science to people that got them thinking beyond the stuff they already had heard about or maybe might see in the media.

And the other thing that we have really turned our attention to, I think probably within Five to six years is the depiction of character. That it’s not just about the topic. It is about the person who is representing the science. That you’ve got to think beyond just the science itself. Characters matter.

So, we’ve got to put more scientists in front of the screenwriters that can stand as the characters that they create. You can’t just allow them to imagine these people. You must introduce them to these people. So, we must overly gift them with a cohort of scientists that don’t just reflect the way science is now, but instead the way science could be.

We’re asking them to make up something. So let them make up. A world that is equally distributed with black and brown scientists or achieves parity between the genders. With the time we have left, I want to step back and ask a few bigger questions.

Tom: So, given your experience at the National Academy of Sciences, your experience and connection with the Hollywood community, what are the things that give you hope about the future?

Ann: It seems to me that it’s not true that people are not interested in science. I think the word science is triggering to people. It reminds them of the frog they didn’t want to dissect when they were in high school, or the boring teacher that they had. When you drill down into the topics that are interesting to people, everyone is interested in science.

We must do a better job of marketing it. It’s not always about the, the documentary. It’s not always about, this is why we put scientists on stage with comedians. You’ve got to go where people are. You don’t always have to have them come to you. So, it gives me great hope when I see people fill a room with a scientist if you’ve done it the right way and they leave with a smile on their face and excited to talk to the next scientist because you’ve broken down a barrier and you’ve shown them how interesting and exciting and fun this can be.

And that makes me feel good. And I also think it’s not true that scientists are not good communicators. People go talk about all the time, well, scientists, they’re just terrible communicators. Again, I don’t think that’s true. Sure, there are some terrible communicators, but there are some incredibly gifted communicators.

And it’s not just the A plus communicators, there are some amazing B plus communicators. And we should be happy about that too. Let’s say that you’re sitting outside along Constitution Avenue at the Einstein statue. And a high school student that reminds you of yourself says, I’m curious about what I can do with my future.

I love reading. I love writing. I don’t feel very comfortable with my science classes. What can I do with my life? Well, I think the first thing I would say is listen, one of the things that you probably have going for you, if you’re interested in writing, you’re interested in these things, but you have no science background, you, my friend, are going to be the perfect person to walk through that door and help them communicate science, because you will be Insufficiently educated, insufficiently fluent in the language of science to be able to be the canary in the coal mine to say, you know what?

It’s not me. It’s you and I can help you speak to people like me. We always think that you’ve got to have other scientists helping scientists bring people in that are not science people and walk them through that door and say, you know what? You are the people we want, and we need.

Tom: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

People could imagine, I’d like to write the next great screenplay for a drama or sci fi film or something else. I hear that it’s tough to be a writer and to earn a living with the way the media landscape is changing. So, you meet a very hungry, eager writer full of enthusiasm and creative ideas.

What does that conversation look like?

Ann: Gosh, you know, writers are passionate people. We talked about how much passion scientists have for the work that they do. It’s hard to turn somebody away from their passion, which is why accuracy should not be our goal. Think about Star Trek and how incredibly inspiring so many of those, especially the early television shows were, were they accurate?

Accuracy is not necessarily the thing that’s going to strike a chord, spark your imagination, be that thing that makes you excited. I would say plausible is a good thing, but it’s not about the accuracy. That’s not what makes people excited. And I think that it can inspire you to look at something and say, I want that.

I want to be that. I want to have that world happen. How do I get there? Maybe that’s what scientists and the entertainment community have in common. Imagine the world as it could be. I think I learned that from Frank Walczak, too. Science opens the possibility space of what’s possible. The more that we discover of what the world is and what lies underneath it, the more you realize that things as they are don’t have to be this way.

There are so many other possibilities, right? And it’s a matter of one having the imagination to even think of it. And then two, the perseverance and tenacity of then going after it. Well, and that’s the other thing that the retreats have always taught us is that despite the high school dance hesitation of meeting in the middle, at the end of the retreats, what the scientists always realize is that they are cool enough to hang with those screenwriters and they’re just as creative as the screenwriters.

And the screenwriters are plenty smart. to hang out with those writers. I mean, we’re not just trying to create a bunch of scientists and engineers when people go to watch movies. We’re just trying to create a sense of comfort with science or scientists and to make people believe that these are people that exist in the world doing something good and we can trust them, and we like them.

And it’s about making them part of the fabric of our neighborhoods