Scientists as Strangers

Researchers have an image problem

- BY DAVA SOBEL

Scientists, in the popular imagination, are oddballs. A chemist or geologist may be a genius, it is generally agreed, but the heightened mental acuity comes at great social and emotional cost, rendering the scientist a misfit, a weirdo, a robot in human clothing. This perception troubles me.

In a 50-year career spent writing about science, I have interviewed hundreds of scientists, from young postdocs to elderly laboratory directors, including several Nobel Prize winners. None of them fit within the confines of the stereotype.

True, a few proved obnoxious, even insufferable, but not in a stereotypical way. So why do I continue to bump into this cliché wherever I go? The following statement, for example, jumped out at me from a New York Times obituary for slain Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Nuno Loureiro: "Far from the stereotypical scientist holed up in his lab with little to say to the outside world, Dr. Loureiro was known for being warm, down to earth-even stylish." Apparently such attributes are so out of place in the personality of a scientist as to merit special mention.

Recently a group of high school physics teachers joined me via Zoom for a discussion of two of my books. The first question on their prepared list was, "How are the people who made big contributions to science similar to and different from 'normal' people?" Actor Jim Parsons, who played string theorist Sheldon Cooper in nearly 300 episodes of CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory between 2007 and 2019, won four Emmy Awards and a

Golden Globe for his portrayal of the archetypal socially inept scientist. Children asked to create a picture of a scientist most often draw a white man wearing a lab coat and glasses, Marie Curie and George Washington Carver notwithstanding.