The cinematic scientist

IN THE EARLY 20th century, scientists were often portrayed in European and American movies as wild-eyed, wild-haired men who worked alone indoors or underground, surrounded by impossibly complex equipment: Drs. Frankenstein, Jekyll, and Caligari, for example. Today, however, scientists on the screen are often sexy mavericks fighting to prevent corporations and/or the military from distorting science: Think of Sean Connery as a cancer researcher in the Amazon in ''Medicine Man," Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fossey in ''Gorillas in the Mist," Jodie Foster as an astrophysicist in ''Contact." How did we go from Frankenstein to Fossey?

According to Christopher Frayling, author of a new study of the cinematic scientist, ''Mad, Bad and Dangerous?" (Reaktion), the answer is what he describes as the ever-widening divide ''between specialized knowledge and popular understanding." Since the late 19th century, when French film pioneer Georges Mèliés first portrayed scientists as latter-day alchemists in workshops and labs cluttered with flasks, thermometers, globes, skeletons, and the like, the cinema has struggled to bridge that gap. At least the men in white coats are heroes now, instead of villains, right?

Perhaps not. Frayling, who is rector of the Royal College of Art in London as well as the author of books on vampire fiction and the spaghetti western, points out that today's silver-screen scientists are only allowed to be heroes if they spend less time in the lab and more time fighting the establishment. The scientist as maverick is just another misleading stereotype: As Frayling recently told the London-based Daily Telegraph, the kind of research we're urged to admire in Sigourney Weaver's Fossey, for example, is ''a complete negation of real science, in which progress comes through careful research carried out by teams funded by large grants and subject to peer-group assessments." Might deeper public understanding of science rid the screen of stereotypes-whether positive or negative-of scientists? Yes, concludes Frayling, who goes on to write: ''Sadly, it could also sound the death-knell of some of our favorite kinds of film."

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.