This video we did in 2008 is THE reason why Discovery Channel should not be propagating the fear and destruction of sharks with their annual Shark Week. What the video says is hard to even fathom — that humans have so emptied the oceans in the past 50 years, you rarely see sharks in the open seas today.

If you want a responsible, up-to-date for the 21st Century perspective on sharks, I strongly recommend you watch Sharkwater. I was deeply impressed with the job Rob Stewart did in hitting exactly the right note for how we should perceive sharks today.

As for Discovery Channel, they need to move on to fulfilling Mike Judge’s visionary movie, “Idiocracy,” by finally producing the show that America truly wants — “Ow, My Balls!” They are just the guys to make it.

One man against a money machine. After a career as a nature documentary filmmaker, Chris Palmer is now a professor at American University and using his years of knowledge and dedication to speak out against the careless video exploitation of nature. Discovery Channel is the focus of his editorial in Huffington Post. But do people at Discovery Channel even read?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DE-EVOLUTION OF THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL

In the beginning … there was the brilliant documentary “Cane Toads” — the first real “hit” for The Discovery Channel. That was the mid to late 1980′s, when cable television was gloriously new — back when I was glued to my control box with 15 switches that had three positions allowing for 45 channels on my TV, though it was tethered to the set with a wire so you couldn’t go far — it was the pre-remote days.

Back then, the enormously talented Australian filmmaker Mark Lewis produced his landmark movie, “Cane Toads,” which is a quirky, very funny, very clever movie about the natural history of the introduced toads in Australia which the fledgling Discovery Channel acquired and showed. For a brief shining moment there was a ray of hope that this new cable channel was a pathway to enlightenment about nature that would stand for all things good in trying to halt the decline of the world’s natural resources.

But it didn’t last long. Entropy took over, as it always does.

Sadly, the story mirrors the decline of William Paley’s CBS News as told by David Halberstam in “The Powers That Be” — a sort of cautionary tale that I have pointed to multiple times here on The Benshi and in my book. It’s just a sort of iconic progression -- ”Idealists find new modes of communication, grand dreams and aspirations are laid out, real world settles in, audience decides they’d rather watch sex and violence, television folks give them what they want, and the idealists end up at the bar drowning their sorrows and complaining (btw, I’m a member of this latter group)”.

Such is the case for the Discovery Channel these days. Their most popular shows involve plundering ocean wildlife (“World’s Deadliest Catch”), plundering forests (“Ice Loggers,” “Swamp Loggers,” basically anywhere miserable that there are loggers), and then fanning the flames of mass fear and hatred of sharks with their flagship yearly extravaganza, “Shark Week”.

And for every Shark Week series they produce, they have trained their publicists how to explain to the public that watching people getting mauled by sharks is good for the planet, claiming their programming creates more concern and interest in sharks. It’s no different than the guy in my film school class who made a student film that included a graphic rape scene that was simply pornography but he explained it to the faculty as helping people understand the wrongness of rape. Right. Guess which industry that guy is making his income from these days (hint: you can see his “work” on your hotel television adult channel).

At any rate, Chris Palmer is doing an heroic job of being one of the few voices speaking out against the tackiness of the Discovery Channel. He’s written a number of powerful editorials about it. Here’s his latest about Shark Week.

The Writers Room for Discovery Channel's "Shark Week"

It’s now official — this country is in the grips of a full blown science communication crisis.

BIG BUSINESS MAKES A MOCKERY OF CLIMATE SCIENCE. Rolling Stone (the magazine that recently engaged in "assisted career suicide" with General McChrystal) has apparently decided to make itself culturally relevant again. In this month's issue they point a fickle finger at President Obama for his failure to push forward a climate agenda. This illustration comes from their article.

Last week Senator Harry Reid announced that the only major piece of climate legislation in Congress is officially dead. Rolling Stone points to the Obama Administration in doling out blame — which is particularly painful given what would have seemed like a prime opportunity to springboard something off the BP disaster.

For the science world, the official crisis is that the best scientists this nation has to offer are trying to tell the public that excess carbon emission is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. But their message is not coming through. THAT IS A SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS CRISIS. It doesn’t get any more cut and dried.

On Friday I took part in a conference call on this subject with a team from The Nature Conservancy who will transcribe the call and eventually publish it in their monthly science publication, Science Chronicles. This week I’m in Washington D.C. to meet with folks at the Union of Concerned Scientists and Center for American Progress to talk about the mass communication of climate issues.

And in the meanwhile, we have THE ONE BIG STORY THAT IS NOT BEING TOLD: That the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which climate skeptics have repeatedly labeled as being, “alarmist,” are now consistently being EXCEEDED. Things are getting worse MORE RAPIDLY than expected.

You would think, given the outdoor sauna that places like Washington D.C. currently are experiencing (the misery index is through the roof here!), that EVERYONE would be talking about global warming, but as yet that’s not happening. I think there’s a lag factor at work for the present. But wait til late August if it stays like this.

UPDATE: It’s Monday morning in D.C. and the landscape is cluttered with downed trees from yesterday’s violent thunderstorms, and OpEd’s from last week’s climate collapse. Perhaps the most prominent is Paul Krugman in the NY Times who says the climate effort didn’t fail because of a lack of science or because of the weak economy. He points the finger of blame at GREED (meaning the coal and gas companies with their powerful disinformation campaign) and COWARDICE (politicians who have given up the fight, with John McCain as his biggest target, labeling him a “climate coward”).

Similarly, Lee Wasserman in the NY Times blames not just the politicians, but the Obama Administration in general. He concludes his editorial by saying, “Citizens wouldn’t support an approach they couldn’t understand to solve a problem our leaders refused to acknowledge.” He couldn’t have said it more clearly — we have a failure of both communication and leadership.

And lastly, Joe Romm of Climate Progress seems to have scored the tragi-comic quip of the day with his encapsulation of it all: “The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.”

JOIN US IN WICHITA! My 86 year old mother, Muffy Moose, co-star of “Flock of Dodos,” and I will be on hand to help celebrate the annual meeting of the Wichita chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State with a screening of the movie on Friday evening, September 10, at the Exploration Place in Wichita, Kansas.

DODOS ON THE PRAIRIE

It’s been over 4 years since the very first public screening of “Flock of Dodos,” on a cold February night in 2006 out on the prairies. That event took place in the suburbs of Kansas City, right as the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy was reaching a fevered pitch in the state of Kansas. The pro-intelligent design school board was still in power, and the flummoxed pro-evolution community was still seriously fearing a future of religion in the science classrooms of the state. Before the night was done the audience erupted in cries of, “Bullshit!” in response to intelligent design provocateur Jack Cashill who was on the post-screening panel discussion.

But science did prevail in Kansas. And not because of any large science organizations.

In the summer of 2006, I fired off distressed emails to a couple of the major science organizations in D.C. The Discovery Institute was pouring large sums of money into the state to support the intelligent design side, but the Kansas evolutionists were holding bake sales (literally) to raise funds for their campaigns. I asked the large science organizations why they weren’t also pouring funds into the state to match the Discovery Institute. They basically replied, “We don’t do that.” Meaning it’s politics, and scientists don’t like to get involved with politics, as we know all too well.

In the end, thanks to a great deal of back-breaking grassroots effort and the heroic work of a handful of tireless individuals like Sue Gamble, Bill Wagnon, and Dr. Steve Case (all in the movie), Genie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, Barbara Forrest, Ken Miller, and many other dedicated souls, most of the pro-intelligent design board members were shown the door in the 2006 elections (thus concluding the second round of “The School Board Circle of Life,” as we mention at the end of the movie).

Things have been relatively peaceful in Kansas since. In fact, last fall when I visited Steve Case at the University of Kansas and we showed Dodos, there was a distinct feeling of “the Evolution Wars” being a dark chapter in the state’s recent history that people would just as soon forget.

So when we screen the movie on Friday evening, September 10 at the Exploration Place Science and Discovery Center (what better place to present such a pro-science movie!) in Wichita, there shouldn’t be the sort of shouting matches during the post-screening panel discussion that we had back in 2006. Should there be?

You’ll have to attend the screening to find out!

TWENTY YEARS LATER: Veteran lobster fishermen Brian and Stevie Robbins of Stonington, Maine will be on hand to view the film we did with them nearly 20 years ago. It was a magical night of storytelling that we managed to record. It will be a memorable evening.

OUR THROW-AWAY SOCIETY

Some things last. Most things don’t. I keep thinking that, as we make plans for what’s going to be a great and memorable evening at the University of Maine on September 22 where we will present my film of three lobster fishermen which is now almost 20 years old. What makes this film worth watching so many years later? Why haven’t we just thrown it away?

In June of 1991 my crew of four and I traveled up the coast of Maine to the little port of Stonington to spend an evening with the Robbins brothers and their father in Stevie’s fishing shack. Before that, I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. It all changed in one evening.

They had agreed to do an in-depth “interview” (more of a storytelling session) with me not because I was such a talented filmmaker, but rather because they believed I was NOT any good as a filmmaker. They told me this later. There was no way they would have EVER sat down with a bunch of professionals from PBS or Discovery Channel hoping to “capture the Downeast thing” on film. That would have been too exploitative for them. As I tell at the start of the film, I gave them a copy of my ONLY film at the time, the 5 minute short, “Lobstahs,” which a few months earlier had been panned as “decidedly lame” at the New England Film and Video Festival. A week later they watched it. Brian called me and said it was so bad they figured I had to be harmless. They agreed to meet and eventually opened themselves up to us in a manner that is rarely, if ever, seen in the quiet, reclusive lifestyle of working class folks in Downeast Maine.

The result is a film that’s worth watching, nearly two decades later. And as we gear up for this event, I find myself wondering, what is it about the film that justifies pulling together several hundred people for an evening, and why don’t I feel like it was just a product that served its purpose and lived it’s life? Why isn’t the film part of our throw-away society?

THE TRAGEDY OF “ONE SHOT” THINKING

The concept of “throw away” is linked to the idea of giving things just a single shot — sort of like “single use plastics” — like a plastic fork or cup. I learned this “one shot” approach to life by hanging around Hollywood for the past two decades. I never saw it in the academic science world before moving here, but I was eventually stunned to see that by the late 1990′s it had infiltrated the environmental world. Let me tell you how.

In 2001 I reconnected with my former marine biology colleague Dr. Jeremy Jackson to create the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. I knew very little of the ocean conservation world. My life until then had consisted of twenty years of academic science, followed by six years of film school and seeking employment in Hollywood. Jeremy didn’t have much background either in the (unbeknownst to us) competitive world of saving the oceans. We thought it was as simple as good intentions and good ideas. We were naive.

As we set off on our mission to use my newly acquired filmmaking skills to help him communicate his conservation ideas to a broader audience, we were about to learn a great deal in a short period of time. The first thing we were told, from several communications directors for large environmental groups in Washington D.C., as well as more than one communications consultant, was that, “YOU ARE ONLY GOING TO GET ONE SHOT WITH YOUR IDEA.” I knew this concept from my years in Hollywood where this really does exist in terms of the way that big budget screenplays are sold. But I had never dreamed the same sort of thinking might have infiltrated the saintly world of saving the planet.

THE HOLLYWOOD ONE SHOT — MY ACTION SCRIPT

Here’s how the big budget screenwriting world works in Hollywood. You write a screenplay which you keep under tight wraps. Then you seek out an agent who will ONLY look at your script if you can assure the agent that no one — absolutely no one — in the entertainment business has ever even seen the title of your screenplay, much less read it. If the agent believes you on that point, and if the agent thinks you’ve got a decent title and pitch (something like, “It’s ‘Die Hard’ at a dinner table — a sort of action-version of ‘My Dinner with Andre’“), then no matter how poorly written the script might be, you’ll probably get a shot at a “spec sale” — meaning selling the script on speculation, ideally by creating a bidding war among production companies.

In 2000 I had a team of agents representing me as a writer at one of the top three agencies. They took one of my big budget action scripts and did exactly this. They staged a spec sale release of the script. It went out to roughly 75 production companies on a Tuesday morning. By the afternoon, internet message boards were ablaze with gossip about the script — “Anybody read this?” “Any bids?” “Anybody taking it to a studio?” By Wednesday morning there was “solid interest” from numerous companies and rumors that two production companies had “taken it to a studio” (which means that all of the dozens of small production companies have deals with the five or so big studios and are allowed a few times a year to bring them scripts they think are worthy. But they can do this only a few times, which means they have to be careful which scripts they choose to burn up those shots with). So it was a big deal they were choosing my script.

And yet. By Thursday the script was dead. Everyone passed. Lots of reasons. No need to go into them. But everyone liked the writing of the script and most said back to the agent, “We want to meet the writer.” Which left me with the worst case scenario — no money, but literally about 50 meetings to do. I did about 30. It’s what Hollywood loves to do. Take energetic people and grind them down through endless meetings.

But the main point of telling this is that in Hollywood, with it’s ruthlessly short attention span (and absence of social, political, or moral agenda other than making boatloads of money), ideas really are given only a flickering nanosecond of opportunity. And then? It’s the one word that best describes the working mentality of all Hollywood … “Next!”

And by the way, the reason I dreaded doing all those meetings was I had already done it in 1996 when my USC musical comedy short film was a big hit at the Telluride Film Festival. I did close to 100 meetings back then with producers, managers, agents, and other folks. Actually, I should clarify that — most of them were with the ASSISTANTS of the big shots. And guess what — similar to the short attention span on screenplays, most of the jobs in Hollywood turn over incredibly — blindingly — quickly. So much that by 2001 there was virtually no one from those 1996 meetings who was still in the same job or even with the same company. That’s how Hollywood is — constantly in motion, no long term agenda, except making money.

SAVING NATURE WITH A SHORT ATTENTION SPAN?

So then it was 2002. Jeremy was pulling me back into the world of marine biology. We were talking with all these ocean conservation people and I was hearing the exact same thinking I had gotten used to hearing in Hollywood. We were told, “The American public has the attention span of a gnat. If you come up with an idea for a conservation campaign, you need to realize that you’re only going to get ONE SHOT at the public. If your idea isn’t super duper blazing white hot such that it explodes into everybody’s heads and causes them to drop whatever they’re doing and restart their entire lives … well, then, you’ll be finished before you can even start.”

I’m serious. I heard this, over and over again. It was apparently being taught at media workshops that these communications people were attending. And of course we were in the midst of shaping our concept of “Shifting Baselines” as a mass media campaign, so according to them, our brilliant idea would only get ONE SHOT!

A lot of the details of this I reviewed in my book — about the “experts” telling us the term would be a disaster with the public as it sounded “too technical” to them. They basically said don’t do it, and if you are foolish enough to do it, be prepared for “the backlash” you’ll get after you’ve launched your campaign and it’s failed. At that point, nobody will want to hear even the sound of your title — you’ll be as useless as a day old newspaper.

I kept wondering, and even saying to some of them, “Yeah, but what if it’s actually an important concept that you’ve built your ‘campaign’ around, and you’re willing to sing a song about it that you’ll keep singing for the rest of time until you’re dead?” That seemed to be beyond their comprehension — as in, “Why would you want to start a new year with the same theme as the previous year?”

REVOLVING EMPLOYEES

We launched Shifting Baselines in the fall of 2002. It’s 8 years later. We’re still running it. It never “erupted” as a concept. It’s just been on a steady, slow build, year after year, as more people see the relevance of the term. So it’s still around, but virtually none of those people with their sage advice are.

Of the dozen or so Communications Directors I met in 2002, mostly with the major environmental groups based in Washington D.C., only one of them is still in the same job — Matt McClain, the guy who has been a driving force in making Surfrider Foundation one of the most powerful and effective grassroots environmental organizations ever. He is still their Communications Director, as Surfrider remains on course, year after year, with same key players — Chad Nelson, Michelle Kramer, Ed Mazarella, Mark Rauscher, Nancy Hastings, Joe Geever … on and on. Little wonder they are so effective. It’s called staying power.

All the rest of the Communications Directors, JUST LIKE HOLLYWOOD, had moved on to other organizations — other jobs within a couple years. I really couldn’t believe it.

SO THEN, WHAT, IN THIS SADLY MIXED UP WORLD, DOES LAST?

You want the answer? Human stories. Did you hear of the 50 year anniversary celebrations a couple weeks ago around the novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird”? It’s a truly great story that deals with fundamental aspects of humanity. It has the potential to live forever because of this. Humor and emotion. Tragedy and comedy. The Greeks figured this out long ago.

So, despite my terribly inept filmmaking efforts (hey, it was BEFORE I went to film school) in the making of “Salt of the Earth,” the simple fact is, the lobster fishermen (two brothers and their father) were so candid, so warm, so friendly, so funny, so crude, and in the end, so honest with the stories they told us that even with the bad camera work, the pathetic stock footage (we could only afford to purchase a few seconds of nice footage which we used in slo-motion, so slow the frames skip!), and my amateurish narration … the film is still every bit as enjoyable and moving today as it was nearly 20 years ago because of what the fishermen deliver.

Hey, everybody -- let's all go to Africa and shoot the same scene of a lion tackling a wildebeest that a zillion previous nature filmmakers have shot!

And that’s what makes for “shelf life” in the medium of film.

As nature filmmakers, year after year, keep shooting the same films of the same lions taking down wildebeests from the same herds in the Serengeti (a young British filmmaker complained to me once at the International Wildlife Film Festival about what he called “the perfect lion film” in reference to all the nature filmmakers who would rather reshoot this same sequence each year than go after any new stories) … as they keep churning out miles of footage of nature that fails to tell compelling stories with human elements … you begin to realize why there isn’t a list of the American Film Institute’s 100 Favorite Nature Films that everyone can agree on. They just don’t have the shelf life.

In the end, it’s not nature or science or sports or politics that people are really interested in. It’s people.

TOTAL TACTICS: Last Sunday the Union of Concerned Scientists launched this excellent, very positive communications campaign with ads in major newspapers. These ads aren’t meant for scientists or bloggers who read 25 articles about climate science a day. They’re meant for members of the general public who have no interest in ever looking at a graph, even if it is famous.

TOTAL TACTICS

In 2005 I did a short video with environmental writing superstar Mark Dowie (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark book “Losing Ground: American environmentalism at the close of the twentieth century”). He cited the famous grassroots organizer Saul Alinsky (a name that’s coming up a lot these days among the attackers of Obama who call him a socialist) who coined the term “Total Tactics.” It refers to the need for ALL levels of organization when waging a campaign. In the video Mark illustrated the term by citing the civil rights movement.

Similar to civil rights, the issue of global warming has pretty much turned into a movement, and as such, it also needs to make use of the Total Tactics way of thinking. What that means is all levels and approaches to the issue are needed. The large organizations with their armies of high paid lawyers are needed to bring suits against offenders, while the grassroots groups who know how to build trust in small communities are equally important.

Similarly, both negative communications (such as being able to aggressively discredit sources of disinformation) and positive communications (building a favorable public opinion) are needed. In the case of global warming, there is a need for hard hitting climate bloggers who can undercut the voices of opposition, AND there’s a need for larger scale public relations that will help build public trust and support for the profession of climate science.

THE NEED FOR GOOD PUBLIC RELATIONS

So let’s talk about this term “p.r.” a little bit. In May, Erin Biba wrote this excellent editorial in Wired Magazine titled, “Science Needs to Step Up it’s P.R. Game.” It was following on the heels of Sharon Begley’s equally biting essay in Newsweek, “Their Own Worst Enemies: Why Scientists are Losing the P.R. Game.” As both of these writers point out, public relations is essential to any profession.

A major part of public relations is making sure the public knows about the good things you’ve done. For example, when the day comes that you show up at the pearly gates of heaven and St. Peter makes his decision, if you’re a humble scientist, you may run the risk of getting sent to hell, simply because St. Pete is busy and you didn’t speak up. But if you’ve hired a good publicist, that person will have made certain that the man at the gate knows all about the work you did on earth curing cancer, and without even opening your mouth you’ll get a warm reception.

THAT is what much of p.r. is about — making certain people know about the good things you did. And realizing that in the absence of such knowledge, people will assume that you’ve never done anything worthwhile because that is just how people are.

LARGE ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS NEED GOOD PUBLICISTS

A scientist friend of mine was on the board of a major environmental group. He was constantly bemoaning the fact that the organization does amazing work overseas, but because their communications people are so inept, no one ever hears about it.

It’s a serious problem. It’s also a tacky problem — it’s basically the idea that as you’re walking a little old lady across the street, you need to have a professional publicist calling everyone’s attention by shouting, “Hey, everybody, look at what’s happening here -- this guy is doing a good deed!” It’s a disgusting thought, but that’s how our society works.

Perception IS reality. Your goal is not to manipulate perception in dishonest ways. It’s only to make certain that it matches, one hundred percent, what the reality is. If you have a profession that is characterized almost entirely by honest people who value their integrity so highly that they are willing to investigate themselves simply because their opponents have managed to propagate groundless charges in the mass media (yes, I’m talking about the ENTIRE ClimateGate episode), then your profession deserves to have a good public image.

And if you have a profession that is filled with people who are driven not by their desire to live in the biggest McMansion on the block, but rather by the same curiosity that caused them to stare at the insects and flowers during little league baseball games or wallow in the mud as a kid or gaze at the stars in high school … well, then your profession has a right to project those images to the general public.

This is what is at the core of the print ads being published by the folks at Union of Concerned Scientists. The artwork is excellent. The ads very cool — very simple. And it’s an exercise in propagating the truth. I know this. I was a scientist for 20 years. Virtually every scientist I ever got to know had this driving, passionate, often self-less desire to learn, regardless of the economics. When I think of those people, then I think of the attacks against the credibility of research scientists being propagated these days, it really disgusts me and makes me wish there were a billion dollars (literally) to put behind this U.C.S. campaign because it is projecting the truth.

POSITIVE MESSAGING TAKES A LOT OF MUSCLE (BUT IS CRUCIAL)

As any political campaigner will tell you, negative advertising can be incredibly powerful. Just ask Michael Dukakis. I had a close friend who was a member of the top staff of his presidential campaign in 1988. I remember the day when she said, “We’ve got it — we’ve figured it out — we don’t have the money to buy the big ads that Bush is going to do, but we have lots of people so we’re going to win this election at the grassroots level by knocking on doors across America.”

Famous last words.

Unfortunately, they learned the hard way that a zillion door knocks can’t hold a candle to one Willie Horton negative campaign commercial. Dukakis was a good guy, but he got his clock cleaned.

KERRY COMMERCIAL

In 2004, when another good guy (= loser) was running for President, we managed to scratch together a few bucks here in Los Angeles and with the help of a whole lot of volunteer crew (including the most amazing big time cameraman I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with who came with a crew of 20 guys and two trucks all donated) we shot this simple environmental commercial for John Kerry. It was a very targeted piece, sponsored by Environment 2004, that was run in regions of Wisconsin and a few other states where mercury contamination of local waters was a significant issue.

OUR 2004 KERRY COMMERCIAL: In the voiceover (which is so rough it’s hard to recognize -- he was at the end of a long voiceover session for the animated movie “Cars”) was the late Paul Newman (like everyone, he did it for free to help out Kerry). Charles Durning (the fisherman) was wonderful — what an a-mazing guy — during a break I chatted with him about his experiences in World War II — he was among the first troops who landed on Omaha Beach on D-day, was wounded, then ended up at the Battle of the Bulge where he was one of the only survivors of the Malmedy Massacre (he said he hid behind a tree). I wanted to cancel the shoot and just spend the day hearing his stories. He’s one of the last of Tom Brokaw’s, “The Greatest Generation.”

It was a cute spot that was largely positive in tone — nothing about George W. Bush destroying nature — just the positive message that Kerry was strong on the environment. In looking at it 6 years later I really like it, but … well, the rest was history for Kerry. In the end, he simply didn’t have enough “Total Tactics,” especially when the Swift Boat Veterans finally attacked.

“TOTALLY LIEM” (5 minutes): We are so grateful we were lucky enough to shoot a fun interview with Karel Liem for “Flock of Dodos” that managed to capture a few spontaneous moments of his laughter and enthusiasm. It isn’t much, but just by watching this you can understand why his students and colleagues were so fond of him. He brought a warmth and happiness to the often-cold world of biology. What more can you ask for to draw people into the profession of science.

We didn’t get enough of Karel Liem on film. That’s all I can think to say. He’s gone. He departed this world last fall (1935-2009), and unfortunately there is virtually no film record of him, despite his great and wonderful spirit and career.

Karel was widely loved, and last Friday night there was a banquet in his honor, attended by over one hundred scientists and friends, at the annual Ichthyologists and Herpetologists Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. Working with one of his former graduate students, Dana Ono, we put together two short videos which they used to open and close the presentation part of the evening.

The first video was 10 minutes (posted near the end of this essay) with some of his former grad students speaking about their fondness and respect for him, with excerpts from the one “sit down” interview a former student did with him eight years ago. The second video was 5 minutes in length. It captures a tiny slice of what made him so special — namely his tremendous enthusiasm and passion mixed with an irrepressible sense of humor and a fondness for pranks and practical jokes.

The second video (above) was 5 minutes, which ended the evening’s festivities on a fun and humorous note. It’s not the standard biographic tribute. But it might be better than that because it has what so much science filmmaking lacks — a heart and soul. It’s little more than a cobbling together of some outtakes from the hour long interview we filmed with him for my movie, “Flock of Dodos,” in 2005. But in the outtakes you get little snippets of his great laugh, his passionate style of communication, and his warm and friendly demeanor which was ALWAYS present.

Dana said the video went over wonderfully on Friday night and the thing he heard the most from people afterwards was that it completely captured the Karel Liem that everyone knew so well. Why is that? It’s because it’s full of SPONTANEITY — something I talked about in detail in the first two chapters of my book. The outtakes are all unscripted moments of Karel being himself. Not some guy stuck under the heat lamps the way most documentaries are made, with a group of strangers barking questions at the scientist like an inquisition team. No, these were moments of Karel Liem interrupting his buddy Jim Hanken to heckle him, then us wandering over to the Bio Labs library in search of something (we didn’t know what) to add into the film. He is totally relaxed and simply himself — the person everyone remembers.

I am now so, so thankful I managed to do this one interview with him. How else could you ever convey to anyone these three dimensional aspects of Karel Liem? THIS is what film is meant for. Not for a recitation of the facts of his career accomplishments -- that’s what writing and resumes are for — but to capture these things that simply cannot be conveyed in print.

KAREL LIEM: A VOICE OF SCIENCE FILLED WITH PASSION AND HUMOR

In my years of graduate school at Harvard University (1978-84) we were treated to the opportunity of spending time with an unbelievable assortment of some of the world’s best biologists. There were the obvious superstars like E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould. Both of them taught the large introductory courses (Harvard wisely uses their celebrity professors as draw cards for the intro courses) for which I served as one of the army of teaching “fellows” (you DO NOT call them teaching “assistants” at Harvard, dammit — T.A.s are for lowly public universities! — I never could get over that, having gone to such places as an undergrad and being utterly lacking in any sort of Ivy League blue blood).

But in addition to these A-list showmen, there was an endless line-up of other amazing professors who would have been the highlight of any normal biology department. It’s sort of like the second string players on the New York Yankees in most years who would be starters if they were on other teams. Karel Liem was one of these characters.

He was the Henry Bryant Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard for over 35 years. I never did take his fish course, but my officemate and lifelong science soulmate Dr. Mark Patterson did, and ended up marrying one of his graduate students. More importantly for me, Liem’s lab was across the hall from our lab (the lab of my advisor, Ken Sebens) for my first three years of graduate school, so I got to know his four hot shot graduate students — all of whom were major organizers of the tribute last Friday (and are in the video below).

CHEAP CARS

In particular, Dana Ono and I became late night partners in crime, hanging out in the wee hours, bitching about the under-paid lifestyle of academics (what better topic to match notes on late at night in a biology lab) and speculating on our futures. Dana already had things figured out. He noticed that professors drove cheap cars. That wasn’t gonna work for him. Upon finishing his Ph.D. he headed across the river to the Harvard Business School, did a special program that preps science Ph.D.’s for the business world, then dove feet first into the burgeoning business of biotech.

Over the years we’ve kept in touch as he battled his way through one start-up venture after another. He always has plenty of war stories to share. But through the years, he also remained close friends with his advisor, Karel Liem. Which reminds me of one of the major milestones in my memory of Karel.

One of the most sustained and forceful nights of laughter in my life was when Dana turned 40. His wife organized a birthday dinner for him at an Asian restaurant in Boston where we had about thirty people off in a separate room with the tables arranged in a large rectangle. It quickly turned into “Storytime with Karel” as Dana and the others started cueing him to tell all the best and most outlandish stories of his science career. And that was what Karel was best known for.

THE ATLAS OF ANIMAL PENSISES

His stories were legendary. Some of them he used in his lectures in the intro bio class. Like the story about the time when he was a curator of vertebrates at a museum in Chicago and a woman came in with a “worm” she had found in a can of cat food. She was suing the makers of the cat food over it and needed to know what it was, so she took it to the invertebrate biologists. They said it wasn’t any sort of worm, and in fact a close examination of the tissue showed it to be a body part of a vertebrate, perhaps a penis. The label on the can said the only animal ingredient in the cat food was horse, so they sent her over to the vertebrate curator, Karel Liem.

As Liem told it, “I took one look at what she had and said, ‘Madam, that is not a horse penis.’ She said, ‘How do you know?’ To which I replied, ‘Because I’ve seen a horse penis — you would need a much larger can!’ She asked what it might then be. I said without hesitation, ‘I believe it is a sheep’s penis.’ Then I led her over to my desk, pulled down my ‘Atlas of Animal Penises,’ and sure enough, there it was — a sheep’s penis!”

He said he later testified at the court trial about the identity of the contaminant. And that was just one of countless stories Liem knew how to weave into his lectures to help lighten the material, and always with his bellowing laugh. He was the best, as evidenced by the scope of the tribute to him last Friday night (and by the way, it’s prompted me to wonder, exactly how many scientists end up with banquets in their honor AFTER they have departed — not a lot, I guarantee you).

KAREL LIEM TRIBUTE INTRODUCTORY VIDEO: This was the longer (10 minutes) video with which the event opened. In the middle is 6 minutes of excerpts from a “sit down” interview Phil Lobel managed to conduct with Karel in 2002 which was not professionally shot (it was just him with his camera) but at least it’s something. So his interview and mine are all that exists as far as we know. There should be more for great scientists like this.

VIDEO PRODUCTION IN THE NEW MILLENIUM

And on another note, if you’ve got the time and are just sitting here reading along, let me tell you the amazing details of the longer video I shot with Liem’s former graduate students as it reflects the crazy new world of communication technology. We had set up for the four guys to meet at George Lauder’s lab at Harvard on a Monday morning at noon. The night before, I spoke with Dana about how they were going to shoot the video themselves. One of them had a cheapo video camera, but they had no clue about lighting, blocking, sound, basically anything to do with video production. I finally said to Dana, “We gotta do something about this. Gimme a few minutes.”

It was 11 p.m. in Boston on a Sunday night. I quickly put an ad on Craigslist in Boston, looking for a cameraman. Within twenty minutes I got three responses, one of whom, Tim O’Connor of New England Studios, said he routinely films professors at Harvard and would be up until 2 a.m. I called him. Badda-bing, no worries. At noon the next day he was over there setting up the gear.

And then, for the real twenty-first century twist, one of the guys took his laptop, connected with me on Skype, clicked on the video camera, set it up behind the cameraman, and the next thing I knew, I was directing the ENTIRE shoot via Skype for over 2 hours. I could see the guys in front of the camera, I could see the actual shot set up on the flip out screen of the camera, and on the other side, I gave the guys a walking tour of my house during the break. It was amazing. I felt like I was right there with them.

Strange world we live in these days. And not the same without Karel Liem.

Bottom line: If you know a truly great professor, go get a camera and shoot some video of them just being themselves — being spontaneous. You’ll be thankful you did someday.

A POST-SCRIPT

If you read my book, you know it’s been a long 20 year journey into the world of filmmaking involving a lot of rejection, insults, and snubs. Some people ask me, “Was it worth it?” The answer is a resounding yes. All it takes is one night like last Friday where the filmmaking skills and resources I’ve accumulated are able to come to bear with a single effort that is able to bring the spirit of someone as wonderful as Karel Liem back to life for even a few mill-seconds in the hearts of those who knew him. That’s more than enough to know it has all been worthwhile.

 Yes, indeed — if you want a good lesson in climate science, then I’m sure you know that a “debate” in a bar in Hollywood hosted by a comedian is the place to get it, right? On the left, climate skeptic and jovial lunkhead, Phelim McAleer. On the right, inappropriately smart and sincere Simran Sethi. In the middle, the guy whose dick was once in a box.

Lexus was the driving force behind the event (why? dunno. I used to have a friend who worked for Camel cigarettes, hosting parties at bars in Hollywood with free booze and smokes just to promote the brand among the cool crowd). Lots of free booze. And the sort of crowd that free booze attracts in Hollywood (I lived there for 12 years, these people used to show up at my parties uninvited — they’re basically party lemmings, aimlessly wandering the clubs). Somehow I ended up jammed into the front row, wedged between the twenty something dude in the sport jacket with the loosened necktie and fedora, and the fat, balding Les Grossman look-alike with the siliconized super model towering over him.

“Welcome to the loudest debate in history,” were Andy’s opening words. The whole thing was utterly bizarre, though not really for Hollywood. Several hundred people, drunk, shouting, all still talking and hooting as he laid out the ground rules and the two experts were introduced. And even though many people think Hollywood is the land of Al Gore, that’s only a perception, not a reality. Half the crowd were loud global warming skeptics, coughing “Bullshit!” at poor Simran Sethi, a very dignified journalism professor from the University of Kansas, while they gave the “whoop, whoops” to Phelim McAleer, the filmmaker behind “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” who is in fact mostly wrong and in the end probably kinda evil as well (he certainly showed himself to be a complete putz at the Society for Environmental Journalists meeting last fall — I’m not a big Al Gore fan, but Mcleer’s potshots in the Q&A missed the mark and he’s lucky he didn’t get tazed, bro).

SKEPTICS STILL MAKE THE BETTER BEER DRINKERS

I have to be honest and say that sadly, the “debate” opened up with the same basic dynamics we’ve explored in my books and movies. The old “who would you rather have a beer with?” question from presidential elections, that we brought up in “Flock of Dodos” was clearly on display as Simran instantly projected the demeanor of a preachy school marm while Phelim was borderline Bluto from “Animal House.”

I’m sorry, but heartfelt sincerity counts for absolutely nothing with a crowd full of drunken Hollywood party kids. Simran clearly has a good heart, but it’s wasted in the land of the wasted.

She began with a lifeless and kind of ambling metaphor about the planet having a fever, while he started with a STORY (eh hem, need we say more?) of being a school boy growing up in Ireland and being warned about “global cooling,” then later “global warming,” and now, according to a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, he said it’s being called, “global weirding.” The last one was delivered as a punch line and drew a roar from the drunk and belligerent crowd — at least the ones near the front as it was unclear anyone in the back was hearing anything whatsoever.

The comedian/moderator (who really is a great guy and somebody at Lexus must have given a lifetime of sexual favors to turn him out for such an illogical event — I mean seriously, a global warming debate in Hollywood? you might as well give a quantum physics lecture at a kindergarden) had a stopwatch for each exchange. I think they got about a minute per round. There were five questions which were actually pretty well written, though I can’t remember any.

The skeptic definitely prevailed through the first third of the debate, but then Simran actually overcame her pleading, lecturing tone and scored a couple of nice zingers that for at least a nanosecond penetrated through the superficiality of it all. After he finished taunting her about the hypocrisy of environmentalists jet setting around the world, she came back with, “We all have to fly, including you, in order to be here tonight.” For which he had nothing. And then, as he tried to call environmentalism elitist and only for rich people, she replied, “Look, I’m from India, I GET the poor thing.” Which was very nice.

WHO IS MORE ANTI-PEOPLE?

After a while he settled into the same diatribe you can hear Michael Crichton spewing in the 2007 Intelligence Squared debate — that worrying about the climate is for rich people and comes at the expense of more urgent issues for poor people (as if these skeptic folks really care about the poor). It’s also the same note Marc Morano hit in my movie “Sizzle” as he said, “Modern environmentalism is the most anti-human agenda of the twenty first century.” And so this guy pounded the same note.

And while he did solidly win the battle for first impressions, he actually crossed the line a bit into a surprising moment of unlikeability as he kept calling her a hypocrite until it suddenly sounded fairly personal and insulting — enough that Andy commented on it and a few people booed.

The skeptic actually began losing points with the crowd as he lost his cool and made his accusations of “hypocrite” have too much of an ugly personal tone.

On the people thing, I just wish she would have turned it on him and said, “YOU are the anti-people person by advocating continued excess consumption at the expense of the developing nations who will pay the price for global warming.” But she didn’t.

The whole thing mostly just made you ask, “Why?,” and unfortunately, Samrin was the wrong choice for this venue. Had it been the Harvard Club in New York City she would have cleaned the floor with this lout. But it wasn’t. It was frickin’ Hollywood. I’ve been to 20 years of these celebrity/alcohol driven, hipster, issue-oriented events in Hollywood (btw, just to underscore the TOTAL hipness of it all, Ashton Kucher was there). If anyone decides to take part in one, please speak to me first. The people are rude. It’s a bar, they come to drink. There’s only one sort of speaker who can be effective in such a venue, and that’s a veteran stand-up comic who knows how to deal with hecklers and proceed with mostly one-liners. Which just reverts back to my advice a couple months ago about the idea of “debating” climate skeptics in public — leave it to the professional comedians like Bill Maher. Highly educated people are at a distinct handicap.

Overall, it was an utterly ridiculous event that at times seemed comparable to the Circus Circus scene in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” And also felt one step closer to Mike Judges’ visionary masterpiece, “Idiocracy.”

SUCH A NICE COUPLE: In the high point of the night, my friend and plastics-in-the-oceans activist Anna Cummins goes eye-to-belly button with 7 foot 1 inch former LA Lakers basketball player Vlade Divac.

So in the same way that the Henrietta Lacks book proves science is boring, so does the excellent HBO show “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” reveal the same thing for sports. The storytellers behind the show demonstrate the same skill for using HUMAN stories to broaden interest in a narrow subject. It’s one of my favorite shows on all of television (just after “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew”). Let’s take a look at what they do.

REAL SPORTS WITH BRYANT GUMBEL: The best sports show (that's not really about sports) on television

IT’S HBO

For starters, it’s HBO. If they can’t figure out how to communicate something to the masses, nobody can. (And by the way, guess who bought the rights to the Henrietta Lacks book? You got it, HBO — which means you can probably look forward to something as good as the book).

Each episode is generally made up of four or five roughly 10 minute segments, each a completely independent story. But the secret of the show is that after a while you begin to realize it has very little to do with sports. The segments are almost always great HUMAN stories which tend to focus on single individuals. Often they are classic stories of ordinary people achieving extraordinary success, as was the case a couple weeks ago with the segment they did about the Oakland A’s pitcher Dallas Braden who is the most average of guys, came from the working class town of Stockton, California, achieved very little of note in four years in the major leagues until out of nowhere he pulled off a near-miracle by retiring all 27 batters in their game against the best batting team in the league, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. And then, the icing on the story, he stood up for all the “ordinary” guys when he barked at one of the extraordinary players, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees, when he walked across “his” pitching mound.

Those are the types of stories they present. Or they tell tales of falling from greatness, as they have for so many top level athletes who fall victim to drugs and money. Almost all of the stories are great human dramas with sports simply as the backdrop. And it gets to the point where you don’t even care what sport the segments are about — you just know that if it’s going to be a story about badminton, it’s probably going to end up with you cheering for the minority kid who overcame poverty to break into a white people’s sport and set all the records. Or whatever.

In fact, in the last episode, they presented a classic segment that reached deep into your heart, and actually began with the first line revealing their entire formula as the narrator said, “We begin with a story of rugby. Of course, as you might have guessed, our story isn’t really about the game of rugby itself, but rather about one of it’s players …”

There you have it, their entire formula, spelled out for you. Not about the sport, not even about the team, but about the single individual — demonstrating the principle I keep repeating here on the Benshi, that the power of storytelling rests in the specifics.

And it’s as if the Henrietta Lacks book could have also begun by saying, “This is a story about cancer cells. Of course, as you might have guessed, our story isn’t really about cancer cells, but about a woman who died from cancer …”

And by the way, that rugby story ended up being about the ONLY openly gay professional athlete in the world, Gareth Thomas, who came out last fall. And to no surprise, the story was utterly heartwrenching as well as uplifting.

The same sorts of stories exist in the world of science. They just need more people like Rebecca Skloot to dig them up.

—————————————

A STRONG READING RECOMMENDATION ON THE CURRENT GULF SPILL TRAGEDY:

My buddy David Gessner, nature writer and literature professor at UNC, Wilmington, is on a one man driving/blogging journey going east to west in the Gulf.

And meanwhile, my former co-blogger, Jennifer Jacquet, is on a similar journey, going west to east from New Orleans and reporting on her blog.

BOTH ARE GREAT WRITERS.

Rebeccas Skloot has written an amazing book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” that communicates a big dose of science to a very broad audience (it’s been on the bestseller lists for a while now).  But the skillful way in which she tells the story of the most important cell cultures in history is a perfect demonstration of using the humanities to first arouse her audience before plunging into the dry details of the science behind the story.

It all starts with the simple principle of “arouse and fulfill,” that I cite frequently both here on The Benshi and in my book. I used to point to Stephen Jay Gould as the master of it, but now I think Rebecca Skloot is even more gifted in her ability to work this combination of elements that is essentially a communications bait and switch.

Look at her WONDERFUL book. It is without a doubt one of the best popular science books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. And yet, for nearly the ENTIRE first third of the book there is virtually no mention of science. It’s mostly the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman, stricken by disease, struggling to raise her children, dealing with racism, poverty, incest, abuse … a whole bunch of things that make no mention of science. The first third of the book is all based in the humanities. Just as Gould opened his monthly columns in Natural History by talking about baseball, Mickey Mouse or opera. It’s the hook, and it ain’t science.

As a result, the first 100 pages of Skloot’s book make for brisk and deeply emotional reading that locks you into the journey of this proud and courageous woman (and by the way, once again illustrating Nicholas Kristof’s point about the power of specifics — the book is not a story about all cancer victims — no, it’s the story of a single woman who provides the incredibly powerful through-line of the entire story) whom everybody adored but was eventually wiped out by cancer. By page 127 the author finally feels she’s done enough “arousing,” has firmly set the hook in her readers, and has finally built up enough momentum that she can afford to start tossing in some science. She does this for two chapters, diving into the details of the widespread use of HeLa cells around the world for biomedical research.

But then, almost as if she feels the attention span of her non-science readers beginning to flag, she jumps into a chapter about violence, telling about Henrietta’s son Joe who became a murderer (and we had learned earlier of the childhood abuse that might have caused this). So she gets you charged back up on the human side of things, and then, to delicately touch back into the science, she goes with the extraordinarily dramatic (for the science world) story of the “HeLa Bomb” in Chapter 20.

She clearly has a masterful touch. Storytelling is an art. There are some basic principles of narrative structure, but beyond that the storyteller has to have a feel for the audience and know how to mix these elements.

It’s time for there to be a more refined examination of “science storytelling.” The best place to start is with the most successful work, of which Skloots book is truly a great example, and not coincidentally continues to be on the bestseller lists.

So overall, I hate to bring it down to this level, but it’s the same story as our man “Scottie the Hottie” and his sixty second video that spent 40 seconds on arousal. This is the hard part for broad communication — figuring out how to arouse your audience. It’s the endless challenge. And with every new hunk of information added to our world, it becomes that much more difficult. And yet …

Science, presented well, even in this era of information overload, has the ability to be infinitely interesting and even compelling. But it doesn’t stand very well by itself. It is at it’s best when embedded in a broader, more humanized context. This is why Mark Slouka bemoans the decline of humanities curricula, and this is why Rebecca Skloot is such a successful author. You want to know how to communicate science to the broad audience? Read her book. It’s a true role model for science communication.

And lastly, just to double back and examine the reverse of everything I say here, I took a look at the Amazon Reader Reviews for her book. Almost everyone gives it five stars, which is heartwarming to see. But as I expected, you can find a few of the more literal minded types who say EXACTLY what you would expect them to say — basically, “Why’s there all this crap about the relatives of Henrietta Lacks and why so much of the author’s personal story?” These are the people who prefer a textbook to a novel, or will choose brussels sprouts over ice cream. Ho hum.

Comments on Skloot’s book:

TOO MUCH AUTHOR – 1

The author spends a rather substantial portion of the book describing her own efforts. It didn’t add to Henrietta’s story and leaving it out would have made for a better, more concise narrative.

TOO MUCH AUTHOR – 2

There is an iron-clad rule in journalism that reporters should never mix the process and difficulties of getting a story into the telling of it. There are many very obvious reasons for this. First among them is the reporter’s process detracts from the story. In fact the trouble that author has in running down the story is completely superfluous to the core story. About half of this book is a description of the ways and difficulties the author had in getting the story. It is a shame because it undermines a fascinating story and ruins the book. (“ruins” the book? sheesh)

TOO MUCH AUTHOR – 3

The focus of this book seemed off. Too much information about Mrs. Lacks’ descendants (whose claim to fame seems to be they were related to her), the author ( I don’t care that she’s white and agnostic and was born into middle-class suburbia) and not enough information on Mrs. Lacks’ life.

TOO MUCH SEX

It was as though the publisher kicked back the manuscript and said “more sex”. Awkward passages appear about incest in Henrietta’s family, then more stories about her relatives trysts that bear no value in the telling of Henrietta and her cells or of the science or scientists that studied them.