It's July, 1997. A little rover sits on the surface of Mars. In family rooms across the country, children play with a toy version of the same rover. By playing with this realistic-looking model, they become fascinated with the complex mission being carried out far away. Terrifying numbers of hits bombard the web pages showing the science the real rover is doing and more people are emotionally involved in the space program than at any time since Apollo. This corporate effort to get scientifically accurate products out for the landing was a huge win for science education, right? Or did it, as some critics claimed at the time, "trivialize the space program"?

Much has been written about how uninterested kids are in science. Many trees have also died for publications covering how some of this is caused by the increasing specialization and "priesthood" mentality in science. My experience, however, as one of the principals in putting together the merchandising of the Mars Rover (and recipient of the praise and flak that followed) is that it is simpler than that: people do not get out of their own industries very often, and when they do it usually is perceived as a hobby and distraction to their "serious career."

The risk/reward structure for entertainment professionals and scientists is amazingly similar. On the entertainment side, the vast majority of producers have their own small core group of two to twenty people they work with on a project-to-project basis, adding collaborators as the project in question demands. There is a cult of the individual, and perceived power and actual power after a while track each other as long as some decent amount of innovative and revenue-positive work occurs along the way. Precise wording of credits is vital, and a long list of credits is critical for getting big gigs, which leads to more (and more impressive) credits and projects.

Now replace "credits" with "papers" and--voila! The entertainment industry becomes academic science.

Let's say you're a producer who has pulled together a project about a scientist who happens not to be a nerd (who might even, for instance, be female and have a social life and a knack for looking good in trendy clothing). Said producer goes and pitches this new genre to a network, and what is the answer likely to be? "Can't the lead character be a lawyer? We have demographics for that so we can sell it to advertisers, but who will be interested in a woman scientist?"

Let's suppose the producer now decides not to give up but to find a female scientist to consult with to deepen the character a bit. What does he do? More than likely, he asks his friends, who might have a friend who is a doctor who knows a high school science teacher who will then speculate on how academic science is done. The alternative--to call a large institution without an introduction--is fairly intimidating since there are few entry points except perhaps for media offices, which are usually set up for journalists researching focused stories rather than for creatives with unfunded story concepts fishing for inspiration. Some institutions will explicitly not provide support to anyone who does not have a full team, script, and funding in place.

Suppose we have the opposite situation: an engineer writes a sitcom about scientists called "Bay State Road Bunsen Burners." (See, you just had a stereotypical visceral response to that, didn't you?) How will he try to sell it? He will talk to the guy down the hall who worked with someone who did a documentary once, and will get the name of a production company that probably knows as much about sitcoms as a biologist does about cosmology.

How do you go from a space mission flown behind heavily guarded doors to kids sitting on their floors in family rooms playing along with the mission control guys? How do you get teenage girls to talk about how they want to dress like Emily, the cool young female scientist in "Bay State Road Bunsen Burners"?

Two years ago, after working at "guerrilla science education" for a while inside conventional institutions, I decided I had to form a startup company to fully develop a market for entertainment projects which will carry science themes to those who would not naturally watch a documentary or maybe not even science fiction.

This company, Takeoff Technologies LLC, neither an entertainment company nor a technology consultant but something of a lumpy puree of the two, finds scientists and engineers to advise entertainment projects and assists technologists who want to find a way to get an entertainment or toy idea into production. Given the nature of both sides, the company has had to work its way up via word of mouth and strategic partnerships with those already solving pieces of this puzzle. Some things we've learned:

• The creative process isn't very different for a filmmaker or toy designer than it is for a scientist, particularly in the need to visualize solutions. Once both sides figure that out and build some person- to-person trust, interesting things tend to happen. It helps a lot, but isn't essential, for them to meet in person. It is, however, essential for them to be able to interchange photos and sketches.
• The earlier in a project and less focused the collaboration is at the beginning, the more each of the parties get out of it. Often a scientist or engineer can suggest something the writer would never have thought about on his own, before the writer becomes invested in an alternative storyline.
• The structure a technically trained person brings to looking at a story problem can either be viewed with awe by a writer/producer or can drive them crazy. Personal chemistry becomes terribly important in these collaborations.

The company is also moving forward assisting aerospace entrepreneurs who are building novel spacecraft and launch vehicles to try to use entertainment-industry joint projects to help finance their privately funded flights to space.

All this is not to say there is no energy in market already--there certainly is, from the successful plays about Richard Feynman, to the hit movie A Beautiful Mind to many excellent documentaries and educational toys that have broken into the mass market. But the fact that one can pretty easily name the successes mean there need to be a lot more to fully develop the potential to educate millions of kids and adults while they think they are being entertained.

There's a saying in biology that "life thrives at interfaces"--between air and water, land and sea--and maybe the biologists are on to something. But they have to be sure to tell a toy designer or filmmaker all about it!

Would you like to forward a comment about this column to the author? You can email her at whatmatters@mit.edu.

Joan Horvath '81 is the CEO and President of Takeoff Technologies LLC. Takeoff is designed to be a bridge between the entertainment community and the science and technology community. Takeoff works with technology companies looking to find markets for their technologies in the entertainment and toy industries and puts together collaborations to create innovative products and services. Coming across the bridge in the opposite direction, Takeoff assists with the "content" side of entertainment, finding interesting stories about scientists and engineers and putting them together with producers, sponsors and so on, as well as providing technical accuracy consulting for projects.