Disclosure: i did some consulting work for this film. Here is a review from the Rockefeller University/ Imagine science Festival showing this month.

Popularization of science (especially X-ray crystallography) is not an easy task.  The balancing act filmmakers make to keep interest with hardcore scientists (who hope to keep the conversation specific and technical), and a general audience (who want to connect emotionally to the process and narrative) was something these filmmakers struggled with and i will be very interested to the response of the general public. From the review:

Carole Rifkind says that science can be made more accessible by reinterpreting terminology and jargon that could alienate the public. For example, Shapiro and his team use x-ray crystallography to study proteins at atomic resolution, first engineering a form of the protein that could crystallize, and then using electromagnetic wave diffraction patterns to determine structure: for the sake of accessibility, the Rifkinds decided to deemphasize Fourier transforms and high-level synchrotron physics. However, at a recent screening at the Imagine Science Film Festival, members of the audience thought the method’s technical difficulty had been downplayed. Rifkind’s response? The popularization of science should “not seek to convey the science as much as [the process of] doing it.”

Being interested in science all my life, the jargon issue has always eluded me. For some the jargon makes the information actually easier to understand.  I know now that a sizeable portion of science can be described in a way that is not dumbed down, yet at the same time, made both simple and expansive. It’s an exercise that scientist’s make less and less as the demands of the lab pull them in deeper and deeper.  I hope this doc does a god job of helping reverse that trend, because scientists help themselves learning how to tell their own stories simply.

There is a sizeable negative stereotype about scientists that needs to be remedied and making movies like this more technical just does not seem wise.