At scientific meetings, I'm always torn between going to the talks with "important" science and the sessions that look, well, just plain fun. I'm not the only one driven to seek pleasure in the dark meeting rooms of convention centers: my paleontologist husband says the talk "Geology Goes Hollywood" was standing-room only at one Geological Society of America's annual meeting.

Ditching work to go to a matinee is such a deliciously sinful pleasure. After all, everybody loves a good story. So by the fourth day of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 1999 annual meeting, I couldn't resist going to "Portraying Science in the Media: Why the Ambivalence?", a session that promised clips from old science-fiction movies. As an ex-scientist, I'm always amused by the cinema's lack of vérité about science.

Hollywood did not disappoint. The old-movie vignettes included a scene in which Pierre Curie, while awaiting a new student named Marie, tells his assistant, "Women and science are incompatible!" and a scene about a scientist who keeps his dead girlfriend's head alive in a jar while he looks for a body for her. The more recent clips included one in which a regular character from the television soap opera General Hospital learns he has AIDS, and a scene from the movie Bio-Dome after Pauly Shore and his buddies have a huge kegger that trashed the Biosphere-2-like experiment.

Although there were plenty of laughs, the panel had some serious messages. Stories express the public's ambivalence and fear about science, but can also be vehicles for learning about scientific information.

"We're caught up in the narratives," said linguist Paula Treichler of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign. "So the fact that it's science, and it may be teaching us something, is very painless."

Some scientists in the audience complained that mass media's representations of scientists are inaccurate. Panelist Constance Penley of the University of California at Santa Barbara commented, "I think that what was behind every presentation here today is that there are these representations already there in popular culture. Can we heed them and respect them and see the ways in which we could work along with those popular narratives that are already there?"

I interpreted the panelists' message as, "Factual accuracy, while important, is not everything. If you want people to learn about science, tell them a story. People like stories. People can get involved in stories, and people will learn the facts that are important to the story line. Stories have their own power - use it."

I probably heard that because I'm in the entertainment business, too: I'm a science journalist. It's my job to make a discovery about gaudily colored, foul-tasting grasshoppers intriguing enough that a stockbroker will read it on the train to work and think, "Hey, that's neat." And if she thinks, "Hmmm, maybe this means bright-colored animals often taste bad," then she's learned something. However, if my story was weighed down with too many facts about the secret lives of grasshoppers, she'd probably quit in the middle and turn to the business section.

After all, humans are storytelling organisms. For centuries, people have used stories to entertain each other, and also to educate each other and to preserve knowledge. My interest in science was fostered by stories. Paul De Kruif's book Microbe Hunters convinced me that scientists were heroic adventurers who followed their intuition and eventually made great discoveries that benefited humanity. De Kruif's book was as compelling as any detective novel or adventure story.

Now, if I told you scientific specifics as I recall them from De Kruif, I might be wrong. Although the facts fascinated me, it was really the stories that grabbed me. The book powered my imagination - the way some aspect of science long ago captured the imagination of every working scientist I know. Stories tap into our psyches in a way that "The facts, ma'am, just the facts," never will. Stories engage us by presenting the very human act of discovery, not just the facts that are discovered. As my science-writing instructor Peter Radetsky said, "Stories are about people doing things."

However, scientists are trained to remove themselves from presentations of their work. Scholarly scientific papers are often written as though some offstage puppet master performed the experiments while the scientist just observed, recorded the action and then reported what happened. For scientists, the action is the facts, not the people. Putting the people back into an account of science makes scientists uncomfortable, because it counters their training. Indeed, they may label such narratives "unscientific."

If, as yet another scientist just told me in an interview, science is an intensely human endeavor, it must be done by people, not just mysterious machinery. People with children, mortgages, vices, pets, and passions - even though they also wear Coke-bottle-thick glasses, insist on commuting by bicycle, and study worms for a living.

Treichler, who showed the clips from General Hospital, said, "The power of narrative in television dramas, movies, sitcoms, and some sensationalistic media is being overlooked as a primary message-carrier to the general public." Pointing out that people can find television's entertainment programs useful for learning about science and medicine, she added, "This is a reality that the scientific and medical communities need to acknowledge and work with, not deplore."

At least some members of the audience cautiously agreed. Biologist Sandya Narayanswami of the University of California at Irvine, distressed by the mad scientists in the film clips, suggested that a science soap opera might demonstrate that, "From the inside as a scientist, we have normal lives."

If not a soap, how about a prime-time television show? Publish or Perish could star Helen Hunt as Dr. Joan Clarkson, a new assistant professor. The program would show the pressures she feels to publish papers and get grants while simultaneously juggling her new responsibilities of running a research lab, teaching, advising students, and attending endless committee meetings.

Her first NIH grant proposal would get rejected just as a key experiment failed. Her boyfriend would feel neglected, since he expected the late nights in the lab would stop once she got a real job. She confides her concerns to Ramón Martínez (played by Jimmy Smits), a colleague in the next office whose marriage is experiencing similar strains. But she fears getting involved with someone in her department and instead renews her relationship with an old boyfriend who is now an assistant professor at a university 2,500 miles away.

Then her research is highlighted in the local paper. Her colleagues barely notice, but the university's vice president for research sends a congratulatory email. However, the article mentioned that she uses salamanders in her work on limb regeneration, and animal rights activists burst into her classroom and drench her with blood.

In the spring, Joan's other grant proposal gets funded, her new experiments work, she's invited to a Gordon Conference, and she gets a teaching award from her department.

Week after week, some science would also get done on the program. Will Dr. Clarkson get tenure? Tune in next week.