Beautiful minds: This celebration of scientists on screen is long overdue

Boffins, lab technicians and professors of pure maths will walk a little taller today after hearing the news that Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne have both been nominated for Best Actor at the Golden Globe awards, for playing scientists.

Not just chaps with white coats but Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking, men of rarefied intellect and visionary power, aeons beyond the capacity of ordinary mortals.

The rise of the super-scientist as film hero is a welcome development after years of adverse publicity: for every halfway-stable inventor-genius on celluloid (Barnes Wallis in The Dam Busters) there have been 50 deranged dabblers in human misery (The Man with X-Ray Eyes, The Man with Two Brains, Body Parts, The Fly, Re-Animator). Think of a scientist on screen and it’s less likely to be Marie Curie (played by Greer Garson in 1943) than Dr Frankenstein harnessing lightning bolts to create a monster or Dr Jekyll knocking back a flask of toxic steam to change into a killer.

The Imitation Game (Turing) and The Theory of Everything (Hawking) are “biopics”, of course, as are A Beautiful Mind (about the mathematics genius John Nash) and Jobs (about the creator of Apple). The fact that they trace the careers of real people who made real discoveries should allow us to hope that films might be content to dramatise scientific breakthroughs for their own sake.

It’s a faint hope. The subjects of these films were attractive to studios because they were damaged in some way: Turing was hounded to death because he was homosexual; Hawking contracted motor neurone disease; Nash had schizophrenia and Steve Jobs became a notoriously brutal tyrant. In all cases, the damage, not the dazzling brain, was the main event. If we’re looking for a film that really celebrates pure scientific genius, it’s back to the story board.