Professor Robert Park of the University of Maryland has launched an attack on the popular image of scientists as shown by movies and television. Scientists, he says, are generally portrayed as forgetful, short-sighted and even crazy.
The professor is right, of course. Though there have been a few serious attempts to treat scientists with respect, the model for most movie scientists remains the screen version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Brilliant man, of course, but so obsessed with making a monstrous Boris Karloff from spare body parts that he seems quite unconcerned by what his awful creation is likely to get up to.
Frankenstein had even madder movie contemporaries. There was Dr. Moreau, whose speciality was genetics: his laboratory was an island of creatures that were half animal and half human. Or how about Dr. Alexander Thorkel as a role model? In Dr. Cyclops he might be the world’s greatest biologist, but his fondness for shrinking people to the size of chickens does not suggest a candidate for the Nobel Prize. [...]
(Peter May. Knockout First Certificate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
No trecho – Though there have been a few serious attempts to treat scientists with respect – (2.º parágrafo), a palavra que substitui corretamente though é
