TV REVIEW : Alchemist Brew Mixes Up ‘Nobel Legacy’

Adrian Malone’s three-part series on PBS, “The Nobel Legacy,” is absolutely not the place to go for a coherent overview of science’s value.

It’s just terrific, though, if you want a mix of gorgeous imagery, some basic explanations of chemistry, biology and physics from three recent Nobel Prize winners, and some controversy.

The imagery can sometimes be so awesome that it overwhelms the ideas. Dr. J. Michael Bishop’s visit to a Florentine museum of Renaissance sculpture offers a visual montage considering the human form and the prospects of curing genetic diseases. But an overwrought filming of an outdoor staging of “Hamlet” to illustrate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a good idea gone nutty.

This tour of the work of such Nobel-winning scientific pioneers as James Watson and Francis Crick (discoverers of the DNA double-helix), physics avant-gardists Werner Heisenberg and Nils Bohr, and chemistry’s Einstein, Robert Woodward, can be an unconventional, layered view of how scientists work. Woodward’s legacy, for instance, is summed up not with talking heads and gee-whiz graphics, but with a filmed dinner party of the late Woodward’s friends and associates debating his legacy. It shows how human scientists are.

But don’t tell that to poet Anne Carson, hands down the single most irritating person we’ve seen on TV this year. Perhaps Malone thought it would be enlightening to include the artist’s take on science, but, with Carson, Malone is stuck with a person filled with undisguised hatred of science, the urge for reason and Western philosophy itself.

Looking at medicine, all Carson can see is machines invading the body. Looking at physics, all she sees are atomic bombs exploding. Looking at chemistry, all she sees is pollution. Carson reinforces the false notion that art is somehow opposed to science, and even worse, that science is our enemy. Since she hardly has equal time here and seems to walk out of another program, her presence is just strange--a real pox on what could have been an irreverently quirky and honest appraisal of science’s geniuses.

* “The Nobel Legacy” airs at 10 tonight and continues May 11 and May 18 on KCET-TV Channel 28.