Turn on your television any evening at 6:30 and watch the news anchors of the big networks talk about science. The stories are usually about how researchers’ warnings are being ignored by politicians, or how budgets are being cut, or how teachers are being taken to court by religious fundamentalists. Pretty depressing. But it gets better if you keep watching. In prime time, scientists are this season’s biggest heroes.

About 6.2 million people a night watch real scientists struggle on the “CBS Evening News,” and the median age of this audience is 60. But 22 million people watch scientists win every week on CBS’s “Crime Scene Investigation,” and the show’s biggest fans are children and college students. They ogle when a stylish blonde picks up a piece of shrapnel with tweezers. They lean forward when gas chromatography identifies the chemicals used to make the bomb. They tingle when flat-panel computer screens show a database analysis that reveals the address that sold the chemicals. They cheer when the cops use the research results to catch the bad guys. And when they go to school the next day, a lot of them have questions.

We got the idea for a blog about science on television when we noticed that the big theme at this year’s meeting of the National Science Teachers Association was forensics. The exhibit hall was full of booths selling science lessons packaged into crime scenes. It isn’t hard to see the connection. A recent article in Popular Science estimated that the big four networks are running 15 successful prime-time dramas this season in which medicine, science, or technology play a defining role. During the entire decade of the 1990s, there were only ten science-based dramas.

Dr. Harold Varmus:

“We all need to become cheerleaders for science.”

The weekly triumphs of dashing young TV scientists are an important and hopeful development, says Dr. Harold Varmus, who won a Nobel for genetics, ran the National Institutes of Health during the Clinton Administration, and is now CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. During an April 30 appearance at Cornell University, Varmus recited a long list of political and cultural challenges facing science in the U.S., including his personal top-ten list of places where Creationism has run amok. But he ended by citing an upsurge in high-quality entertainment that celebrates science, including the opera Dr. Atomic and the play Copenhagen. “When things get serious, people turn to science for answers,” he said. “And if things are going to happen the way we want them to, we all need to become cheerleaders for science.”

I don’t know if a Nobel Prize winner would ever watch “CSI,” but if this one did, I bet he’d enjoy it. This blog is about Hollywood’s cheerleaders for science and the effects they are having in classrooms.