One day in late 2004, television art director Karen Steward visited the penthouse floor of a glass office building in Los Angeles to sit down with UCLA epidemiologist Sally Blower and the half dozen members of Blower’s Disease Modeling Group and talk about television. Steward was enlisting Blower’s scientific expertise for the third episode of the CBS drama NUMB3RS, in which an FBI agent’s brother uses mathematical models to determine the origin of a mysterious outbreak of Spanish flu.

Presenting the multicolored script, “I asked her to show me graphics on her computer screen that show how to track a disease from one place to another. She just laughed at me,” Steward recalls.

That’s because the crux of tracking disease lies in relatively simple equations, which Blower drew out and explained for Steward on a large white board.

Steward was “blown away” by Blower’s thoroughness and enthusiasm. But the equations—which include parameters such as how long the infection lasts in one person and how many susceptible people that person contacts—were apparently too simple for Hollywood.

“She wanted pretty math,” Blower recalls. “So we ended up writing down equations for them that really didn’t have anything to do with what they were saying.”

For the last two decades, Blower has applied her predictive models to a diverse array of disease scenarios, including a recent, controversial paper that suggested a vaginal microbicide against HIV could surprisingly benefit men more than women. That an increasing number of public health experts are starting to welcome the predictions of mathematical models “has been very satisfying,” Blower says. But not all scientists side with Blower’s models, arguing that reality (and not just TV) is significantly more complex than what she presents in her equations.

…read the rest of my latest article from The Scientist