Rand Turns 75: A Look Through the Decades at World-Changing Research

https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2023/05/rand-turns-75-a-look-through-the-decades.html

by overvale • 3 years ago

22 8 3 years ago

They skipped consulting on the creation of Star Trek. I would imagine that was as impactful as many of their other major projects.

overvale4• 3 years ago

Wow. Had no idea. Where did you learn that?

consumer4514• 3 years ago

I don’t remember where exactly I read that originally, but I just now learned it was a RAND employee acting privately.

After I joined RAND in 2013, I was pleased and surprised to learn that I now shared another connection with “Star Trek,” because a RAND employee had been involved with the show years before the first episode aired on Sept. 8, 1966.
RAND researcher Harvey Lynn had served as a consultant to series creator Gene Roddenberry, brainstorming technical issues and contributing insights that helped shape such “Star Trek” signatures as the Enterprise's computer (he suggested that it talk, in a woman's voice), the sickbay (he suggested outfitting the beds with “electrical pickups” that monitor the body) and the transporter used for teleportation, series star William Shatner later recalled.
“Gene wanted authenticity and Harvey helped deliver it,” Shatner wrote in “I'm Working on That,” a 2002 book about the link between “Star Trek” scientific fact and fiction. An Air Force colonel who knew Lynn to be a “creative scientific thinker” had connected the series creator with the researcher, who consulted for “Star Trek” as a “private citizen, not as part of a RAND project,” a fact noted in the FAQ about RAND.
https://www.rand.org/blog/2016/08/star-trek-at-50-how-the-tv...

Rand Turns 75: A Look Through the Decades at World-Changing Research

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