Shock, horror, BBC News in Star Trek ignorance probe

I generally ignore people who moan about how the quality of BBC News reporting is going downhill, but now they've reached a new low. They quote actor Robert Picardo on how Star Trek inspired scientists, naming him as the ship's doctor in the original series - there's even a picture of Dr McCoy... the character who unfortunately was played by DeForrest Kelley, who died in 1999. Ricardo was in the much later (and lesser) Voyager series.

You can listen to Picardo's words of wisdom by clicking through here (the BBC corrected their text after I tweeted about it, but you can still see the original text opposite), or even better you can take a look at my book Ten Billion Tomorrows on the relationship between science and science fiction which explores just how various works of science fiction - with Star Trek one of the big hitters - has influenced scientists, just as much as SF is, of course, influenced by scientific discoveries.

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