Producers of NOVA’s 'When Machines Prescribe' win 2025 AAAS Kavli Gold Award
The filmmakers behind When Machines Prescribe — which premiered on the PBS science series NOVA, produced by GBH — are recipients of the 2025 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award in the Video Spot News/Feature Reporting category.
The AAAS announced today that the filmmakers behind When Machines Prescribe — which premiered on the PBS science series NOVA, produced by GBH — are recipients of the 2025 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award in the Video Spot News/Feature Reporting category.
Llewellyn M. Smith, Kelly Thomson, Robert Kirwan, and Chris Schmidt won for their work on the documentary short which investigates medical algorithms in which the patient’s race drives clinical decision-making – and how their continued use has harmed the health of Black patients.
The film follows the story of Gregory Mumford, a Black man on a kidney transplant waitlist. As he and his family wrestle with the implications of his diagnosis, the story investigates an algorithm used to measure kidney health, developed in 1999, that makes broad assumptions about biological differences across races that are not well-supported by scientific evidence. The result of these “corrections” is the life-threatening demotion of Black patients like Gregory down the kidney transplant list. The kidney disease case prompts researchers to examine other clinical algorithms that correct for race with no scientific basis – used to guide treatment decisions for everything from hypertension to osteoporosis to childbirth. Their findings prompt the removal of racially-motivated corrective factors from kidney function clinical algorithms nationwide — resulting in more than 14,000 Black patients, including Gregory, moving up the list and being eligible for life-saving transplants sooner.
The story “packs an impressive amount of material into a small package,” said judge Stephen Ornes, a freelance science journalist. “It's economical and engaging in its storytelling, and it weaves together patient narratives, expert voices, and rigorous evidence to take viewers through an urgent and pressing narrative that deftly unpacks tricky scientific ideas, the limitations of measurements, and biases built into algorithms.”
Producer and Correspondent Llewellyn M. Smith said making the film “required multiple collaborators: the brilliant NOVA team; our own production ‘dream team’; Gregory and Pipier Mumford, who showed us the human consequences of flawed, race-driven medical science; and the dedicated medical professionals who walked us carefully again and again through complex medicine and research history, to make sure we got it right.”
The award will be presented at a ceremony in February 2026 in conjunction with the AAAS Annual Meeting in Phoenix.
When Machines Prescribe is a NOVA production by BlueSpark Collaborative LLC for GBH. Produced by Llewellyn M. Smith and Kelly Thomson. Edited by Robert Kirwan. Executive Producers: Julia Cort and Chris Schmidt.
Major funding for When Machines Prescribe is provided by the Doris Duke Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and The California Endowment. Additional funding is provided by the George D. Smith Fund, Inc., the PDB Foundation, the Wilemal Fund, and the NOVA Science Trust with support from Margaret and Will Hearst and the Hoveida Family Foundation. Original funding for this program and NOVA is provided by the Carlisle Companies, the NOVA Science Trust, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for NOVA is provided by Viking Cruises.