Plans are under way for two ambitious science festivals on the East Coast, in New York City and Cambridge, Mass.

Large players are involved in what will be the first citywide festival for each city.

The New York International Science Festival, supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will take place in 2008 at Columbia University and other possible venues such as Lincoln Center.

The Cambridge Science Festival, set for April 21-19, involves a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University; the MIT Museum; the Museum of Science, Boston; WGBH, and the Cambridge City Council.

“We’re slightly self-congratulatory that we’ve got in first,” the director of the MIT Museum and a professor in the science, technology and society program, John Durant said. “Of course, we wish them well.” He added that each festival would benefit from the other.

“Anything that puts science in the limelight is a good thing,” the director of McGill University’s Office of Science and Society, Joe Schwarcz, said.

According to the Columbia Magazine, “a massive science-for-the-public gathering” in New York is being developed by the Science Festival Foundation — a nonprofit company founded by a Columbia University physics professor, Brian Greene, and his wife, a broadcast journalist, Tracy Day. The Science Festival office and Mr. Greene could not be reached by press time.

Science festivals have been popular in England, the director of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, Simon Gage, said. “There’s every sign is that they’re going to take off in the states.”

However, science “still has a stigma,” Mr. Gage said.”It’s not automatically associated with entertainment and enjoyment, so there’s a bit of an uphill battle.”

Mr. Durant said Cambridge is a science city, but science is “mostly invisible” if one doesn’t work in that industry. He said the thinking was, “Why don’t we lift the lid and celebrate what we’re world-famous for?”

“Cambridge is perfectly positioned, I think, to hold a city-wide science festival,” the co-director of the Science & the Arts series at the CUNY Graduate Center, Adrienne Klein, said. “New York City is different in innumerable ways, but I think Brian Greene’s planned festival will also be terrific.”

She added: “Very important science is done in New York,” but it is often “below the radar.” It is too often “unnoticed because the city has higher profile dominance in finance and the arts, among other things,” she said.

“The secret to a festival,” Mr. Durant said, is to have “a large number of interesting things going across the city.”The Cambridge festival plans to turn Massachusetts Avenue into the world’s biggest model of the Human Genome. There will also be a science carnival, and a new science play about evolution.

There are other science festivals in America, including an ongoing festival in Pittsburgh. In 1999, there was a citywide festival in Atlanta celebrating the 100th anniversary meeting of the American Physical Society’s. The CUNY Graduate Center is hosting a mini-festival this November coinciding with a meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts.