For several years, Oxford art historian Martin Kemp has reflected on the links between art and science in his regular “culture” column in Nature, a top science journal. Recently he looked back over 15 years of proliferation of artists in scientific laboratories. He described the promise to such ventures, with no apparent perils.
For one thing, artists in the lab might be able to alter science by infusing new ways of thinking, says Kemp, an expert on Leonard da Vinci and the history of science and art. The “artist-in-residence” may also show scientists how to better communicate their ideas to the public. As a third element, Kemp says that sometimes artists simply introduce scientists to a new notion of “process,” since much art is not goal oriented.Whatever the case, the art-science connection has tended so far to produce an asymmetry, he explains. Artists who have stints in laboratories often do produce interesting work, and their careers usually advance afterward (thanks to the prestige of science). However, scientists rarely discovery anything new based on art, though they enjoy playing the artist for a time. “Little, if any, kudos is to be gained by the scientist in having a [science-art] project on his or her CV,” Kemp says.
In fact, the typically arrangement in “science-art schemes” involves an established and financially secure older male scientist with a laboratory playing host to young female artists seeking a career break. So the incentives are quite different, he says. Even so, ever since the debate began in the 1950s over the unhappy separation of science and the humanities—the "two cultures"—these schemes have been important to bridge the gap and win public trust. After all, Kemp says, “Stories in the press reinforce the perceived weirdness of artists and scientists in the public mind.” He recommends a united front.
In his column last week, “Artists in the lab,” Kemp focused on two of the largest arist-in-the-lab funding programs: Britain’s Sciart grants and Australia’s SymbioticA research center. They represent the peak of a 15-year trend in which, he says, “The notion of artists and scientists collaborating is no longer a surprise, and is a well recognized strategy in the art world.”
The Kemp reflections bring to mind the many areas of science where art has played a role. One of the most interesting has been protein science (which is about molecules, not eating habits). Protein science blossomed since mid-century soon after the discovery of DNA and breakthroughs in understanding protein as complex macromolecules. Based on the DNA code—another kind of art icon—proteins all the functions of life. However, to understand a protein means to decipher its complex and elegantly “folded” nature. This has become the wild frontier of molecular biology.
Proteins are long strings of chemicals (amino acids) that fold in an almost unlimited number of ways, although a number of major patterns do show up. Proteins function by how they are folded: the folding exposes all the chemical charges that run all the machinery of biology. The folding is the target of most medicine, since an intervening chemical (namely, a medicine) must attach to a specific part of the protein to shut down something that causes an illness. Unfortunately, proteins are sub-microscopic, and that is why any help that scientist can gain in visualizing, if not exactly “seeing,” how a proteins fold, is beneficial.
One of the first artists to come to their aid was Irving Geis, who trained in both engineering and fine arts. In 1961, he painted the first image of a simple folded protein (myoglobin in blood) for Scientific American. After that, Geis’s dramatic renderings of the variously folded ball-and stick protein chains—with a chiaroscuro effect worthy of Caravaggio—gave rise to “protein art,” some for textbooks and some for galleries.
Today protein art continues to expand in elaborate computer modeling art-graphic programs as well as in creative paintings and fabric designs. The folded protein has taken a place alongside the other scientific image that has influenced art, the “fractal” (which led to spiral designs in fashion and poster art).
The story of Geis and protein art proves Kemp’s point that artists do help scientists communicate with the public and each other. But does protein art, for example, change scientific thinking or lead to discoveries? One recent event suggests that, maybe so. Biologists have been trying to decipher the folds of a protein in the HIV virus. If they understood how the atoms and bonds fold exactly, they could insert a chemical to neutralize the virus. So they put what little they knew of the puzzling HIV protein on the Internet and challenged “gamers”—a kind of subfield of art—to decipher a logical folding pattern.
In three weeks, by their collective probing, the gamers came up with a very likely solution to how it folded. They used an online game called Foldit, a kind of origami spin-off. “Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for . . . structure determination,” the scientists reported in the current Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. “The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs.”
This kind of contribution by “art” to the actual scientific progress of a scientific problem is not common, but there’s a reason that it can still happen. As the HIV scientists said, “People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at.”
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