This week’s issue of Nature includes a special Outlook supplement, Lenses on Biology. The 5 lenses are essays adapted from chapters in a new, interactive undergraduate textbook, Principles of Biology, published by Nature Education. The essays focus on what we know about cancer, stem cells, synthetic biology, ocean health and climate change.
To tie in with this special, we asked five biological scientists at different levels of their careers – from high school student to post doc – to tell their personal stories about why they decided to study one of the five featured subjects. Enjoy this closer look at what motivates scientists!
Our fourth post is by undergraduate student Katy, she discusses her love for art and biology and how subjects like synthetic biology enable her to look at the world in new and exciting ways.
Katy is a senior in Biological Sciences studying at North Carolina State University. She is often seen with a sketchbook in hand and loves sharing her passion for science though her art. Currently living in Raleigh, NC, she frequently adopts little critters as temporary pets. Right now she’s taking care of a millipede lovingly named Maximus. You can follow Katy’s adventures on twitter @KatyAnnC or on her blog, Katy’s Notebook.
When I was first asked to write about why I study science, my initial reaction was, “Well, it’s so interesting!” While as a general topic this holds true, anyone who has had to memorize the structures of the roughly 20 amino acids, analyze pages of H1- NMR results for a grade, or time the descent of balls rolling down an incline plane for the 15th time can tell you, devotion to science isn’t always interesting. In fact, it can sometimes be downright mind-numbing.
If science is not always interesting, and the nitty gritty tasks involved in doing science can be so monotonous, why study science at all? In my haste to answer the initial question, I’d left out the most important part. Science isn’t just about facts and collections of data; it is a way of looking at the world. It is about constantly asking questions, wondering, observing, and improving our understanding of the world in which we live. We use the data, often collected by those monotonous and uninteresting methods, to challenge ourselves and our perceptions of the world.
This constant challenging and wondering is why, despite several bumps along the way, I am drawn to science, and more specifically, biological sciences. My continued fascination with life and many of its forms can be partially attributed to my high school biology teacher and her infectious enthusiasm for how living creatures work and why they do what they do. I remember my first frog dissection — the moment it “clicked” for me that concepts we’d been learning were applicable to a world outside our textbook.
The realization that science was applicable to the real world sparked a curiosity that would later ignite a passion for science that persists today. Thankfully my parents were patient with me as they endured many home experiments involving anything from model rocket engines and pond scum to the family microwave (which has never been the same since I used it for a project many years ago).
However, until a few years ago, I felt my journey into science was lacking something. Only when I discovered science art and scientific illustration did things fall more into place for me. Despite a commonly held misconception that science and art are incompatible with each other, I found, like many others, how much they can complement each other. When paired together, they can inspire in ways that neither can by themselves.
The field of synthetic biology, which combines science and engineering to come up with new biological systems not found in nature, has many parallels with the relationship that I discovered between science and art. By looking at living systems in new and different ways, synthetic biologists find new ways of seeing the world. Using art to communicate science can do the same. In order to create a cohesive image, the subject material must be looked at from different perspectives. Often these different perspectives can lead to increased knowledge of the subject material, both on the part of the artist and the viewer.
I got to experience this firsthand while illustrating a sea urchin shell for a course two summers ago. This kind of shell, also called a “test”, exhibits clear radial symmetry, but only upon closer inspection (I had to use a dissecting microscope) can bands of tiny pores be seen in the shell. These pores allow the tube feet of the sea urchin to protrude through the hard shell. After I had taken a closer look at the test, I decided to focus part of my illustration on these pores and the repeating, fractal-like patterns I found.
Sea Urchin
By taking the time to look more closely at my specimens while I draw or paint them, and being open to viewing them in different contexts, I learn much more about my subject material than if I always approach my art in the same manner. Likewise, synthetic biology strives to do this through novel methods of approaching science and the development of new technologies.
Despite the inevitable times of deflation and feeling lost among tables of indiscernible data, science always draws me back. With all the questions and new things to discover, the real question is “How can I not study science?”
Ornithoptera alexandrae butterfly.
This interesting blog touches the question about how art and science interact, and if art is an integrated part of scientific work, or should be banned from science. This discussion leads us back to discussions of the ancient Greek philosophers and their precursors. The fundamental question was: What is reality? Can we understand the world around us with the help of our senses, or is the world around us a product of our mental concepts? The answers to these questions never were straightforward, and have been heavily discussed during the last 2000 years. During the different periods of history, sometimes it was en vogue to believe that reality is defined by our senses (materialism) other times people preferred to believe that reality is mental (idealism).
The concept of idealism was profoundly formulated for the first time by Plato (428/7 – 348/7 BC). Later it was enlivened by different Neo-Platonic movements. E.g. Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 –1519), a follower of Neo-Platonism, did not make a clear distinction between art and science. If the reality of the world basically is a mental product, all mental products including art, play an as equally important role.
Idealistic scientific thinking fell out of favor by the end of the nineteenth century. The main paradigm was now materialism. Idealistic thinking was highly criticized as unscientific. The external world and its observation by experiments became the main subject of science. Reflection about how our brain is structuring the world, and its meaning for scientific discovery were excluded from scientific methodology. Materialistic, scientific approach survived as a leading paradigm until today. Such materialistic orientated science banned art and artistic thinking from science. Art was viewed as a separate area, which could not give valuable contributions to scientific discovery.
However, a number of twentieth century scientists are known to have concerned themselves with Neo-Platonic, artistic thinking, such as earlier described in e.g. Goethes (1749 – 1832) theory of color, a theory focused on the mental reception of color. Among these modern scientists are the logician and mathematician Kurt Goedel (1906 – 1978), the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976) the mathematical physicist and pioneer of chaos theory Mitchell Feigenbaum (born 1944), to mention a few. Feigenbaum has even said, “Goethe was right about color”! All the above-mentioned use mathematics as their scientific tool. Only mathematics and mathematical logic survived as a respectable science as the paradigm changed to materialism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Mathematics is a product of our brain and thus conceptually idealistic. On first sight a modern eye will often judge idealistic concepts as quite fantastic, naive, strange and far away from all reality. A modern scientist would use exactly these descriptions hearing what Plato claims in his Timaeus; the world is built out of triangles. However, this becomes less suspicious, if one stops to focus on the triangles and starts to reflect over the basic idea behind this concept. In modern theoretical physics we can find such thinking. In quantum theory, as an example, a mathematical model is used to describe the material world of atoms. The Schrödinger equation plays a central role in this theory. The sine function stands central in the solution of this equation. The sine is a function of an angle in the right triangle. So even with his triangles Plato might not have been so wrong and naive as it initially may look.
Neo-Platonic thinking in science again became acceptable during the last decades. E.g. Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964, an American mathematician) reintroduced the concept self-organization in 1965 in the second edition of his “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” During the years following this publication, the concept of self-organization became popular among scientist working in the field of complex systems. The work of Wiener was influential for the development and understanding of scientific concepts about complex systems. These holistic, systems theory based concepts play an important role in modern scientific movements such as systems biology and synthetic biology.
Conceptual thinking plays an important role in the contemporary design and art movements. A new intersection between science and art is taking place, since scientific thinking is re-opened for such idealistic concepts. In the following years it will be interesting to see how design and art will influence the development of the field of synthetic biology and vice versa.
Design in this modern sense is an approach from the general to the detail. Apple is one of the few companies, who are using this design oriented approach very extensively and consequent. Steve Jobs saw himself between (design) art and (computer) science. This means in science to make a holistic design of the project at the beginning and use a huge amount of time for the design process. In this respect science can learn a lot from designers, especially from people like Jonathan Ive. Such holistic design thinking might be an important solution for the problem of big and complex data, which is of special importance for Synthetic Biology, which aims to design a complex nature.