Demystifying Science

by Britt Flaherty

When I look under the microscope at bacteria, I'm seeing a picture bloated by lenses and reflected off of mirrors, pierced by lasers and modified by chemicals; yet, from this complicated image I can logically determine how bacteria make important nutrients from thin air. Complex scientific tools mean that the conclusions we draw are frequently inferred from indirect observations. This makes the scientific process seem more like magic and mysticism than hypotheses and experiments and creates a real barrier in communicating the difference between fact and belief to the public. However, in a society where science is frequently at the forefront of political and policy discussions, it is increasingly important to convey our research and the scientific method to non-scientists. According to the NSF, 84% of Americans support government-funded research. As scientists, we have an obligation to communicate with the taxpayers (and future scientists) who are supporting our work and footing the bill. However, there is little time or training for scientists to develop the skills necessary to talk about research with a non-scientific audience.

Because there are few tools to help researchers ignite public interest in science and develop meaningful explanations of our work, I was excited to discover a playful and artistic approach like Science Tarot Cards. This deck of mystical guidance was developed through a collaboration between scientists and artists. Cards feature important people in the scientific realm (including Carl Sagan) as well as great stories from science history (like Schröedinger's cat or Mendel's peas) and famous scientific theories and principles (chaos theory and nuclear fusion, to name a few). Art like these tarot cards and the “science as art” contest, hosted by BioEASI, engage both scientists and the public, creating a forum for open and relaxed communication.

Green cyanobacteria, shown here growing in the ocean, accumulating into brown formations called stromatolites, and releasing oxygen gas, are featured on the Science Tarot Card "catastrophe." Cyanobacteria are responsible for adding oxygen to the earth's atmosphere billions of years ago, rusting all exposed iron and allowing new aerobic organisms to evolve. 

  

Last spring, I spent a day at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego and attended a science communication workshop. With the help of some phenomenal science communicators, I developed a three-minute "elevator speech" about my organism that uses alliteration: "cyanobacteria are green algae, grow in ponds and oceans, and have simple genetics that we can manipulate to make biofuel." That evening, I talked about the workshop and practiced my speech on fellow scientists at a dinner party. The dinner party guests were recipients of a federally funded fellowship to study biology, but most of them had never heard advice on talking about their research with non-scientists. It seems that, despite public support of science, scientists are not being given ample training and opportunity to forge a real relationship with the public.

As I navigate my way through graduate school and begin a scientific career, I'm increasingly grateful for non-profit organizations like BioEASI, creative collaborations like the Science Tarot Cards, and national meetings like the AAAS Communicating Science workshop. These outreach efforts ignite general interest in research and help scientists hone their communication skills, thus ensuring the continued support of scientific research and continued influx of new and inspired scientists. I'm giving the tarot cards to my three-year-old niece this year as an early introduction to science and logical experiments, but I might keep a deck for myself as a reminder of the magic and mysticism that drew me to this field in the first place.

 

Britt Flaherty is a Ph.D. student in the Division of Biological Sciences at UCSD. She works on gene expression in photosynthetic cyanobacteria in the laboratory of Jim Golden.

Art and Anatomy

by Charlie Cosimini

Animals and plants are very complicated, organized living things. So complicated, in fact, that they rarely make any sense if you try to cut one in half and look at it to see what is going on inside. So for many, many years, scientists have been dissecting very complicated systems and re-creating them on paper in a way that is easier to follow than simply looking at the original organism. This is not to say that the illustrations take away from the intricacies of the anatomies they depict, but rather that they are used to break down many inter-related parts into their individual units. You can never open up an animal and find just the muscles, or just the blood vessels, or just the organs, but in an illustration these separate systems can be displayed individually so that their many subtleties are not lost in the sea of tissues in which they are found. 

Illustrations can give focus to a particular aspect of anatomy that a scientist wishes to highlight. Here I have drawn a series of vertebrate skulls (lizard, turtle, crocodile, bird, cat). These were drawn to illustrate the differences in skull structure of a variety of vertebrates. Unfortunately I was using photos to draw these, and the photos (my own) were not great, so some detail has been lost. However, if you look at the top view of the crocodile and turtle skulls, you can clearly see the divisions between bones, and how the same bones have different shapes in the two species.

That highlighting is an artistic artifact; the actual skulls have more subtle lines between most bones. Had I wished to take this one step further, I could have reduced the skulls to only the shapes of the bones and eliminated all additional blemishes and shading; in essence to create a coloring-book style illustration. This would maximize clarity of the bone structure itself, but minimize realism. That is the flexibility that illustrating offers. The drawing I did is a halfway point between the photo-real version of the skulls and a simple blank outline of the skulls. Depending on what information you need to convey, an illustration can portray anything from the most basic and fundamental to the most realistic and complex.
 
Even with the advent of photography, scientific illustration continues to be a very important resource in education because illustrations are more versatile than photos. Though a photo can show exacting detail about a subject, it cannot isolate or highlight a scientists’ message the way an illustration can. Editing photos can, of course, give similar results, but this is itself a form of illustration. A raw photo relays more information than is required oftentimes, and the extra noise can be distracting, if not outright disruptive of the flow of information. Thus scientific illustrations are not only visually stimulating, but also useful tools for science education and communication.

Charlie Cosimini is a 2009 graduate of Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN, where he received a Bachelor's in Biology.  He wrote his senior bio thesis on microbes involved in cheese production and enjoys creating scientific illustrations in his free time. Charlie is currently studying up for vet school and maintaining a "do it yourself" art blog of his own, Chuck Does Art. 

Bridging the Gap

Back in May, I went to a "Conversations of Art & Science" talk sponsored by The Bronowski Forum, a venue "meant for intellectual discourse about commonalities between art and science". The Forum is named after Jacob Bronowski, who served as an associate director of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the 1960's and was keenly interested in "bridging the gap between the two cultures of the arts and the sciences".

The talk itself featured Roman De Salvo, who was introduced by the Forum as a "contemporary American conceptual artist whose sculpture and installations utilize everyday objects and materials in inventive and unexpected ways. De Salvo's work combines his interest in craft, technology, language, and materials with ever present attributes of wit and play". Also featured was Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, the director of UCSD's Center for Brain and Cognition, whose research "examines the interface of science and humanities". De Salvo and Ramachandran both gave presentations describing how their work aims to blur the traditional boundary between art and science, then fielded questions from the audience.

De Salvo, a local artist, creates three-dimensional installations that often utilize what he describes as "energetic phenomena": water, wind, fire, electricity and people. His pieces can range from minimalistic use of everyday objects to elaborate manipulations of organic materials. I thought that his work seemed to address the distinction between art and science in a humorous way, i.e. this seesaw cannon that shoots out water when people ride it:

Maybe he was trying to make a statement that technology is not rigid and predictable, but rather as light-hearted and adaptable to its users. Or maybe he simply saw an old cannon and thought, "how can I have some fun with this?", much like BioEASI's unofficial artist-in-residence Jason Rogalski's interpretation of the universe at last year's San Diego Science Festival.

The neuroscientist Ramachandran had more to say about "the gap" - namely, how the precisely technical brain breaks down artistic stimuli. Ramachandran's scientific focus is on dissecting how the brain experiences art (he claims this is governed by eight laws). He explained that every act of perception requires the brain - be it a human's or a bird's - to make a judgment. In the wild, seagull chicks learn to associate food brought by their mother with the red dot on their mother's beak. A famous experiment detailed here found that reducing the visual stimuli of the mother's beak down to a stick with three red lines on it still elicited pecking.

Human brains can also be fooled into seeing something that's not there. Ramachandran invented the mirror box to help patients who have lost limbs cope with phantom limb pain. By duplicating the image of the healthy limb in the place of the lost limb, the patient's brain is tricked into thinking that the lost limb can be moved, thereby releasing the patient from false sensations of pain. As someone who has no background in neuroscience, I found that visualizing the mirror box helped me understand the complexities of phantom limb pain: how do you alleviate pain in a non-existent arm, that you're sure would go away if you could just twitch it a little? Seeing a healthy, moving arm where your lost limb was apparently helps. So if you think of the duplicated limb image as an artistic creation, as Ramachandran does, this invention serves as an example of how exploring the interplay between art and science can be used to increase public awareness of research - not to mention better people's lives.

I went to this Forum with no expectations as to what would be discussed. I didn't expect either speaker to talk about how art can be used to advance science, and neither directly did so. Instead, each demonstrated that whether an artist or neuroscientist, one can find commonalities between these two cultures. It was a stimulating look into how these experts in their respective fields are aware of "the gap" and always looking for ways to build a bridge.

The next Bronowski Forum will be "Conversations of Art & Science with artist Ruben Ochoa and architect Teddy Cruz with moderator Robert Pincus, art critic, Union Tribune" at 6:30 PM on Thursday, September 23, 2010 at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla.

Welcome!

Hi there, art and/or science enthusiast!

The BioEASI team decided to set up a blog dedicated to the issues BioEASI aims to explore - the relationship between art and science and how art can be used to bring scientific research into the public eye. We'll get started by posting some of our own thoughts on the subject, but in the future we hope to involve local artists and scientists in the discussion. Thanks for visiting and feel free to suggest topics you'd like to see addressed!

For more information on what BioEASI is all about, visit us on the web!