CHEM 106

In my experience in the Art of Science, I gained a greater appreciation about the art world and the science world as separate domains. Additionally, I learned about the connections between scientific and artistic pursuits.

I have never considered artistic or scientific thinking as strengths of mine. Taking this course has not made either art or science a strength. But through taking this course, I have learned about the theory behind the scientific process and real world applications of scientific thinking. I also have learned about what it means to engage in creative artistic work through weekly assignments. I do not believe I have done art since I was in early high school, so trying to think about visual ways to explain scientific processes was difficult. Not only did I need to think about art materials and what was visually stimulating, I also had to think about how to teach others about science.

A quote that I have kept in mind throughout taking this course was from the Dead Poet’s Society, a movie I have only seen in snippets on television.

The teacher character, Robin Williams, said the following, when asked about the worth of art.

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.”

I used to think that this conception of art and science was helpful. But my understanding in this course has made my understanding of the worthiness of art and science more nuanced. Art is not only a display of passion, science is not only necessary to sustain life. Both of these fields, both artists and scientists, are too large to be defined in these binary terms.

This class has been a very interesting experience to say the least. Although sometimes I felt like I was grasping at straws to figure out what to make for my art project each week, it really made me consider the material in a new way and challenge myself. I especially liked when we did hands on experiments or art projects in class because it broke up the class and allowed us to become more involved. It was also great to learn about professors in the science department who have second lives as artists. I would love to have spent more time talking to them about their artistic processes and experiences. It would have been nice if we could have seen more of our classmates’ artwork throughout the semester. That way we could have been inspire by other work and maybe had more ideas for our own work. Overall, I am glad that I got to take a science requirement class in such an interesting way that allowed me to broaden my art knowledge as well.

At the beginning of the semester, we talked a lot about expectations that society has for scientists and artists. Though I still think that the lists we came up with at the beginning of the semester that included

Scientists: answers, innovation, structure, a truth, improve quality of life (future minded), expected to be well educated, push experimental limits etc.

Artists: innovation, opinions, social commentary, entertainment, expected to be experienced, an embodiment of culture etc.

Still hold some validity, I think that throughout the course, we’ve nuanced those ideas a bit. For example, while scientists are expected to be well educated, a lot of what they do pushes beyond that prior education. Similarly, for an artist, experience only comes from time.

It is still really interesting to me how society seems to value scientists and artists differently. As I mentioned in my post before this one, this course has helped me see a lot of similarities between science and art that were not apparent before. I wonder why these similarities such as the need for a deep understanding, for example, are not apparent to society and people at first glance.

I think one of the most valuable parts of this course is the variety of guest lecturers that we had. With each one, we got a glimpse at a different way to consider science and art which helped me in turn reconcile the two for myself. I’m looking forward to seeing the art and science exhibition tomorrow night to see what other ways science and art come together- other than what we’ve discussed and seen in our class lectures and discussions.

This class was a wonderful opportunity to explore my creative outlet. At Wellesley we don’t often get the opportunity to be creative on a frequent basis unless we are taking a specific studio class. This course allowed me to advance upon my knowledge of chemistry and connect it to my passion for being artistic.

There were some parts of the class that were tedious, such as the weekly blog posts; however, I believe that I have learned a lot and am glad that I took this course. The guest lecturers were especially wonderful and I am glad that we got to explore so many different scientific facets, not just chemistry. Additionally, I enjoyed presenting at Ruhlman and now get to brag to my friends that I presented at the prestigious conference as a first-year! (:

Thank you for an awesome year, and I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to take this course.

This class was an interesting experience.  It was fun finding ways to represent various topics artistically and musically.  I especially enjoyed getting more practice with photoshop to make digital works, and drawing parallels between music and protein structures.

Before this, I hadn’t thought about how many of the qualities associated with scientists and artists (experimental, innovative, etc) are very similar.  It’s very interesting to me that two fields sharing many similarities are seen as being different in fundamental ways.  After our discussions, I’ve noticed more how the scientists I know regard artists, and vice versa.  It seems to me that many of them don’t have a full understanding of or appreciation for the other field.  I think that both groups would benefit from learning more about the other, both the similarities and the differences.  The scientific process is an extremely valuable tool, and artistic skills and philosophies are important for communication and understanding.  I think it would be nice if there were more opportunities for scientists and artists to discuss these things on a deeper level, so that there is a greater appreciation for both fields overall.

I think I will continue creating art inspired by science, and explaining science through art.  With any luck, I will be able to keep having such conversations about the importance of both fields 🙂

About one billion birds die from flying into windows every year in the United States. Science and art students at Michigan Tech University are working on a way to help birds avoid windows. Unlike humans, birds can see ultraviolet (UV) light. Windows can be painted, taped or treated with UV reflective material so that birds will recognize them as barriers. This solution is inexpensive, but not always as attractive as people would like.

While science students identify “problem windows,” art students are creating more aesthetically pleasing bird-repelling designs that can be applied to those windows. Appealing window applications are likely to be used by more people, saving more birds every year.

More information on this story is available here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amber-roth/migrating-birds-get-boost_b_7087280.html

While looking for intersections between the scientific community and the art world, I discovered that there are a plethora of people who have had success in both fields. US avant-garde composer George Antheil worked with Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamar on an early technique to spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary to wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. Hedy was a famous actress known for many movie roles in the 1930s and 1940s. John James Audubon was an American ornithologist who studied and documented all types of American birds for his book, The Birds of America. He illustrated his ornithological works with lively and beautifully composed paintings which identified 25 new species.

Samuel Morse who invented Morse code was an avid painter and was known for his portraits before his inventions. Helen Beatrix Potter, known as the writer and illustrator of The Tale of Peer Rabbit, a classic children’s story was also a natural scientist and conservationist. She created mycological illustrations of the reproduction of fungi spores. Albert Einstein played the violin and the piano. There are many people who have been able to meld their love of science and art together and have the best of both worlds!

As an artist and a chemist, I’ve always found it very interesting that chemistry is so hard to illustrate.  In physics you can draw pretty good diagrams, and in biology illustration can often be done through observation.  Note that I’ve never taken advanced classes in physics or biology – perhaps the more advanced material is truly hard to represent.  But that seems to be the norm in chemistry…things just can’t be drawn as they are.

Let’s take Lewis structures.  Drawing a few atoms with lines between them is a pretty good representation of bonds, right?  It works okay (ish) for single bonds… But for double and triple bonds, Lewis structures aren’t very representative of the structures that exist.  A trio of parallel lines doesn’t intuitively convey that there are two orbitals overlapping head-on to form one sigma bond, and two sets of p orbitals parallel to each other forming 2 pi bonds.  Also, these kinds of structures don’t do conjugation and resonance justice – as in class, one must draw multiple structures or dotted lines to convey “partial double bonds” or “resonance structures” when in reality, the bond in question is neither single nor double.  The electrons that make up the bond are simply delocalized; they can move around between multiple atoms in an orbital that isn’t in the shape of that simple little line on the Lewis structure diagram.

Let’s go even smaller – how does one illustrate an electron?  Typically we draw them as little dots orbiting a nucleus.  I briefly mentioned orbitals in the previous paragraph; to expand on that, electrons do not orbit atoms.  They instead hang out around the nucleus in impossible-to-fully-determine patterns (I’m looking at you, Heisenberg), and certain electrons of certain energies are found ~95% of the time in certain areas.  Those areas are called orbitals.  We can illustrate the orbitals with complex computer programs, but what about the electrons themselves?  We’ve established that they’re not orbiting anything; are they even little dots?  Inevitably, no, they are not.  Electrons are just like light – sometimes they act like particles and sometime they act like waves.  In reality, they’re both.  This is actually true of ALL matter – we’re all sort of particles and sort of waves (thank de Broglie for that brain-bender).  The thing is, big objects have teeny tiny wavelengths, to the point that treating them as waves is a little pointless.  Because electrons are so small, their wavelengths are large enough to noticeably affect their properties.  And how is one meant to illustrate that accurately?  A teeny tiny whatever-it-is with hardly any mass that is both a wave and particle?  It just doesn’t work out.

Illustrating chemistry, then, is not a matter of making a representation that takes into account all knowledge possible, with the most accurate picture in mind.  This expectation is objectively impossible.  Instead, it seems to be about finding ways of illustrating things in ways that help us understand chemical properties.  Maybe Lewis diagrams aren’t so accurate, but they are a big help when you’re mapping out a molecule’s structure.  In this way, the illustrations have to be tools, like for teaching or writing in shorthand.  To use them, we have to constantly acknowledge where they are right and where they are wrong.  To create them, one has to keep an eye on the balance between accuracy and simplicity in order to create the best representation possible.  This will be my challenge over the summer: I will be working at making chemistry graphics for one of my professors.  It will be an interesting experience in illustrating that which cannot be illustrated 🙂

Combining art and science seems to be an area of interest for both artists and scientists internationally. Last month, judges of the Wellcome Image Awards compiled 20 different artworks to display in several science centers in London, as well as a few other centers in the United States and other countries.

One image of interest to me was that of the internal chemical reactions occurring inside the kidney of a mouse. At first glance, the image looks like a painting, but after reading the description, I found that this image is the product of a technique called Computational Molecular Phenotyping.

Computational Molecular Phenotyping explained:  CMP essentially gives each cell a unique color profile based on the metabolic needs of the cell at that point in time. For the purpose of this image, the mouse kidney tissue was stained with silver-labelled antibodies to detect the three small molecules or metabolites of interest (the amino acids: aspartate, glutamine and glutathione). The signals from the antibodies were first captured as greyscale images using light microscopy (think of the table microscopes used in biology labs)  and then digitally converted into red, blue and green, respectively. The three separate color images were then overlaid to produce the final composite image. Visible blocks of color in the image may represent a single cell or a group of neighboring cells with a similar metabolic state. Scientists use this technology in order to visualize the process of metabolism in cells. It’s fascinating that technology itself is producing works of art, and by doing so, the artwork/imagery reveals important information to the scientist such as at what pace the kidney organ is breaking down proteins within the body, and the diversity of the cell’s stages in the metabolic process at a certain point in time.

http://www.wellcomeimageawards.org/2015/chemical-reactions-in-the-kidney# 

Chemical reactions in the kidney

JEFFERSON BROWN, ROBERT E MARC, BRYAN W JONES, GLEN PRUSKY AND NAZIA ALAM

Colour-coded map of part of a mouse kidney as it breaks down food to make energy. This is done through a large set of chemical reactions (collectively referred to as ‘metabolism’) and is required for cells to survive. Here, three small molecules – the amino acids aspartate and glutamine and the antioxidant glutathione – produced by some of these reactions are visible (coloured red, blue and green, respectively). The brighter the colour, the more of that molecule there is in the cell. This image was created using a technique called computational molecular phenotyping and shows how metabolism can vary between cells in the same organ at a given point in time.

In class we have spent lots of time discussing prions, how incredibly contagious they are, and how they are virtually indestructible. Unlike every other form of microbe, prions are resistant to radiation, extreme temperatures, metal sterilization techniques, and autoclaving. This means that if certain tools are used in surgery on a person with a prion-related disease, the tools remain infected despite all sterilization attempts. Scary! Additionally, if an infected animal dies in an environment, the environment will remain infected for decades to come!

So why haven’t prions created a wide-spread pandemic if they are so contagious and indestructible? The answer lies in lichens, forest fungi that cover tree bark and much of the forest floor. There are hundreds of varieties and several produce a molecule — likely a serine protease — or molecules that can take out prions.

Lichens produce over 600 “secondary” compounds not essential to their metabolism. They make them for a variety of reasons, including defense from UV, microbes, and herbivory, and as water repellants. Many of these chemicals are responsible for their fantastic colors or fluorescence under UV or surprising color changes in reaction to other chemicals.

Since lichens are super-abundant in forest environments, the scientists decided to put a few common lichens in the ring with prions and see who won. They chose Lobaria pulmonaria, the lungwort, a lichen indicative of pristine forest old-growth northern forests, Cladonia rangiferina, a member of a vastly successful genus common across North America, and Parmelia sulcata, likewise successful in the boreal forests of North America.

What they found was nothing short of stunning. Not only could lichen organic and water extracts degrade prions at least hundred-fold (and sometimes to the point of undetectability), simply incubating the prions in water with an intact lichen could destroy them.

Further research suggested it was not one of three common lichen secondary compounds that was responsible, but in fact an enzyme called a serine protease, since only serine protease inhibitors were capable of destroying lichen extracts’ prion-fighting powers. Proteins are built of long strings of amino acids, proteases are enzymes that cleave other proteins, and serine proteases have the amino acid serine in their active sites, the seats of catalysis. Why lichen serine proteases can cleave prions where so many other proteases have failed is not known. It’s also unknown, the scientists noted, whether some other lichen chemical or protein may be acting as a co-factor that helps the serine protease do its job.

You may wonder if lichens could be used to help protect humans from our own prion diseases. This is probably not feasible in surgical environments, both because lichens seem not to achieve complete degradation of prions reliably and because a nuclear option exists: Bleach or sodium hydroxide. Lots of bleach or sodium hydroxide (followed by autoclaving). Bleaching the forest is less feasible. Lichens, however, may be a built-in distributed defense system we didn’t even know we had.