The Art of Science

Look on any academic or biomedical website, and you will see researchers in the midst of ‘performing’ an experiment: Usually pipeting some ubiquitous pink liquid, wearing a crisp white lab coat and safety glasses. These images are used to reinforce the stereotypical view of scientists as calculating, logical, and knowledgeable. Many would be surprised about the creativity commonly found among people in the laboratory. Throughout my career in biomedical research, I have met many scientists whom were also talented musicians, painters, and photographers. I myself, dabbled with the idea of a degree in fine arts, before making the ‘sensible’ decision to enter neuroscience. This link between the creative and empirical is not merely a rejuvenation of the renaissance and Leonardo Di Vinci. The marriage of art and science persists – not because they are complementary components in our culture – but because they tap into the same creative process for their success.

Not surprisingly, that part of our collective unconscious according to Jungian psychology, is the Artist-Scientist archetype: “They are a builder, an inventor, a seeker, a dreamer, and a thinker. Distracted by their own thoughts, they frequently have to be pulled in out of the rain. They are simultaneously vastly knowledgeable and yet innocent, impulsive yet cautious.” This description not only accurately describes every professor I have worked for, but as my friends can attest, is also a good fit for me too.

If art and creativity inspires and complements the efforts of scientists, what about the inverse relationship? Does science inspire art? Custom DNA portraits allows one to “frame your inner beauty”, producing a print to hang on your wall that is as unique as you. Although this example is rather pedestrian, it does exemplify how art is a medium to explore current culture – in this case, it is the culture of genomic research. In more academic circles, the medical research charity the Wellcome Trust in the UK, and STAGE (Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration) in the US, actively engages artists and scientists to work together through the funding of collaboration. These projects involve the creation of new artistic work that has biomedical scientific input into the process, either through a scientist taking on an advisory role or through direct collaboration. This has lead to many dynamic and unique working relationships between poets and speech pathologists, composers and rheumatologists, documentary film directors and psychologists.

Some neuroscientists suggest that the fundamental creative urge and key skills of pre- verbal (i.e. creative) thinking are the same regardless of the mode of expression: artistic or scientific. Patterns of activation during an fMR word association task performed by artists and scientists show strikingly similar patterns of activation in multiple regions of association cortex and areas involved in socio-affective processing. Science educators should take note. We are forever lamenting the lack of students, particularly female, entering into fields of math and science. Fostering appreciation and love of art and the creative process, as something that is a part of science -- rather than apart from it, as in the current education system -- could hold the key to this dilemma. Albert Einstein one said, "The greatest scientists are artists as well". But maybe Einstein was just being biased: He was just a musician after all.