The  inability to convey to the public exactly what it is scientists are doing in a meaningful and interesting way is perhaps one of the biggest hurdles scientists face. Can art change that?

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What do scientists and artists have in common?

Both scientists and artists alike try and communicate the way in which they see the world. The public has empathised particularly with the science of the natural world and the environment; plants, botany, animals, climate and the like, especially since David Attenborough first introduced his powerful series examining life on earth in the 1980’s.

This has in part been due to incredibly strong visual images, photography and dedication of the cameras and scientists behind these programmes. Who can forget the Iguanas and the snakes episode? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about -youtube it)

This blog aims to introduce the idea that science, in order to be effective, needs the skills that art brings, to communicate and bring the discipline into the 21st century.

Science needs art

Jerome Kagan, an Emeritus professor at Harvard University and listed in one review as the 22^nd most eminent psychologist of the 20^thcentury, says that the arts contribute amazingly well to learning because they regularly combine the three major tools that the mind uses to acquire, store, and communicate knowledge: motor skills, perceptual representation, and language. http://Bazler, Judith, and Meta Van Sickle, eds. Cases on STEAM Education in Practice. IGI Global, 2017. .

A recent article in The Guardian (attached here) again describes how the simple communications of scientific ideas through art (starting in the 1600’s) can revolutionise and create a whole movement :https://franscienceart.com/2019/04/26/big-tick-energy-how-a-tiny-flea-created-a-revolution-in-british-art-art-and-design-the-guardian/

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Modern Science

Scientific merit currently is measured by how many high impact papers you get or how many successful grants you write. (Many better people than I have written about this).

On the ground, in the lab, the automation of a lot of laboratory techniques and the introduction of kits has not only sped up the process of analysing data, but somehow removed the skills that scientists learned when practising their art. Losing out on the fine tuning of those motor skills that Jerome Kagan suggests we utilise.

You are given the solution to solving the problem- according to someone else, rather than troubleshooting it yourself, and perhaps finding more meaning and understanding. However, as I said, it speeds up the process- which is pretty great, but removes the journey.

Science Niches

Regardless of if you are in this century or the last in your scientific approach, the scientific research that gets scientists all exited can be perhaps a little ‘niche’ for the general public. I know and so do many other scientists, that it doesn’t matter how basically you explain something, there always comes a point when the listener glazes over. That thousand yard stare.

Let’s assume as a scientist you have gained two of the three major tools that the mind uses to acquire, store, and communicate knowledge: motor skills, and language, but what about perceptual representation?

Scientists experience frustration sometimes as others just don’t ‘get it‘. By enticing others to follow you on your journey, because they have somehow been communicated with about how exciting it is, then they will begin to reach a level of understanding that you can share.

Most effective communication in this digital age is via a plethora of image based systems; youtube, Snapchat, Instagram, and if you’re over 35 (I’m told) Facebook. Yes, I know there is also Twitter and LinkedIn and a host of others platforms. Indeed, suggested platforms for communicating science are primarily Twitter, which is not the media of many people under 18.

Platforms for visuals and artists

Scientists are told that the visual platforms are not effective platforms to communicate, unless you are a microscopist. I don’t really agree with that. Personally, I follow numerous microscopy, palaeontology, chemistry and other science sites on Instagram, and I find I am first hooked by the visuals then the information underneath reels you in. I have learnt so much from Instagram.

By swiping through imagery, you soon learn what grabs attention. And I’m coming to the obvious conclusion that scientists need to be thinking more in this way.

Problems with current platforms for scientists

There are publications obviously, websites (eg:Researchgate), but for communicating with the general public, it’s Twitter. For example, currently, I follow on Twitter an amazing Natural History scientist who uses the handle @flygirlNHM https://twitter.com/flygirlNHM?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor.

She has recently broadcast a BBC radio programme about the importance of flies-yes, flies, and I do recommend a good listen if you are able,https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00045kh but for all those budding scientists, or more importantly, the scientists who will never be- this might be lost to them.

Will anyone ever get it?

Once you start to focus in on a topic and become so engrossed in it, it becomes difficult to communicate effectively what you are doing, especially if others are not on your journey or don’t have a basic understanding of your field . The capacity to get creative with our ideas and think outside the box can only do good for scientific advances. 

We as scientists ( I group myself primarily in that category but perhaps should be known as  a “Scientart”) know a lot of information about a particular topic or idea. However, it’s expression and creative development is sometimes limited.

Does Art need Science?

Artistic and scientific skills should not be exclusive but embedded in every subject and whilst I have made a case for science to need art, does art need science?

I’m not talking about an artist going off and researching cancer, but instead gaining all the transferrable skills you get from being ‘scientific’. This means developments in observational skills, the objective assessment of what you see, constructing a strong argument, deduction, interpretation and understanding a subject until you ‘know it’ implicitly.  Historians do it, as do geographers, but those pure artists? Any good artist would say that some of those skills are ones that they excel in.

Artists have skills that we as scientist could really collaborate well with and vice versa.

Making it interesting

Last week I was at the UCL Research as Art competition and during the prize giving, the panel kept saying how much they had learnt. The work was visually stunning and had piqued the interest of it’s readers enough for them to read on and learn.https://www.grad.ucl.ac.uk/events/

Poor science education turns a lot of young people away from science before it even gets interesting- something I personally find really, really vexing.

It is vexing particularly because when you’re young- 5,6,7 years of age everything is ‘WHY?’. This natural curiosity is amazing if it’s nurtured and allowed to grow. We are all scientists at heart.

Wouldn’t it be great, if the inspiring curiosity that you used to have about the world was reignited? Before the fun was sucked out of everything?

Contemporary examples that have broken the mould

I would just love it if my scientific research, that has taken years of discipline to reach, could be understood or even be of interest to the same degree as Damien Hirst or Dr Gunther Von Hagens. http://The Philosophy behind BODY WORLDS: About the mission, concept . One is an artist and one is a doctor.

By demonstrating, quite beautifully, how the public can be involved and interested in anatomy and physiological function, both these artists and scientists have managed to communicate effectively and demonstrated how conceptual art and innovation in science are not so very different. 

Ultimately, scientists and artists alike change the perception of the world around us . 

I think my point is that there needs to be more art in science and more science in art, all the time and I’m not the only one.

Pomeroy, Steven R. “From STEM to STEAM: Science and art go hand-in-hand.” Scientific American. Visit https://blogs. scientificamerican. com/guest-blog/from-stem-to-steamscience-and-the-arts-go-hand-in-hand/(Erişim, Nisan 2017) (2012).https://blogs. scientificamerican. com/guest-blog/from-stem-to-steamscience-and-the-arts-go-hand-in-hand/(Erişim, Nisan 2017) (2012).

Science and Art courses

I have scoured the internet and have found a few interesting courses for all levels, to promote a basic scientific approach that can be applied to all different faculties.

Scientific method is a logical, objective and balanced one. One where you overcome your own opinion in order to look and understand what the evidence is showing you.

Online

If you are of the more artistic bent and don’t want a university level course this online resource from Berkley provides an essential base in scientific method from which you can move forwards:
http://berkley science conceptiual framework .

I know professionals who want to know more about the science around them, but don’t want the formal schooling, so this sort of course is perfect. Even the GCSE science levels these days are better informed and teach much, much more than 20 years ago.

University: Undergraduate and post graduate

Science and art is clearly not a new idea- but it seems to be one that is not taken on board nearly enough. There are now some university courses that teach science and art combined:

The BASc at UCL https://www.ucl.ac.uk/basc/, majors in a particular scientific field. You can also find courses under ‘Liberal arts and sciences’ , or postgraduately study for an  MA at Central St Martins https://www.arts.ac.uk/subjects/fine-art/postgraduate/ma-art-and-science-csm. (I think my life would be different if these courses had existed 20 years ago).

... pressure needs to come from business and arts supporters alike lobbying the government with curriculum proposals to create cross-disciplinary programmes such as the innovative BASc in Arts and Science at UCL, or the BA/BSc Digital Media Communications taught by the Departments of Media Arts and Computer Science at Royal Holloway. It also needs schemes to encourage cross-working within small-to-medium-size enterprises as well as major businesses. 

Land, Michelle H. “Full STEAM ahead: The benefits of integrating the arts into STEM.” Procedia Computer Science20 (2013): 547-552.

So whilst the movement is slow and it may not be enough to convince you about why art and science need to be co-taught is – here’s a question:

Was Leonardo Da Vinci, who died 500 years ago this year, a Scientist or an artist?

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I use this, because you should all know who he was and he is the gold standard to me of what science and art should be. The renaissance was a soup of interesting and exciting innovations, flanked by money and power. Pressure was on, money was there and voila….you weren’t pigeon holed you just were what you were, using every tool and means available to you. Should we not be more like that?

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21st Century shortcuts- personal favourite

To summarise-

Art is essential to science and science is critical to art. The next level?

Aside from writing this blog, Instagram, Twitter and (for the over 35’s Facebook) to disseminate science in an artistic way, I do have a fondness for memes. And crazy thought this sounds I sometimes think it is a most effective way of conveying a message. A lovely blog from as far back as 2014 said that the power of the meme lay in the fact that they could “Break tension & Offer shortcuts”.https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/3-reasons-why-internet-memes-are-changing-the-world

Occasionally, my communicating with anyone under the legal drinking age has included a meme or two. Not only are they humorous, but somehow visually they can communicate so much more and more effectively.

BUT A note of caution

It’s a fine line when an old fart like me uses what I think are really funny memes to a teenager for teaching and they can fall spectacularly flat.

Scientists, for their own benefit and in order to make themselves and their work accessible to the world around them, need to become more creative in their approaches to communication and need to adapt in order to survive.

We risk losing our scientific art through automation of our work, and science is now progressing so quickly that we are unable to effectively bring anyone on our journey with us. Unless we change that.

I say that because I didn’t know. I was really surprised- a bit like when I learnt about the golden rule . There had been an implicit  assumption that obviously I would know what this electron micrograph of a diatom was showing me.

They look pretty cool and if you were wondering- they’re algae. Apparently everyone knew- except me. I think they’re lying.

A quarter of the oxygen we breath comes from these microscopic structures that to most people are low key and understated. Just algae until you get them under the microscope and they become fabulous.

Why are they called diatoms? I was thinking something all chemistry and physics. Maybe an electron shell when I saw the picture. But no. It’s all Greek (again as with anything biological- or latin- classical educations sometimes can give you an advantage – it being Greek).

If you go to the UCL web Diatoms at UCL site it talks about their structures quite comprehensively. In a nutshell they’re like an IKEA assembly pack, but living. There is a beautiful maths to them that dictates their size and shape.

This is because they assemble in the same way that crystals and snowflakes form.

As algae they convert energy from the sun and carbon dioxide into oxygen and you’ll find them anywhere wet. nature review article with long complex words :https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8608. Similar to some vegetative things , they reproduce by spores but also by smaller diatoms budding off. Each mini-me version of the diatom is smaller than the one before. Before you ask- we can still see them because when they spore, diatoms of the original size are created and it all starts again.

Historically, they’re great for studying what’s going on in the environment because if it’s really cold, not so many grow. If it’s hot they bloom and they’ve been around for millions and millions of years with remnants of them deriving right from the time of the dinosaurs.

Play this really cool game to see how fossils can tell us about climate change

As they die, their shells fall to the ocean floor (rather brilliantly their fossilised remains are called diatomites) where they wait for a scientist to come along and analyse them. In this form- they don’t look impressive at all.

So- with a bit of deduction when looking at their fossils and you can figure what was going on with the climate once upon a time and where. The paper cited above goes into geeky depth about the potential importance of this.

Made from silica (SiO2 for you chemists- all of you basically), makes them exceptionally tough. So as with the best inventions man copies from nature. Diatom like nanostructures have been made in the lab by something called DNA origami.

Now in my head I’m thinking Rosalind Franklin would be sitting up in her grave right now thinking how awesome that would be. Little cranes made from a double helix?

What? Eh? How? And ……why?

Apparently our wonderful little diatoms attract silica from their watery environs that deposits on their surface and makes crystal- like structures.

So, when mimicking nature, the idea is to create a diatom-like structure which will coat over an internal frame.

Next question- how do you create a frame at a nano- scale level, so small even a bacterium is like a large obese cousin? (0.002mm-0.5 mm). Theres a nice overview to be found here: DNA origami

Science bit: how do you create a shape in DNA? The DNA if you recall from a long time ago when you did science at school, is a line of little genetic codes. Imagine this length of code as a long piece of string. Now, you want to make it into the shape of a flower. You’d have to twist it but you want it to stay in that shape. Where the string touches other bits of string in your flower shape you clip it.

 

 

So in reality, as your DNA naturally begins to curl and twist you can stick thousands of little clips ( staples to the scientists) that causes the DNA to stick together in those places. Nature paper that has a nice little infographic about DNA origami

 

Then comes part 2. This is because all DNA molecules , like Batman and Robin come in pairs. So if you have one set sequence of DNA molecules( nucleotides to the science folk), put them into a test tube then – free random nucleotide molecules floating around in the test tube will find their partners and pair up.

Once you have your tiny tiny shape/ frame- you allow silica molecules to bind to it.

 

 

Unsure of precisely why this was designed or how this can be used – perhaps in drug delivery or simply good investigative science exploring realms of possibility- diatoms  real and designed have been a little gem of discovery for me this week.

Your task is to slip one of these tiny microscopic structures into your conversation and enlighten those other people who didn’t know.

The Natural History Museum, South Kensington, (London). If you’ve never been, you should go. If you’ve not been lately, go again.

 

This is one of those buildings and establishments that I can never get enough of. To say that I am in love with this building would be an understatement. If I could have a perfect job, it would be here, I don’t know doing what- but this place is literally, beautiful science.

So if you’re in South Kensington, kicking your heels, pop in for half an hour. It’s free after all.

 

Yes, there be giants of all sorts, I mean there’s a hulking great blue whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling, but I wanted calm today.

 I had decided to meet one of my old PhD students for lunch, now an incredibly successful researcher at the NHLI at Imperial College, round the corner.

We wandered through gemstones, meteors, crystals and chatted overlooking a stegosaurus fossil.

Every colour diamond on the planet- some glow .

In The Vault, aside from the precious stones, were all the types of crystals and rock formations and there were so many amazing colours. ( A valuable  trip for when I get to telling you about the chemistry of colour).

I stayed on after lunch to lead to the Darwin centre, also containing The Cocoon.

I suppose a lot of people don’t find a white cocoon of tranquility and beauty as sexy as a simulated earthquake or the fossilised bones of a terrifying predator that lived 35million years ago, but inspiration often comes in moments of quiet.

It showcases the work researchers do, even having windows overlooking their labs- which must be disconcerting for the poor researchers.

It looks at the ordering, investigation and analysis of species and specimens. It shows the work that current researchers are carrying out, the expeditions and  why they’re taking them.

This for me is natural history at its finest. Promoting new discoveries and outreach programmes. If you can dip in and out of the museum, then I recommend taking bites at a time. It can be overwhelming if you don’t.

All of this organisation of plants and animals into a taxonomy and a Tree of life was espoused by Darwin. Part of Darwin’s work on his hypothesis of the Origin of Species  however, was based around close observation of chaffinches. How on earth do you get a lightbulb moment from a chaffinch?

Following his voyage on The Beagle (1831-1836) to the Galapagos islands at the age of 22, (life expectancy  in those days was 40), Darwin had collected many bird specimens, and travelling from island to island was initially interested in geographical distribution of the bird types.

Timeline of the 1820’s to put it in context……..

• 1821- Napoleon dies on Saint Helena
• 1822- Rosetta stone gets translated
• 1823- Macintosh invents waterproof cloth
• 1825- Aluminium discovered
• 1826- First photographs created
• 1828- American Democratic party created
• 1829- First Oxford boat race, first typewriter, first braille book

When he returned, with the help of an  ornithologist, he discovered this important finding: That rather than a variety of bird (he was looking at mocking birds), that in fact each island he had travelled to had a different SPECIES on it. He then went back, probably quite excited, to the original data collections and asked all the other people from the expeditions, for their information,  trying to reconstruct locations from where he had discovered the different species and piece together what was going on. What was going on?

Firstly: If you’re asking yourself whats the difference between a ‘variety’ and a ‘species’- well here’s an example:

Cats exist as different species: Lion, tiger, lynx, cheetah,pussycat. Within that Species (lets say tiger), there are different varieties: Bengal, Siberian, South China etc.