I’ve been looking for a while now too, applying to a wide variety of jobs: science writer, grant writer, science communications officer/specialist/manager/assistant or associate director, manager of scientific visual communication, data graphics designer, science illustrator, and high school chemistry teacher.

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”
― Joseph Campbell 

I spend my days working on freelance projects, applying for jobs, writing and submitting article pitches and essays (even getting a couple accepted), drawing and painting, developing workshops, and preparing for the Chemistry MTEL—the test I need to take to be licensed to teach chemistry in Massachusetts public schools. All the while, I’m wondering if I’m spending my time on the right thing. With all of those job applications out, I started to feel like an electron.

Unfortunately, when many of us think of electrons, we still picture tiny planets orbiting around a nucleus. This image persists in pop culture with the impressive endurance of Flavor Flav. But in reality, we can only know the probability of finding electrons around atoms in regions of 3D space shaped like botched balloon animals that we still call, unhelpfully, orbitals. And these probabilities are described mathematically by what we call wavefunctions. This is what my future feels like right now—a diffuse cloud of probabilities.

A famous test known as the double-slit experiment showed that electrons (and photons) exist as both particles and waves. When fired one at a time, a single electron passing through a wall with two thin vertical slits cut out seems to go through… both slits at the same time. Like a wave! Because it’s a wave. But even cooler than that, the experiment showed that putting a detector on one slit to try to catch it in the act causes the electron to only go through one or the other slit. Before detection, the electron exists in a superposition of states—the wavefunction. Detection forces its wavefunction to collapse into one outcome—in the case of this experiment, the outcome is one path through one particular slit.

I also exist in a superposition of states: illustrator, designer, artist, writer, and teacher.1 But most jobs only ask one of me, so if I get a job (am detected), my state will be defined, my “wavefunction” collapsed to one particular outcome.

Schrödinger tried to underscore the absurdity of such inexplicable behavior with a thought experiment that applied the notion to our macroscopic world (the way I’m trying to). Instead of job seekers, it was a hypothetical cat placed inside a closed box wherein a random atomic event, if it happened, would kill the cat. He posited that if superposition was true, the atom in the box has both decayed and not decayed, meaning the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. Only when someone peeks in to check on the cat does the wavefunction collapse into a definite outcome. Will a hiring manager define mine?

“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
—Carl Jung

Here’s how I’ve been occupying each state while waiting for the world to tell me what I am.

Illustrator/designer

In my freelance work, I’m getting the kinds of projects I like best—figures that dig into the science. People are coming to me who’ve tried using AI and have been frustrated with the outcome. But I join others who have reported a marked slowdown in this kind of business.

Writer

My biggest writing endeavor of late has been coauthoring the biography of my former Ph.D. thesis committee chair and current friend and neighbor JoAnne Stubbe for Annual Review of Biochemistry. The famously fastidious JoAnne and I wrote it together over the course of two years, and I lived to tell about it at her 80th birthday party—an enormous honor. Gathered with about a hundred of her former trainees and colleagues, nearly all of whom had written papers with her, it was part roast and part love fest, because along the way she has become very dear to me.

Artist

I’ve gotten more comfortable with this self-label since I wrote the post Are You an Artist?: Paintings Are How I Say I Love You last summer. I painted a portrait of a friend’s mother after she lost her suddenly and tragically to a pulmonary embolism not long after the birth of her first granddaughter. She’s seen here lending a hand in her daughter’s ice cream shop, as she often did.

For my husband, I painted our silly dog for his birthday, and I painted his Dad (a physicist who I hope would have enjoyed this post) as a young man for Father’s Day, which also marked 10 years that he’s been gone. I painted a portrait of our 14-year-old in New York sports colors for Christmas.

I have three more paintings in progress now—one more watercolor like these and two oil paintings. Once I add them to the portfolio, maybe I’ll open up for commissions to paint other people’s loved ones and supplement my income. Stay tuned!

Teacher

As I talked about last month, I held a workshop at the Broad, and I have another one lined up for October in Virginia. Thinking back to how much I enjoyed my three years teaching chemistry and biochemistry at the University of San Diego, I noticed a pattern in my career.

I taught workshops no one asked for in my last job, and before that coached researchers on their written, visual, and oral communications as a Fellow of the Broad Research Communication Lab. I guest lectured in a science communication class for a pal on the Chemistry faculty at Boston College. I’m peddling my workshops still. Though it’s been a while since I was in a classroom, I keep finding ways to get back to teaching. And suddenly it hit me, maybe because I have a teenager now, that what I really and truly want to teach is high school chemistry.

I had an interview last week with a local independent high school during which someone stopped a resident chemistry teacher and me just to point out how much we were glowing as we talked about teaching chemistry.

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” —Howard Thurman

So, I’m working toward licensure and hoping to get some classroom experience this year. As many of you know, in science, when an idea hits you that is so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t think of it before, it’s usually a good one. And that’s what this felt like.2

How to collapse

While I was thinking of myself as existing in all of these states at once, waiting to be collapsed to one by detection, I ran this idea by my physicist friend Jeff Miles. He pointed out that we all exist as a superposition of our skill states, and that “wavefunctions” don’t collapse just once, but on every detection, as states evolve over time between measurements. Many jobs start as one thing and evolve over time, calling on different skill sets at different times.

Detection doesn’t have to collapse only one of the states in superposition. Jeff described this in quantum terms as the “ability to redefine a new basis set, via rotation in the state space, where the new states that can be collapsed are a linear combination of the original states.”

So, if I get a job as a high school chemistry teacher, it might be because I was detected as such. But on successive detections (“wavefunction collapses”), I might be seen incorporating illustration, design, and even animation into my lessons. Look again a few weeks in, and you’ll see me noticing nuances of my students’ personalities and behaviors like a writer. Maybe by the next collapse I’ll have started an after-school science art club. A mid-summer collapse might find me holding workshops for scientists again.

If you are lucky, you might even be hired for a position that requires your unique fingerprint of skill sets. There are high schools with a strong focus in the arts, for example, where my particular combination might be an immediate asset.

I realized that I tailor every application to the job I’m applying for, but I don’t scrub all of my skills from my resume and cover letter. Every application is a rotation of the basis set so that the skills they’re asking for are most prominent, but my other skills are not completely eclipsed. Now I’m wondering if that’s the right approach, or whether I should have been leaning in as an expert in that one specific thing.

It’s a calculated risk to rotate our basis sets. Bonus skills we find relevant may sound like a lack of focus to a recruiter. I don’t know the right answer to this calculation yet. Then again, we’re not electrons, and maybe we can do more than wait to be detected by others to define our own outcomes.

“You will know your path not by how it shines before you but by how it burns within you.” —Jan Richardson

Coda

After e-mailing this out, I discovered a lovely poem by my favorite chemistry poet Mala Radhakrishnan that perfectly ties up this post. She agreed to me sharing it here. Mala also published two books of chemistry poetry that I illustrated for her: Atomic Romances, Molecular Dances and Thinking, Periodically: Poetic Life Notions in Brownian Motion.

My Superposition

Please don’t measure me.
Please, don’t judge.

I’m not just a teacher,
nor simply a mother,
nor merely a chemist
(…and clearly no poet).

But rather, a fragile
superposition.

You make me collapse
when you ask what I am.
Your labels, they limit.
Your models are faulty.

To forcibly fit me
within your equations,
you truncate, approximate
boundless potential.

To naively claim
that you thoroughly grasp,
you perturb, you abridge
my functional basis.

Yet when will you realize
that what you perceive
is not really me,
but a random projection?

‘Cause when you’re not looking,
I’m all I can be:
An ethereal wave
of ambitions and dreams.

Mala L. Radhakrishnan

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Making Art With Scientists

Since stepping away from the lab bench, science illustrator and writer Mary O’Reilly, Ph.D. has spent her career making art for scientists. Now, she wants to make it with them. Come hear why and how she believes that involving scientists in the process will not only make them better communicators but also better scientists.

This was very different from the workshop I’ve been giving for years on simple design principles for science graphics. I handed out sketchbooks and I got them drawing. It was amazing.

Afterward, the organizers were interested in having my slides to share with group members who couldn’t make it. But as I gathered the slides, I realized that they are fairly useless without context. Also, thanks to the wonderful discussions that ensued in the short time we had together, we didn’t actually get to some of the activities I had planned. So for both of those reasons, I decided to just make a streamlined recording of the workshop so anyone could do the activities at any time.

Then I decided to make this video the basis of this month’s post, sort of a special summer edition. So if you want to make art with me, just grab a sketchbook if you have one or even just a few sheets of paper and a pencil or pen. You can download this printable PDF for the first exercise.

Drawing To See Printable

105KB ∙ PDF file

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If you’ve been reading the newsletter for a while, some of this will seem a little redundant, so I apologize, but there is plenty of new material too, and actual activities. I also learned that it is 100x harder to record a workshop alone in my basement than it is to give it in front of a live audience. Maybe my dream of being the Bob Ross of science art is further away than I thought. However, I do have frizzy hair and a gentle demeanor, which seems like a pretty good head start. Anyway, forgive the production value. If I make more videos like this (should I?), they will improve.

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You know how I always call myself a magpie, collecting treasures eerily relevant to each month’s post as if the universe left them at my feet? I was listening to an interview with writer Meghan O’Rourke on Night Science, a fantastic podcast about creativity in science (highly recommend). She described feeling almost like a magnet when she’s deep in a project, “attracting all these little filings from the world, these little bits of metal, everything suddenly starts to seem connected to the project.” Well, this sent me down a rabbit hole. Want to come down with me for a minute?

I am fascinated by coincidences. I collect them like dead butterflies pinned to a Google Doc. My favorite one came after I’d just published an essay in the Boston Globe Magazine about my Mom’s genetic genealogy sleuthing that helped us solve the mystery of my paternal grandmother, who disappeared when my Dad was a baby. I brought the magazine home from the newsstand and had it open to my essay on the kitchen counter. While I made lunch, I silently wished that the universe could give me a sign that my late Dad would have been okay with me publishing it. It wasn’t my story to tell, after all. Thirty seconds later, my husband breezed by, glanced at the magazine, and said, “Oh, it’s right by the crossword puzzle. Your Dad would have loved that.”

Digging into the neuroscience of coincidences led me to a part of our brains I’d never heard of, called the reticular activating system (RAS), first described in 1949 from studies on cats.1 The RAS is believed to filter what we take notice of from all of the available sensory input, defining the signal from the noise. It is believed that chemicals in the brainstem either boost the signal, suppress the noise, or possibly both.2

What really interests me is how what the RAS lets through tells us about who we are. When I’m out to eat with my friend of three decades, Shelby, an assistant principal of a junior-senior high school in our hometown, I can tell by a sudden tension in her brow that she’s just noticed someone, often many tables over, behaving badly. Not spit balls per se, but usually a more insidious kind of rudeness from an adult.

Before the RAS was discovered, Carl Jung had developed a theory he coined synchronicity to explain coincidences like the one I experienced over the essay. It was based in part on dynamic Einsteinian notions of space and time, and, I was amazed to discover, developed in close collaboration with his former patient, physicist Wolfgang Pauli3 of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which many of us learned in general chemistry.4 Together, they defined these synchronicities as acausally linked, but meaningful occurrences, by which I think they meant meaningful to the person who notices them. And so maybe these metal filings, these treasures, are pulled through the RAS by the magnet of what we’re thinking a lot about, because it feels meaningful to us.

As scientists, we are at risk of subconsciously filtering out any information that doesn’t agree with the meaning we’ve made out of our data, and coincidences just reinforce this effect. In the debate over where AI and humans fit into the future of science, it is often pointed out that scientists suffer from this confirmation bias, while AI does not. The first tool to combat confirmation bias is self-awareness, but I’d like to propose that a dedicated drawing practice could help further. Stay with me.

In my senior year of high school, dreaming of art school, I walked through the world looking at everything as though I was going to draw it. I analyzed angles, shadows, and perspective. Processing all of that visual input was as exhausting as it sounds, and to be honest, I felt a small amount of relief after deciding to go study chemistry. But lately I’ve been trying to look that way more. It makes me feel oddly present, and I realize how much I’ve been missing while living up in my head. As I always say, a drawing practice is so much more about the process than the product, which is why the fact that AI can make art is cute but useless for our purposes. A regular drawing practice is a way to open the aperture and expand our sensory input to what we are missing, and that’s crucial in science, in looking at data. It is especially true if we stay open to the details we don’t want to see, because they may be the most important.

But we simply couldn’t function if we let everything in, and maybe our selective noticing actually gives us an edge over AI, because when it leads to synchronicity, we can find meaning in it. Not just patterns, but important flashes of insight, as long as we’ve addressed confirmation bias. And maybe it is something that makes us uniquely human. For what it’s worth, Google Gemini agreed that AI cannot experience synchronicity, and explained why, including that “a computer can identify statistical correlations or cross-reference data points, but it cannot experience the ‘aha!’ moment or the emotional weight of meaning. Meaning is an artifact of consciousness, not data processing.”

Here’s an example of synchronicity’s human benefits. It is possible that I married my husband in part because of a coincidence. Our personality types are in such diametric opposition that ol’ Meyers and Briggs put a warning label on their romantic pairing, and I knew it. However, despite having very different upbringings a thousand miles apart, both of our Moms took us to Red Lobster for good report cards when we were growing up. Certainly, I thought, this must be fate. A sign from the universe, not to be ignored. Or, did I clock this easily dismissed fun fact because some part of my psyche knew what I didn’t yet: that we would spend a lifetime uncovering layers of compatibility that run much deeper and truer than where we derive energy or how we make decisions. Or, maybe it was simple confirmation bias, which, in this case, led to the right outcome.

And while I love the thought of the universe delivering my Dad’s blessing on my essay, it might be more accurate to say that the selective listening5 I applied to my husband’s comment was just telling me what I already unconsciously knew to be true. That he would absolutely have been okay with it. Maybe even proud.

Coda:

An iron filing nearly knocked me over this morning. Walking the dog, I bumped into a neuroscientist friend that I haven’t seen in ages, right around the corner from our house. After we caught up, she started heading the other direction to continue her walk, then turned back to say, “Serendipity!” So I told her that I was actually writing about serendipity today, and how meta that was. And then she added, apropos of nothing, that she was really enjoying her noise-canceling headphones, which block out all other sensory input (her words) so she could fully focus on her podcast while she walked. Stop it, I said, I’m also writing about the reticular activating system. And there on the sidewalk, two women of science, fully aware of the physiological mechanisms at play, got the chills.

Eighteen hours after landing back in Boston, I was due to give a virtual talk at the fourth installment of an Art Science Summit, created and hosted by the terrific science artist and genetics Ph.D. Philipp Dexheimer, and featuring four other talks by equally inspiring science artists. (Many thanks to Philipp for building this community of kindred spirits, in the vein of Glendon Mellow and his Bluesky #SciArt feed.) I wanted to talk about making art with scientists, not just for them, based on an epiphany I had about two and a half years ago, which I later described in a post called Experimenting with humans: making art with scientists. Now the subtitle has become the title.

I gave the talk with jet lag and a fresh cold that made my voice seem far away from my helium balloon head. The disorienting effect made for a stilted start, but at least the ideas I was presenting had been polished over many days of tumbling around in my head, as I rambled along the Irish countryside in a van with my Mom, aunts and uncles, and two cousins.

As I stared out at the verdant fields, dotted with endless sheep, cows, and wildflowers, while surrounded by people I’d known my entire life, it would have been easy to forget that we’re in a weird moment as science artists and communicators. I could have been looking out at a different time, before artists’ work, already undervalued, was taken without asking and then used to make money from it, leaving artists to prove their already undervalued value. But knowing that I had this talk to give kept snapping my mind back to the present. Coming back to freelancing after six years of full-time employment, work has slowly picked back up again, but I can see that it’s a different landscape now.

As my disembodied voice told the audience of the Art Science Summit, I’m not afraid that AI is going to replace science artists and communicators. I’m afraid that it will do it poorly without skilled human practitioners at the helm, and at a time when we really need good communication. I’m afraid people will use good-enough versions to save time and money. I’m afraid that the dissemination of science at all levels will just become worse. But as the satirical blowhard politician from Porpoise Spit says in the 1994 Australian cult classic Muriel’s Wedding to justify his disregard for others, “You can’t stop progress!”

Maybe not, although there was that computer science professor at the University of Chicago who created a program that adds something to artwork to poison any AI model that tries to train on it. Seven million people downloaded it. I wouldn’t want to stop the progress of AI being used to detect pancreatic cancer three years earlier than radiologists can, which is a very real possibility on the horizon. And whether or not AI science art eventually reaches the standards of accuracy and quality that we expect of ourselves, now is the time to empower scientists to see how engaging in the process of creating science communications can make them not just better science communicators, but also better scientists.

I also think this will create more work for science artists and communicators. It may seem paradoxical, but embracing the process with us will help scientists see the value—that science communication is not about making science pretty, dumbing it down, or spinning it. They will see that AI is not a comparable replacement for human practitioners, but rather a tool. And I believe they will become even better partners in the creative process. Scientists don’t have time to do all that needs to be done on their own, because, science.

Here are just a few places where we could start, each of which has a dual purpose of creating external communications and fostering internal scientific innovation.

Building observation skills through drawing

I might start by using this grid technique to demystify drawing, having them build a drawing brick by brick with simple lines and forms. Even though this isn’t how drawing is ultimately done, it gives them practice gauging angles and relative spacing without getting bogged down by the whole.

Here is printable PDF for anyone who’d like to give it a try.

Drawing To See Printable

105KB ∙ PDF file

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Then, as they get more comfortable, I would encourage them to practice drawing their own hands without the grid. Or anything really, but hands are always available. With enough practice, they’ll start to look at the world like an artist does, with eyes hungry for previously overlooked details. What if they looked at data in that same way? Their improved drawing skills might also be used on a napkin to explain the ideas that artistically scrutinized data sparked to a colleague or collaborator. That’s science communication too.

Building creativity through metaphors

The process of coming up with metaphors for one’s work is a creativity booster. Asking a chatbot for one does not give the same benefit. It’s also a way to bridge the gap between scientists and non-scientists. But as I’ve said before, no metaphor is perfect, and finding the holes in them can open new channels of thought, leading to unexpected insights, sparking new experiments. Artists can help guide these creative conversations and even turn them into artworks.

Questioning assumptions through animation

Animation is a powerful way to question assumptions because it demands to know how. Molecular animator Janet Iwasa has been making art with scientists for decades for just this purpose and she’s always been a huge inspiration to me. But there can be a large barrier to entry for animation, both in skill and money. Not so with stop-motion, which can be accomplished with a free, easy-to-use app and no artistic talent. The example below, made with clay and my phone, is purposefully simple and low-budget to illustrate my point. And the process of making these, again, can raise new questions and ideas for experiments. If the model checks out, the stop-motion animation could be handed off as a prototype to a professional 3D animator.

Who will pay for it?

Until more people see the value of this kind of work, getting paid to partner with scientists in this way will remain a challenge. But I wonder how people are using the broader impact requirements of many grants, which urge scientists to engage in meaningful outreach. Could these partially fund artists-in-residence? Many places, like the Broad Institute, already have such residencies. What if some looked like this?

There are departments, like Boston College’s Chemistry Department, that offer a science communication course. I would encourage more to do so and to hire working science communicators to teach them. Even better, maybe someday we will see more academic appointments like Janet Iwasa’s. She is an Assistant Professor in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Utah, and her primary role is creating 3D animations with scientists.

Another idea is to have artists partner with artistically minded scientists within the labs to help lead these activities. I’m willing to bet that there is, on average, at least one artist per lab, whether visual, musical, poetic, or otherwise. Probably more. I have heard of so many researchers hiding this side of themselves for fear of not being seen as serious scientists. But what if empowering them as art ambassadors created cultural change from within? And how many more artists might stay in science if they were given an outlet like this?

When I knew that our Ireland adventure would include a few days in Galway, I started poking around the University of Galway’s website. I discovered that it recently launched an Institute for Creativity, which reaches across the university and beyond to find opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement (which I belabor here all the time as the recipe for innovation). I’ve connected with one of the institute’s leaders and we have plans to talk soon, so stay tuned for more about that. For now, I will leave you with this excerpt from the institute’s website:

“The Irish government has established Creative Ireland, an agency dedicated to linking creativity, community, and well-being for all its citizens. Its Minister for Arts recently launched a pilot basic income scheme for the arts, providing professional artists with a guaranteed income.”

Imagine that.

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In my talk, I described my career in four acts (so far): scientist, illustrator, designer, and corporate communicator. I described my day-to-days, what I learned, and how and why I made the choices I did when moving from one act to the next. It dawned on me that there were two key turning points. The first was when I chose science over art at age 17. The second was when I chose art over science at age 32.1 I realized that if there was anything I regret about my career, it is not stopping at either of these junctures for a second to wonder if maybe I didn’t have to choose. On the way home, I began to imagine a version of my life in which I didn’t.

Young Santiago Ramón y Cajal wanted to be an artist, but his father wanted him to study medicine. I wonder if he was grateful to his father when he went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for his work on the structure of the nervous system. Because he didn’t choose after all, and I wonder how much his drawings of neurons, for which he is arguably more famous, contributed to his scientific success. (Loyal readers, you know what I think. A lot. They contributed a lot.)

I thank my Mom every chance I get for gently nudging me toward chemistry when I announced my plan to go to art school after triumphantly returning from Portfolio Day at a school in Indianapolis. She was right to point out that I loved chemistry in school. I’m not grateful because it was a more lucrative path than art—I never really cashed in on the earning potential I built—but because I really do love science.

Long-time readers may recall this anecdote about David Byrne, lead singer and guitarist for the Talking Heads. When he went off to college, he was interested in science, engineering, and art in equal measure. He said, “I saw them as being equally valid creative endeavors.”2 But when he tried to take classes in both the science and engineering department and the art department, he was told no. Which leaves us with the lingering question: what if David Byrne’s creative genius had been turned toward science?

When I was an undergrad at Purdue, I took occasional painting workshops at the Morton Community Center. I usually had a painting going in our apartment. I wish I’d had a system that demanded more accountability for improving my skills, but that still allowed me to devote a lot of time to undergraduate research. When I see the jaw-dropping artwork my best friend (and college roommate)’s daughter is making in her Purdue art classes now, I cringe at my younger self for not doing the same. I guess I thought I needed to focus on chemistry. But what if art classes were part of the core curriculum of science degrees?

I might have benefited from a photography class when an experiment I struggled with for weeks, maybe months, in my undergraduate research lab was actually working the entire time. I just wasn’t exposing the radiographic film long enough for the bands I was desperate to see to become visible. Maybe if I’d spent time in dark rooms exposing photographic film, I might have caught that sooner and avoided the lost time (and hard forehead smack). There is this sense that art is a luxury we afford ourselves only if there is any time (and energy) left after the important business of the day, after caring for the family. But this little anecdote shows how making art can save us time by expanding our minds to other possibilities. Also, making art is an excellent way to spend time with the family.

In graduate school, I took classes at the Out of the Blue gallery in Central Square at night and painted portraits of my labmates. I still always had an easel set up in the bedroom of my apartment. But if the multiverse is real, then maybe in the alternate universe where I didn’t choose, I brought my art practice right into the lab. Maybe there, my lab notebook doubled as a sketchbook, the way Leonardo DaVinci’s did.

If I chose science over art when I went off to college, then I chose art over science after my postdoc. But what does that even mean? I obviously didn’t leave science since all of my work is scientific. But there is sometimes a moment when I’m working with a client and I ask a question that makes them look at me differently, laugh, and say, hey, you should be on our team. It’s meant as a compliment, I know, but the laugh puts me in my place. Remember, the laugh says, this is what you chose.3

So, what could not choosing look like in this universe? As usual, over the past month, your devoted magpie collected all the treasures I spotted for our little nest here. One was this opinion piece I came across on LinkedIn by Anna Anandita, written for Chemistry World. In a fit of frustration over trying to communicate an idea to her team, she grabbed a piece of paper and drew it. Now, sketching is a routine part of her workflow, and she makes several convincing arguments for why all researchers should embrace an artistic mindset.

Later, I caught up with a couple of old friends, one of whom thought I might like the magazine Aeon (thanks, Carole!). Featured on the home page was this terrific piece by Beatrice Steinert, an artist and scientist who seems to be very successfully not choosing between the two. I knew Beatrice from a conference she organized at Harvard about creative ways to communicate research that go far beyond the figure, which I wrote about here. So I was delighted to see that she’d penned this treasure about biologist Victoria Foe, a sort of modern-day Ramón y Cajal, but for genes and developmental biology rather than neurons and the nervous system. Her visualizations helped her answer questions she’d been chasing her entire career.

Another treasure was placed right under my beak by a dear reader in the comments of last month’s post (thank you, Lauren!). The Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University offers a class called Introduction to Medical Illustration for med students, co-taught by a pediatric surgeon and faculty from the Rhode Island School of Design. It’s not that doctors need to draw, but they do need to see, and this medical school understands that the most important thing that learning to draw teaches us is how to see.

Biophysicist and structural biologist Jane Richardson claims she was not an artist, but, as described here, she wanted a way to represent the protein structural data she was collecting. She enlisted guidance from her mother-in-law, who was an artist, and Irving Geis, probably the best-known science illustrator of the 20th century. But instead of having them draw it for her, she twisted a belt around and studied it carefully until she could draw it herself. Thus, Jane Richardson invented the ribbon diagram that we use to visualize protein structures to this day.

In case you’re still not convinced of the value of drawing, a psychiatrist once told me that organic chemistry almost kept her out of medical school until, panicked, she hired a tutor, who drew chemical structures in a way that made them appear to jump off the page into the third dimension.

To be clear, I’m not arguing here that scientists shouldn’t leave the lab and choose an artistic career if that is where their head and heart are leading them. Only to consider that you might not have to choose. But as much as I believe science will benefit from artists taking part in it, you have to really love it to endure the failure rate. For anyone ready to make the leap, I’ll leave you with one last treasure. I’ve been reading a book by writer Mason Currey that just came out called Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life. It’s not a how-to, but rather a how-did-they-do-it, from trust funds to odd jobs, about artists of all kinds throughout the ages. It’s a good reminder that it’s never been easy, even long before AI came along. But some people simply can’t not make art.

“We’re drowning in an ocean, or a sea of data, but we are starved from knowledge.”
—Nobel Laureate Syndey Brenner

It has been over twenty years since Brenner said this in his Nobel acceptance speech, but I think it still rings true. Are we really doing everything we can with the information we have?

Inspired by a single bullet point from the aspirational job posting I wrote last month, I became mildly obsessed with a pilot study to address this rhetorical paradox. It would be based on the hypothesis that if scientists were given activities to promote mind wandering at work, they would produce more ideas and overcome barriers more quickly. Cognitive scientists call it “the shower effect”, and fMRI imaging has localized it to regions of the brain called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN is suppressed when we’re engaged with external stimuli that require our conscious attention, but not suppressed while doing things with the cognitive demand of, say, showering. And that’s when the magic happens.

I’ve indoctrinated our kids with the value of the shower effect. If they’re struggling with a math problem, I don’t always help them right away. Rather, I tell them to do their best, then take a break and think about it again when they’re in the shower. The struggle is crucial for priming the brain for the flash of insight later. I mean, I’m not a monster; sometimes I just help them. But on more than one occasion, I’ve heard them yell from the bathroom, “Oh! I got it!”

That’s why I wanted to bring opportunities to access this state of mind into scientific spaces, where no parent can help researchers get to the answer because no one knows the answer yet. It’s their job to find it. And by “it” I don’t necessarily mean a eureka moment. Sometimes it’s just a small nudge that gets them past a blockage in thinking. It might be a question to look up, or a quick experiment to try. For me, sometimes it’s just, like, search terms.

You might ask, if you’re stuck on something, why not just read a research paper? You absolutely should! (In fact, my mind wanders all the time when I read papers, so maybe there’s a two-fer there.) But mind wandering might help you pinpoint exactly which vein to mine in the literature. And sometimes you have all the information you need, and it just needs to line up and click into place. Then the solution or idea falls into your head fully formed, like a gumball. And do you know what else happens? That clarity makes it easier to explain it to someone else, which I think we should all by now see is not a nice-to-have but a literal life-or-death necessity.

But there has to be a way other than showering at work to engage the automatic idea dispensers in our heads. What else promotes mind-wandering? That’s where last month’s mural idea came in. I thought that if I created the outline of a mural, employees could come and spend thirty minutes or so mindlessly painting it. I would use a paint-by-number system to eliminate any decision-making that might prevent mind wandering. I would design these walls for many different workplaces and collect information. There would be rules, like no headphones, and people would work alone because small talk would inhibit the desired effect. There would be a QR code on the wall to complete a survey at the end of each painting session about their state of mind and whether they had any flashes of clarity or insight or the sudden arrival of ideas as if out of nowhere. I would install these for no more than the cost of the materials, because once I collected these surveys, the value of the walls would be so obvious that people would line up to commission them for their own spaces. I built a slide deck of my proposal. I designed a mandala in the shape of a human commensal virus. But, as I began gathering evidence to back up my claims, my story didn’t quite check out.

Turns out there is research on the effects of coloring on the brain. It was actually shown to induce a state of “flow”.1 Unlike mind wandering, which kicks in when we’re engaged in external stimuli that do not require our conscious attention, flow happens in the sweet spot of doing something that is just challenging enough, but not very challenging at all. And, it has been shown to correlate with suppression of the DMN.2 Even though this is the opposite of what I was after, I’m not knocking flow. The same study that showed flow and the DMN to be at odds suggests that flow is linked to increased creativity. As a bonus, it is widely credited with mental health benefits.3 Excessive mind wandering, on the other hand, has been associated with rumination and depression, so beware of that. But I’m still fascinated by it as a portal to ideas. But a portal from where? I think maybe ideas are generated from the combination of existing memories that hadn’t met each other before. But sometimes it feels downright spooky.

It often happens that once I start thinking about an idea for this newsletter, I start seeing it everywhere.4 This time, it was in three books and a TV series. In The Stormlight Archive book series by Brandon Sanderson,5 there is a realm called Shadesmar—another dimension also known as the cognitive realm, where ideas live. It is described as a reflection of the mind, a complete inversion. And because we finally got around to watching the first two seasons of Stranger Things, I saw a similar parallel dimension in what the characters call “The Upside-Down”. And then, in The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, he refers to accessing special knowledge from some other dimension as “piercing the soul of the world”. Elizabeth Gilbert has her own theory about where ideas come from in her book Big Magic. For her, they aren’t formed in the brain but rather circulate in the world, inhabiting anyone who might have the fortitude to see them all the way through, moving on to someone else if they don’t.

The most reliable place I’ve found to consistently achieve that clarity of thought and the expansive dreaminess that welcomes ideas from wherever they live was in the kids’ rooms at bedtime. The darkness, cozy warmth, and white noise mingling with their deepening breathing created the perfect environment. So I was fascinated by the Stranger Things character Eleven accessing “the Upside-Down” through sensory deprivation—blindfolded and dunked in a float tank. This is obviously fantasy and I know it sounds a little woo-woo for a newsletter about science, but then again, I don’t know anything that seems more woo-woo to me than quantum entanglement, so I say all bets are off. Brandon Sanderson even seems to draw on quantum physics for his fantasy world-building, where observation, or measurement, creates reality.

I noticed that as Eleven got better at accessing the Upside Down, she needed less and less sensory deprivation. It weirdly gave me hope, since our kids aren’t little anymore, that maybe whatever we use to pierce the soul of the world is a muscle that we can strengthen. Again, I know, this is fiction. But as Lord Byron said in his 19th-century poem, Don Juan:

“’Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!”

So, where does this leave my murals? I’ll have to think about how flow fits into scientific inquiry. I’m not as personally familiar with it as I am with mind wandering, but I know I’ve experienced flow as much while mining sparkly literature veins as I have while painting.

For now, I am afraid that my best advice for getting ideas at work would be extremely unpopular. It would be to leave your headphones at home. To do the tedious things without distraction, letting your mind roam. But honestly, I don’t even have much conviction in that advice because accessing this state will be different for different people. Sometimes my mind wanders when I listen to a podcast that doesn’t hold my interest. Exactly how bored by it do I need to be? Who knows! My husband uses a systematic framework that works for him and doesn’t require mind wandering at all. And I certainly don’t mean to suggest that talking to other people isn’t a wonderful way to generate new ideas. Maybe my best advice after all is just to notice when the magic happens for you, note what you were doing, and, well, do that whenever you need an idea. I’d love to hear what works for you.

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The Opportunity:

Arcadia is always looking for smart, driven people to level us up. If you believe you have a game-changing skillset or perspective that can augment our mission, challenge our assumptions, or accelerate our progress, we are interested in hearing from you. Pitch us your idea for a role at Arcadia.

I love this. However, it is fully on-site in Emeryville, CA, and I’m happily tied to Boston for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, my idea was to write my own job posting to imagine a job that I believe should exist, and a world in which art is recognized as fuel for biomedical innovation, not just for making science pretty (science is already beautiful1). Think somewhere between artist-in-residence and corporate research communications. Call it a vision board, a manifestation, whatever the kids are calling it now. Maybe someone reading this who is like me, but in the Bay Area or more mobile, could use it as inspiration for their own pitch. Maybe it could open other employers’ eyes to new possibilities. I started drafting.

Then I had lunch with a chemistry professor friend and an intellectual property lawyer friend. We talked about how bad it is out there. Recent Ph.D. grads moving back home, unable to find work in an industry that, in recent memory, had to invent perks to entice them. We sighed over the epic struggle biotech companies are facing to make deals right now, as seemingly every day another one shutters. On my way home, I thought, “I can’t write this silly job posting now. It’s frivolous and tone deaf.”

And then I noticed my hands tightening around the steering wheel, and something bubbling up from somewhere deep within. I didn’t recognize this stranger at first, but when it arrived, rubbing its eyes and blinking against the light, I realized what it was. It was anger. Anger at the realization that I had unwittingly internalized the inherent value (or lack thereof) that society ascribes to artists. And then out came the shored-up anger at all of humanity’s ills laid bare again and again across the globe and throughout history over who and what gets valued, what this is used to justify, and how we become insensitized to it because there is only so much awfulness that our nervous systems can hold at once.

But if we could just linger on the artists for a minute, I wonder, why have we normalized and accepted the term “starving artist”? Coined hundreds of years ago as a nod to the noble sacrifice of material comfort for dedication to craft, it has morphed into a caution against pursuing art as a vocation, perhaps creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even as “art” becomes easier to come by, it doesn’t change the value of true artists, because their value was never solely tied to the art product itself. The artworks (paintings, sculptures, poems, novels, songs, etc.) are just by-products of the artists’ true value. The reason they can make that art is that they can see things that others don’t. The reason they do make art is that they often feel things more strongly than others do, which fuels their art.

Rather than just sitting around waiting for biotech to bounce back so we can go back to doing it the way we always have, shouldn’t we be questioning the entire premise? Researcher and artist Palina Kot might agree. She penned a correspondence published in Nature on January 20th, calling on the science community to take a fresh look at all that art and artists can offer in both the pursuit and dissemination of scientific discovery. Based on the massive response she received upon sharing it on LinkedIn, she and I aren’t the only ones thinking this way.

So, I wrote the job posting, maybe a little defiantly. Some of the bullet points were collected from job postings I’ve come across in my own search. Some are my own, which will be apparent. Without further ado, here is the posting for the job I believe should exist.

Scientific Artist

Organization size: 50-200 employees

Organization type: Biomedical research

Location: Greater Boston area

Job type: Full-time hybrid

Benefits: 401(k), Health insurance, 401(k) matching, Paid time off, Dental insurance, Paid holidays

The Opportunity

We believe that the role of art in science is not just to make it pretty or to elicit brand loyalty. It is not even just to communicate it clearly, though that is a crucial use of it. We see art as an integral part of the scientific discovery process. In this role, you will work with scientists to help them do what you do: to see. You will unleash your entire creative self, embedding with scientists who aren’t here just to collect data but to ask the right questions and to understand the answers. You will communicate their science with them, not for them, so that you don’t rob them of the opportunity to notice what’s missing. You will create opportunities for scientists to broaden their minds, escape ruts in thinking, question their assumptions, and generate many ideas without immediately discarding them. Overall, you will work closely with scientists to understand and communicate emerging research developments using a variety of methods.

Responsibilities

• Write and illustrate research updates, journal commentaries, and perspectives with scientists, particularly in translating technical findings for broader scientific audiences.

• Collaborate with scientists to develop presentations for internal meetings, conferences, and stakeholder presentations.

• Hold workshops in design principles for science graphics that draw on Gestalt Principles of human perception to teach scientists how to transmit information more efficiently and effectively.

• Hold workshops in basic drawing skills that are more about learning to see than creating a polished product.

• Help scientists brainstorm new ways to visualize data to find hidden patterns and new insights.

• Build and staff a station for stop-motion animation where employees can use a variety of art supplies to animate the mechanisms of the biological system they’re studying (and their proposed interventions), surfacing questions and ideas they hadn’t considered before, because animation demands to know how.

• Create opportunities for employees to engage in tasks that promote mind wandering, which has been shown to enhance creative thought.2 You might draw an outline of an illustration as a mural on the wall and provide paints so that anyone can stop by and color them in; when it’s complete, you’d paint the wall and start again.

• Work on a variety of art projects in plain sight, including but not limited to painting portraits of the executive leadership team and all employees to be used as headshots.

• Work with scientists to come up with metaphors for their work to be presented to non-scientist employees, who will then ask questions about the metaphor that will cause the scientists to think about their work in fresh ways.3

• Create an interactive art installation that all employees contribute to, designed to build community and foster innovation.4

• Curate (i.e. fill) walls with employee-created art—you will find artists among the ranks if you ask—to enhance the space, inspire other employees, and remind everyone that they can bring their whole selves to work.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in biological sciences or related field5

• 10+ years conducting original scientific research with a track record of peer-reviewed publications

• Demonstrated ability to write about complex scientific topics for both technical and general audiences

• Experience creating presentations and visual materials for scientific audiences

• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office programs

• Strong portfolio of scientific illustrations and fine art

• Proven ability to find awe in a drop of water falling from an icicle, or the way the light falls on the lines of an elderly woman’s cheek, or bubbles, etc.
  

Having written this, I decided I couldn’t wait to bring one of these ideas to my own basement. Here is the image I prepared digitally to propose this mural project to my husband. I would draw it with Sharpie, choose 4-5 paint colors, and set it up as a paint-by-number so that whoever is engaged in this activity need not think too much, thus leaving space for that mind-wandering, idea-generating magic. Because why have a family if you can’t experiment on them?

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Has anyone else noticed what seems like a counter-movement to the gradual disappearance of humans on the other ends of telephone calls, in entry-level computer science jobs, and other occupations threatening to go the way of the travel agent? I didn’t notice it until I reluctantly began re-engaging in social media. I suspect it really took off with TikTok when I wasn’t paying attention, and I can’t prove causality, but, are we… replacing AI with humans?

When I started a full-time job in 2019 and took down my freelance shingle, it was the last time I posted on social media with any regularity, and it felt like a huge weight lifting. From then on, I spent very little time on it. The irony wasn’t lost on me when I was in charge of social media at my last job, but I loved spotlighting my co-workers. Now that I’m open for freelance again, I decided to post a couple of watercolor paintings on Instagram (@oreillyscienceart) that I recently made as gifts for my family (see also: Are You an Artist?: Paintings are how I say I love you).

Thus sucked into scrolling, my feed, aptly named for its surprisingly nourishing quality, quickly became 90% videos of artists creating things. I noticed that these videos would have tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of reactions and hundreds to thousands of comments. Some people just enjoy the oddly satisfying effect of it, including a subset there for the ASMR, hearing pen scratching paper in tiny soul-soothing whispers. But a quick cruise through the comments revealed overwhelming awe, deep appreciation for the craft, and entreaties for the artist to share their methods and name their materials. Thus, many of these artists make money by offering training courses and/or by mentioning certain brands. They also make money selling the pieces they make! Many of the comments are along the lines of, “Is this for sale? How do I buy it?”

The popularity of these videos harkens back to the Arts and Crafts movement that sprang up in response to the Industrial Revolution. Advances in mass production enabled the affordability and thus the democratization of goods, but it took its toll on the environment and left some with a sense of loss, seeing these machine-made products as soulless. Sound familiar?

We are justifiably fascinated by the fact that AI can generate jaw-dropping images in seconds, and I think many share my curiosity about how this really happens, but the wonder is poisoned by the truth of what we do know—that most of these models were trained on real human artists’ work with neither credit nor compensation. I’ve watched a robot draw a picture, and it was cool, but I wouldn’t need to watch it more than once. I doubt I’ll ever get enough of watching these real-life modern-day Bob Rosses all over the world, making their art.

There is something so exciting about watching the art of creation, cringing when the artist slashes the canvas with paint, seemingly ruining it, and then the transcendent “Ohhhh” moment when you see why they did it. Digital tools don’t have the same stakes thanks to the undo button, but the makers of the Procreate drawing app must have known that there was a market for this. They included a feature that lets users export a time lapse video of every mark made along the way. Here you can see every step and stumble of the spaghetti-mess floundering toward my Kandinski-inspired journal cover about a mutagenizing chimeric protein.

If the artists I found are modern-day Bob Rosses, then where else are we as a society turning to humans? In lieu of ChatGPT therapy, a popular social media personality who goes by AK Przy might be the modern day Mr. Rogers, if Mr. Rogers yelled supportive words while pushing a broken vacuum cleaner around his lawn, or rolling himself down grassy slopes, or punctuating his insistence that he likes us just the way we are by standing on an overturned canoe snapping kitchen tongs like castanets, and then finally charging the camera with the catch phrase, “Keep it up cutie because I’m so freakin’ proud of you!” See also: Melani Sanders, founder of the We Do Not Care Club.

Were you wondering if I would ever get around to the science? Who are the modern-day Carl Sagans we are reaching out for as alternatives to those AI summaries of textbooks and lecture notes? Sure, there’s Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, but there are so many more. Our 11-year-old engineering enthusiast is learning from the childlike glee and infectious curiosity of humans on YouTube like Mark Rober, Derek Muller, Emily Calandrelli, Dianna Cowern, and George Zaidan.

A scientist with a Ph.D. in genetic medicine who goes by dr.cal.ur.science.pal came up on my Instagram feed. Posted up at a tissue culture hood, pipetting occasionally, she describes new discoveries and science concepts like gene editing in an engaging and humorous way. She even has a catch phrase, which she says with a jaunty spritz of her gloved palm with sanitizing solution (“Let’s talk about it.”). But it doesn’t feel gimmicky because she’s not really trying to sell anything more than her wonder and love of science. One video describing the engineering of T cells that led to a major breakthrough in cancer treatment got half a million reactions. One about why large animals like whales and elephants rarely get cancer got a million. For science!

Sure, AI could make videos like these with fake humans, but would they have the same effect? If I watched one, then realized afterward that it was fake, would I feel betrayed, like all those people who hated the author James Frey after it was revealed that his massively successful recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces was semi-fictional? Probably. We hate being duped. But what if I knew from the start it was AI-generated? I don’t know, the thought of it just makes me feel a little lonely.

So it seems like there’s this bifurcation between newfound efficiency and humanity-seeking behavior. Now that we can save hours by planning a vacation with a chat bot, including how to make a meal with everything left in the refrigerator before we leave on that vacation, many are finding themselves filling that vacuum by watching people doing things. I know I’m late to this discovery because after a little poking around I realized that sociologists have already been talking and writing about it using phrases like “human favoritism”, “the handmade effect”, and “the Veblen good”.

I’m just a little groundhog, poking my head up to see if there will be six more weeks of troll-strewn slop storms on the internet, and instead I see all these beautiful humans. I stand by my original pivot though. When I stopped feeling the need to post on social media, here’s what I did instead. Anytime I had a funny thought, anecdote, hot take, photo, whatever, I began thinking about which friend or family member would appreciate it most, and I would send it only to them. That one heart or laughing emoji, and the ensuing back and forth, the authentic checking in, was always worth ten million reactions. And still is.

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When I drafted my last post, about how AI wasn’t up to the task of science illustration, I had no idea that I was so close to hanging my freelancing shingle back out again. In fact, the announcement that my company would be winding down and closing its doors, like so many others since the recent downturn in biotech, came seven hours before I posted it. Two weeks later, I would be saying goodbye to friends who’ve become family over the past couple of years as we packed up our desks. The day after that, people would be going bananas over the latest AI image generator.1

I’ve always kept my freelance business active for times like these. When I have a full-time job, I respond to inquiries by recommending any number of the highly capable science illustrators I mentioned in my last post, pairing their unique skills to the specific request. Thankfully, a timely inquiry from a former client softened my landing into unemployment. I started it the morning after my last day, but now that it’s delivered, I have some space to think.

There is a common question I get when scientists reach out to talk to me about their career aspirations in science illustration. What should I be mastering? In other words, how should I best be using my time while I wait for my client list to grow? What will make that list grow? Should I learn all of the Adobe programs? Should I be teaching myself 3D modeling? Animation? Should I be polishing my fine art skills? Or learning more science? I thought of this a week or so ago when my husband showed me Dodgers’ superstar Shohei Ohtani’s 64-point plan for becoming a major league baseball player. Known as the Harada Method, Ohtani had filled it out in the 9th grade. It included a variety of areas of growth, from working on core and wrist strength to “remove insecurities” and “be someone people want to support”. So I guess the answer to these questions is to start by figuring out your ultimate goal, and work backwards from that.

When I look around at the current state of affairs and ask myself what I can do, I am reminded of a quote I’ve shared before from 20th-century author, educator, and civil rights leader Howard Washington Thurman, who said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

When I consider the potential market for science communication, the biotech environment, and the funding woes, I am reminded of the advice James C. Collins gives in the quintessential business book, Good to Great. He insists that companies must figure out what the one thing is that they can do better than anyone else in the world.

And the combination of these two pieces of advice reminded me of what my Dad told me when I was 17 years old, also quoted in the post linked above: “Find what you love to do and do it better than anyone else.” Shohei Ohtani is actually a perfect example of having achieved this goal. Through his passion, discipline, determination, and good fortune to grow to 6’3” and 210 pounds, he was literally able to become the best in the world at his craft.

I’m not 17 anymore. But I’m not winding down either. It struck me over Thanksgiving that my mother-in-law took a job when she was five years younger than me that she has now had for almost 40 years. Even though I occasionally emerge from my age dysmorphia to realize with some horror that my youngest co-workers could have been my children, I am also decades from the finish line, I hope. Life is long. What will I do with the rest of it?

The job I left was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I’m grateful to have had it. One of its best features was the enormous variety of work it offered, which helped me see what makes me come alive.

In this role, I made board slides, designed the logo and every iteration of the website, helped write reports, perspectives, award nominations, and media talking points, created the content for all of our social media, and built a library of drag-and-drop illustrations relevant to the work we did. I liked doing all of these things a lot. But there was one aspect of the job that I loved above all else.

I made it my personal mission to try to ensure that every scientist knew what every other scientist was doing. I wanted every chemist to understand what every protein engineer was working on, every machine learning specialist to understand what every gene editor was trying to do. I wanted them to become fluent in each other’s languages. I knew that innovation lurked in those in-between places, where the chance combination of seemingly disparate ideas becomes something entirely new, like puppy yoga. So I gave workshops on design for science graphics that drew on Gestalt theories of perception and pre-attentive processing. I taught them how to use color and abstraction and how to guide the viewer’s eyes through their slides so they didn’t get lost. When they prepared presentations for our internal science talks, I was available for practice talks, slide reviews, and, if time permitted, creating bespoke graphics for them. I explained how their audience needed to know the stakes if they were going to come along with them. They were consistently receptive and grateful, and my proudest moments were when I saw them using the skills I taught them. I imagine the ripple effect of them all going off now and sharing these skills with their future colleagues, by example or intervention.

Finding what I love to do, check.

So now back to the original question. How does one become the Shohei Ohtani of science communication? One feature worth emulating might be how he diversified his skills without trying to master everything. He chose to excel at both batting and pitching. If the MLB decided to replace pitchers with pitching machines tomorrow, he would still pull multi-million-dollar contracts for all of the balls he sends into the stratosphere. There is a rule named after him now that enables pitchers to be designated hitters even after they’re replaced on the mound. He literally changed the game.

I don’t know exactly what that means for me or any of us yet. All I know is that for my entire career, it has been true that work begets work. I know that AI doesn’t begin to address the massive need for good science communication that grows with every new discovery. And I know that one way or another, I will continue to draw, write, design, and teach. In other words, I’ll follow Yogi Berra’s advice: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

In July of 2006, at the peak of the housing bubble that would soon cause a global financial crisis, massive hiring freezes in science, and what Ethan Perlstein would coin the postdocalypse, my postdoc advisor mentioned that it would be nice to have a picture. We were working on bifunctional chemical compounds that would bind to an IgM antibody with one end, and the sugar-binding B-cell-surface receptor, CD22, with the other end. Like molecular velcro, it was a way to deliver toxins to B cells for the treatment of B-cell lymphoma. Using Photoshop and the trackpad on my Macbook, I drew the picture below.

While I drew it, I kept stopping to consider things like the relative concentrations of everything and how the receptors might cluster since they have sugars on themselves that also make them bind to each other. This is what science illustrators do. I also went to the primary literature to find evidence that the IgM antibody arms bend down like hinges to engage their antigens, as shown, as opposed to the way we had been crudely depicting it, like an arcade claw machine. Though I would go on to make cleaner, clearer variations using vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator once I learned how to use it, my advisor refused to replace this original one in his talks.

I wondered if I could create the same complex using AI. I started with Adobe Photoshop’s Firefly AI image generator because it seems to have the best ethical rating in terms of paying artists for the art it was trained on. I gave it this prompt:

10 copies of a molecule, each interacting simultaneously with one of the ten epitope-binding sites of a single IgM antibody and one copy of CD22 on the surface of B cells.

It returned the 3 images in the top row below, which were… not that. Ok, how about DALLE-3, which some consider the gold standard for image generation (middle row, left and center)? Interesting, but still no. I searched for AI programs for science graphics and came across FigureLabs and Recraft. FigureLabs (middle row, far right) started to get there, but didn’t even use the number of molecules I asked for, or the right IgM, nor did they make the complex I described. Recraft, well, you can see (bottom row).

So, none of these recapitulated the complex. This was a complicated prompt for sure, but science is complicated. I needed to know if it was up to the task.

I went over to Google Gemini, where I could upload a paper I published from this work1, and see if it could create an illustrated summary of the key findings. Maybe it would do better with more context. I started by just asking for a summary of the paper, which I could use to prompt the image.

It returned this summary:

Key Findings

• CD22 is a Recycling Receptor: Contrary to the prior belief that CD22 is degraded after internalization, the study demonstrates that CD22 is constitutively recycled back to the cell surface of B cells.

• Differential Cargo Fate: The fate of the cargo depends on what is bound to CD22:

  • Glycan Ligand-Based Cargo: This cargo is released from CD22 in the endosomes due to the low pH, and subsequently accumulates intracellularly as the CD22 receptor continues to cycle. This accumulation happens because the glycan ligand binding to CD22 is attenuated at pH 6 and largely abolished at pH 5.

  • Anti-CD22 Antibodies (aCD22): Antibodies, which do not release from CD22 at low pH, remain bound to CD22 and recycle with the receptor back to the cell surface, thus failing to accumulate inside the cell.

• Implications for Therapy: The results suggest that the efficacy of B cell-targeting agents, especially for delivering cytotoxic cargo (immunotoxins), may be facilitated by using pH-sensitive glycan ligands rather than antibodies, as this mechanism allows the therapeutic payload to be released and accumulated inside the cell.

Me: Great summary! Can you now create an image that summarizes this text?

Oof. Setting aside for a minute the fact that somehow the endoplasmic reticulum and golgi apparatus (which are not part of this process) seem to have been miniaturized and confined to an endosomal compartment for no apparent reason, there is nothing on the surface of the cell. The whole point is that CD22 shuttles cargo from the outside in, then goes back out for more.

So I tried the latest version of ChatGPT. It returned the image on the left below. It wasn’t even close, so I just chose one issue to attempt to correct, playing the part of a client trying to coax a better result.

Me: Can you try again, but in addition to the purple antibody, make another one with five copies of the antibody in a radially symmetric arrangement with the Fab arms facing outward (IgM)?

Nope, and nope.

Recraft doesn’t support uploading a paper, so I just used the summary above with a little extra direction.

Me: Using the summary below, create an image that shows CD22 receptors on a B cell surface internalizing both an IgG antibody and an IgM antibody. The IgG stays bound to CD22 and comes back out to the surface when CD22 recycles. In contrast, the IgM antibody gets dropped off inside the cell, so CD22 comes back out empty and binds more. Here are more details. [“Key Findings” above]

I’m not sure where to begin with this one. Now there seem to be viruses involved and a bridge to nowhere.

Moving on. I tried FigureLabs.

This seemed to be headed in a better direction, except that the receptor CD22 looked like an antibody, and then, somehow, it was an antibody, and the cargo got into the cell on its own, or possibly the CD22 turned into the cargo. I decided to let it try again.

I tried to suggest changes to this one, but I had already used up my free prompts. Anyway, maybe this will improve, and there is obviously reason to believe it will. But even if it eventually solves the problem of illustrating a 14-year-old result, how will it ever be able to depict truly new discoveries that it couldn’t have been trained on? And also why would scientists want to put their brand new discoveries out there to be trained on and possibly discovered by someone else?

I know, I know, prompts matter, so I tried one last thing.

Me: Create a scientific diagram of a cross-section of a spherical cell. Receptors on the cell surface bind to a starfish, where each starfish leg binds to two copies of the receptor. The receptor looks like a stack of small spheres in a rod-like shape. Show some of the receptor-starfish complexes being swallowed by the cell into circular vesicles. Inside the vesicles, the starfish are released, and then show another vesicle with empty receptors returning to the surface to pick up more starfish.

Photoshop, Recraft, and Gemini, respectively:

So, human science illustrators are needed, and maybe more than ever. But government-funded scientists are in a really tough spot now. Threats to funding mean they might not be able to afford to hire a professional for their graphics, but, paradoxically, because there might be higher competition for a smaller pot of money, they can’t afford not to take communication seriously.

Obviously, I am biased, but I feel strongly that scientists ought to know about people like recent Duke grad Sophia Kuhn, who majored in Chemistry and is now looking for opportunities to share her talents in science illustration, with a passion and maturity that belies her age. And Ella Watkins-Dulaney, a recent Ph.D. from Nobel laureate Francis Arnold’s lab at Caltech, who offers a diverse range of science communication skills, knowing that adaptability is everything in the face of an uncertain future. She and Emma Erickson, who has a Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology from UT Austin, have day jobs in publishing capacities that allow them to use their skills, but they also take freelance work. There are science illustrators who haven’t left the bench, like pharmacology Ph.D. Behnoush Hajian, who taught herself 3D modeling skills that complement her keen sense of design and composition, forged from a lifelong photography practice. Gloria Fuentes spent decades in biomedical research until her growing concern about funding for science gave her an epiphany about the crucial role of communication, leading her to science illustration. She clued me in when Claude and BioRender had partnered up2. Some illustrators run full-blown studios like scicomm veteran Nicolle Rager Fuller, who was generous enough to get on the phone with me when I first began considering this as a career, and 3D artist and animation whiz Mao Miyamoto, who I had a lovely chat with over hot chocolate at L.A. Burdick’s in Harvard Square when she was just starting out.

You would be in good hands with any of these artists, but even if you’re not in the market, enjoy their portfolios!

Two weeks in, we had Parents’ Nights at the kids’ schools. We were led through a typical day in the lives of our students—10 minutes in each class, shuffling awkwardly through crowded halls at the bell. Our sixth-grade son’s science teacher asked us to write down what learning style we thought worked best for our kids. I wrote, on behalf of the kid whose nose is always in a fantasy book, “storytelling and mystery”.

Our eighth-grader’s science class, we were told, would be structured into two main sections: life science, including genetics and evolution, and physical science, including physics and chemistry. Now, I know it’s not the teacher’s job—nor should it under any circumstances be mine—to write the curriculum. Outwardly, I smiled and nodded, because even though teachers are increasingly younger than me, the teacher-pleaser inside me still thinks we are eight years old. But the clamouring inside my head sounded like this: What?!? Life science IS chemistry! They are NOT in separate categories!1

The next week, I came across the following passage in the book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn by Amanda Gefter, who regular readers will remember as the writer who recently unearthed the work of the nearly forgotten Peter Putnam. The book hilariously describes how her passion for physics (despite never formally studying it) led her to pose as a science journalist until she became a real one. After describing how the compass Einstein’s father gave him when he was four years old ignited his curiosity about unseen forces in Nature, she wrote this:

My father, too, had offered me my first clue that reality is not what it seems. Only in my case the clue wasn’t an object but an idea, and instead of turning out to be Einstein I grew up to be a counterfeit journalist with more questions than answers. Still, it occurred to me now that the best gift a parent can give a child is a mystery.

And then later, at work, an encouraging article in Endpoints News grabbed my attention: “Regeneron heads to FDA with treatment for very rare bone disease”. The disease is called fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), and for these patients, their muscles, tendons, and ligaments are slowly replaced by bone.

The story that follows actually took place over a few conversations, but this is basically how it happened. Like many kids, our 11-year-old went through a Harry Potter phase, reading every book, waving wands, and putting spells on us. So when I asked him if there was a spell for turning people to bone, he thought for a few seconds and said, “Petrificus totalis.”

I asked him and his 13-year-old brother to imagine that happening in real life, with no spells to reverse it. They let that sink in. As usual, they had questions. “At what age does this happen? Is it only older people? And, do the nerves turn to bone too, so they don’t feel the pain?” I had to tell them that it can start at ages younger than theirs, and no, sadly, it’s very painful. The 13-year-old made a sound like he’d been punched in the gut. I hadn’t even told them that patients’ ribcages become so rigid that most die of cardiorespiratory failure by their 50s.

Then, I told them the good news about the new medicine, dropping it in that the scientists had to figure out how it was happening first. And then the magic happened. They said, “Wait, how is it happening??” I had them.

I told them about the network of proteins in their bodies that pass a message from one to the next, chemically whispering, “Make more bone. Pass it on.” There is also a protein in the network that whispers “Stop making bone” when the body doesn’t need it. But for patients with FOP, the recipient of this cease-and-desist message has a specific mutation that makes the message sound instead like “Make more bone.” It passes the wrong message on, like the breakdown in a game of telephone.

Scientists at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals pinpointed this mechanism2 and then found a way to fix it,3 ultimately creating a medicine that keeps the misunderstood protein away from the mutated one. It worked so well that the clinical trial’s independent monitoring board recommended that they start giving it to the placebo group. It would be cruel not to.

I asked the kids how we could tell the story as a mystery, and they had an idea for a novel written from the perspective of a kid with FOP who was starting to feel symptoms, but his parents had decided not to tell him the truth. Ignoring for the moment how easily they were able to evoke these gaslighting parents, I asked them to go on. So the kid, who is not a scientist, has to find a way to solve the mystery before it’s too late.

That reminded me of David Fajgenbaum’s memoir, Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope into Action. It is the true story of a medical student and former Georgetown quarterback who came down with a mysterious disease, then raced to figure out how to treat it in between (and sometimes during) five near-death experiences over the course of years.

It also reminded me of Sonia Vallabh and her husband Eric Minikel, who left promising careers in law and urban planning, respectively, after Sonia lost her mother to prion disease in 2010 following a rapid decline that started at age 51. Sonia learned that she had the same DNA mutation in her prion protein gene, making it all but certain that she would suffer the same end—a hideous dementia followed closely by death. Fifteen years, two Ph.D.s, and at least one promising drug candidate later, they are witnessing what few scientists ever get to—the therapy they developed is currently being tested in clinical trials.

So on the eve of the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, let me point out that science is full of stories like these, and stories like these are full of chemistry. The bone formation that becomes uncontrolled in FOP involves a change in states of matter from ions in solution to the solid crystal lattice of hydroxyapatite, made up of both ionic and covalent bonds in dizzying symmetries. David Fajgenbaum discovered (Spoiler Alert) an overabundance of a protein in his blood for which there was already an FDA-approved chemical that blocks it. That chemical (rapamycin) is still saving his life 11 years later. Sonia Vallabh’s mutation causes a protein to fold incorrectly, exposing amino acids whose chemical properties lead to its aggregation in the brain. As humans, we are wired for storytelling, maybe none so more than kids. And there are so many mysteries in medicine remaining for them to solve.

“So is this a mommy blog now?” you may be asking. I don’t think so (I would have called it Signs of a Struggle), but that’s not for me to say. What I do know is that how kids learn science is everybody’s problem. Because how the next generation thinks about science as they approach voting age affects us all.

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The inspiration for this post began at 5am on a Monday at Boston’s Logan International Airport. I was on my way to Indiana to attend a memorial for a friend—my best friend Shelby’s brother—lost at the unfair age of 50. For some reason my kids like to point out that when someone dies of cancer, the cancer dies too. So, take that, cancer.

My trip there and back was about 30 hours total and included four flights, each so short that the flight attendants took my coffee back while it was still hot. Meanwhile someone at work was waiting for a slide, and I needed, quickly, a silhouette of a human with a subset of specific organs shown. I’d tried to assemble it using handy illustration libraries like BioRender and Servier Medical Art but I wasn’t satisfied with the results. I knew I’d just make it myself, but I was facing the prospect of taking my computer in or out of my overstuffed backpack sixteen times. At the last minute, I’d packed my sketchbook.

The slide recipient was delighted with the hand-drawn anatomy. At the same time, I’d been tasked with coming up with images for a symposium honoring the late Harvard synthetic chemistry giant Yoshito Kishi who died at age 85. So while I was in the air I also drew this, which, by virtue of its physical form, became a gift for his daughter.

Now I’m back to keeping a sketchbook in my purse at all times like I used to. Not that I’d ever stopped drawing. Early this year when I realized my oldest wasn’t going to have a single art class in all of 7th grade I took matters into my owns hands, literally. Legendary science illustrator Graham Johnson once told me that if I wanted to improve, I should go home and draw my hands and feet fifty times. It’s great advice because these subjects offer constant availability and just the right amount of challenge. (Remember what a hard time AI had with hands for a while?) My son and I stood side by side at a giant sketch pad propped on an easel, our left hands posed in mid-air, as I urged him to see only shapes and lines at certain angles. I told him we didn’t care at all about the outcome, that this was no different than the discipline of his daily workouts for baseball. No winning or losing. We were just getting in reps. The purpose was not to draw, but to see. After the lesson I sought feedback from him because I am needy. He said, “I liked how you told me to not think of them as fingers.”

So what does this have to do with science? If you’re in the business of being in the company of scientists, you’ve probably seen (or been) that person who looks at data and sees what no one else in the room saw. Those people see beyond their expectation of what the data should look like, and that insight can make all the difference. Looking at the world as though you’re trying to draw it can build that same muscle. It might even make us more curious.

But who has the time to draw regularly? I know, I don’t either. Here is where a technique called gesture drawing is handy. Art students know the technique well as quick sketches completed in 1-5 minutes to capture a pose—the curve of a back, the angle of a head. Lately I’ve been pulling out my sketch book for a few minutes at a time to capture our dog. She is a tiny mop of long black hair from which occasionally appear two eyes and a nose, but more often I’m not sure which end is which. She’s a frequent but restless napper, so unlike traditional gesture drawing, which involves setting a timer, I’m at her mercy. Here are a few sketches done in one sitting, noting the trigger that interrupted each pose.

I might have three seconds or three minutes; there is no way to know. If we reach the time scale of minutes, then there is always an arbitrary moment when I feel I’ve reached bonus time. I can’t believe my luck, because I know that once it’s over, the pose is gone, never to be exactly replicated. It feels like I’ve frozen time or it’s stretched for me the way it slows the closer an “observer” gets to the speed of light. It comes with a heightened state of awareness of all our bygone moments. The feel of your child’s cheek on your bare shoulder. A brother gone too soon. So that I strain even more urgently to really see.

Gesture drawing can be done with anything, including but not limited to a kid watching TV, your own hand, a partner doing the crossword, a pet, a bird out your window, even a complete stranger. I keep a small sketchbook in my purse for the same reason I keep a paperback in there: waiting rooms, airports, long lines, warmups for kids’ sporting events. It’s never too late to start this practice. Richard Feynman started drawing when he was 44 years old and continued for the rest of his life. If you do, please tell me about it! Experience the time warp for yourself. Send me a sketch or two. You can respond directly to this e-mail. If I collect enough, maybe I’ll do a future post about them.

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On a gorgeous day in Kendall Square last week I took a walk to get lunch. It was 70 degrees—25 degrees cooler than two days prior—so when I happened upon this balled-up bunny, I wondered if it was confused. But it didn’t look confused. It looked anxious, scared, even as it was leaving itself recklessly exposed. It squatted there stock-still as if carved out of wood as people rushed by. No one else seemed to notice it so for a split second, I wondered if I was imagining it, manifesting it from my own malaise. In case anyone else is feeling it too, I thought I’d share some things I’ve found uplifting recently.

First, I learned from the Substack Your Local Epidemiologist that a group of public health professionals had started sitting down with supporters of the grassroots movement Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) to hear each other out. The conversation was hosted by the podcast Why Should I Trust You? and it continues in various ways to this day.

Science writer Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, put it well when he said that the problem isn’t that we have science skeptics. We should all be skeptical about science. We should be framing our challenges “not as being anti-science, but being pro-power and pro-profit.” But even that isn’t simple when you consider that, for example, the immunotherapy revolution that stunned us all by sending Jimmy Carter’s stage 4 melanoma into remission might have never made it out of Jim Allison’s academic lab if not for its ability to make a profit. And this is true of just about any life-saving medication. Profit isn’t a dirty word. It’s why people disclose conflicts of interest all the time. Just because someone makes money from science doesn’t mean they necessarily put profit in front of people. Former Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins came on the Why Should I Trust You podcast and talked about this. He doesn’t think we should stop talking about getting the model right, and there is certainly room for improvement. But it is also true that medicines from this system—and from Collins’ life work—now allow cystic fibrosis patients to plan their lives, not their funerals. And this is true of more diseases all the time.

The post describing the meeting between public health experts and MAHA advocates includes a screenshot of the Zoom call. I was deeply moved by it. On a recent visit back to Indiana, I saw a quilted table runner being gifted from one friend to another on the banks of the river near where I grew up. Having just written about how paintings were how I say I love you, I thought, a hand-made quilt is the quintessential I-love-you art, isn’t it? I imagined sewing a quilt using fabric printed with the squares of the participants’ not-mad-looking heads from the Zoom screenshot, because they all found a way to say I love you to humanity by being there. Nothing seems more wholesome than quilt-making until you consider that it is, technically speaking, violently stabbing fabric with a sharp needle over and over, accompanied by an incessant and monotonous sound drowning out even your own thoughts, which is how it can feel to listen to people we disagree with. But if we pan out, maybe we can see that listening is what it takes to stitch us back together. Then I started seeing this thread all over.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a book event for my brilliant friend Lisa S. Gardiner’s new book Reefs of Time: What Fossils Reveal About Coral Survival, on what fossilized coral reefs can teach us about Earth’s past and future. An audience member asked her for tips on getting people to care about climate change. She lamented that there was no good answer to this but described her own place-based approach. It’s admittedly hard to scale, but when she’s talking to farmers in Nebraska, she’s talking about weather. On the coast of Louisiana, it’s about sea level rise and pollution. To get someone to care about something, you have to know what they already care about, and that comes with listening.

Journalist and liberal daughter of Republican parents Mónica Guzmán came onto my radar years ago when I heard her say that we can’t be curious and judgmental at the same time—that these are two different modes. I was skeptical, so I tried it. She was right. I recommend her 2022 book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. And now I’ve just learned that she is involved in Braver Angels, an organization that is on a mission to catalyze these conversations by actively bringing people together from opposite sides of the divide.1

Finally, this isn’t a recent discovery, but I was reminded of Sally Kohn’s 2018 book The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide for Repairing Our Humanity. It is a twist on Elie Wiesel’s famous quote that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. Sally argues convincingly—and with deep research into the evolution and psychology of hate—that the opposite of hate is connection. She is a liberal political commentator and has been a contributor on Fox News. She’s drawn no small amount of criticism, but a touching story in her book describes reaching out to people who’d been trolling her on social media. For those she could coax out from under the bridge, she found them surprised that they weren’t being pulled out for a slap on the wrist, and all the more chastened for it. She found a shared humanity that she could easily extrapolate to those she couldn’t coax out.

The sidewalk bunny that launched this reverie reminded me of how similar fear and anger look. And even as I wanted to help it (knowing it didn’t want my help), I also imagined it seizing on me as I walked by like a scene out of Monty Python. But mostly, I was curious. And that feels like a good start.

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Gregor Mendel, the posthumous father of genetics, is a recurring character in my ongoing argument that science communication matters. I often cite his struggle to communicate his pea plant breeding results as the reason he died in obscurity while the field waited decades for someone to find them again. Now, Massachusetts-based science writer Amanda Gefter has unearthed an incredible story of a nearly forgotten genius named Peter Putnam, published a couple of weeks ago in Nautilus Magazine. Born into a wealthy family, Putnam excelled at physics, went to Princeton, and developed a theory of the mind that, like Mendel’s theory of inheritance, was far ahead of its time. He impressed Albert Einstein and worked with some of the most prominent physicists of that era. At the age of 60, Putnam was struck and killed by a drunk driver while riding a bicycle to his job as a janitor in Houma, Louisiana. Through a labor of love and with the help of some notable physicists who’d seemed to be waiting for her, Gefter beautifully fills in the gaps of his story. It has art, science, a problematic mother, storage units bursting with endless boxes of Putnam’s nearly indecipherable and narrowly rescued writings, and a great, enduring love. I feel so strongly that everyone should go read this piece right now that I would like to yield the remainder of my time to the gentlewoman from Shelburne Falls, MA: the honorable Amanda Gefter.

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Which is when I realized that I had no idea how to show him my paintings. I know this dates me, but most of my paintings were done before we all carried cameras around in our pockets. He wanted to see something, so I showed him my website of science illustrations. He made a face. I’d tried to warn him. (“eh.”) My friend’s phone was at her ear, calling home for someone to snap photos of the many paintings of mine adorning their walls, but no one was there. We chatted a while longer and on our way out of the gallery, he called after us, “Stay friends forever!” As if we had a choice.

As a teenager, I spent much of my free time painting in a small corner room of our unfinished basement, idiotically smoking cigarettes around open jars of turpentine (sorry, Mom) and listening to an eclectic assortment of cassette tapes on my boom box—from Simon and Garfunkel to Ice Cube, Jimmy Hendrix to the Sister Act soundtrack. I spent the bulk of my senior year in the art room at school once I’d completed my graduation requirements. (I took exactly one AP class, by accident—chemistry.) We had a legendary art teacher named Terry Jackson who made news that year when our school won four of the five best-in-show Scholastic Arts Hallmark awards for the entire state of Indiana—two of them alone by my friend Amy—and a bounty of others. With his signature humility, Mr. Jackson was quoted as saying, “It’s never happened before and I don’t think it’ll happen again, but it’s nice it happened once.”

I don’t have pictures to share of the paintings I did that won that year. The Hallmark winner was a portrait of a classmate that was given to his Mom many years ago. Another was traded with Mr. Jackson at his request, his now hanging in my own Mom’s living room. The natural attrition of three cross-country moves likely befell the rest.

I kept up painting through college, graduate school, and postdoc. Once I had kids, I traded in my oil paints and canvases for crayons and sidewalk chalk, then cardboard puppet stages, then Endeavor space shuttles as Halloween costumes. By the time I looked up and realized I’d stopped painting, the world had moved on. Adobe Photoshop could turn a photograph into a virtual oil painting with a single click. Then came AI. What was the point? Besides, I’d managed to make my hobby my career, keeping up with the times, pixels my medium.

So then, am I an artist? This is still a complicated question.1 At some point, I realized that I didn’t have anything particularly profound to say about the world or what it means to be human. I realized I was more interested in humanity on a molecular level, especially when things go wrong, so we can discover ways to fix it. I realized I could more easily comprehend the results sections of the most obscure chemistry journal than an artist’s statement in a gallery. I tried on the moniker of “illustrator” for size, and that felt right. I like using my skills to try to explain complicated things. Besides, I thought, looking back at my oil paintings, they weren’t really that good.

Then one day, a few months ago, our 10-year-old asked me if I could teach him how to paint. He found an image of a cute kitten online (which turned out to be a painting itself2 ), and I gathered two canvases. Distracted shortly into the lesson by the Nerf basketball hoop in the same room, he asked if I would please just finish mine for him. And this was how I made my first oil painting in 13 years.

He wanted to display it in his 5th-grade classroom, which was unsurprising since he takes almost all of his drawings—the ones he doesn’t give to us—to school as gifts for his friends and teachers. It suddenly dawned on me that nearly every painting I did outside of my high school art room was for someone too, a close friend or family member. I’d barely let the paint dry before eagerly pressing them into someone’s hands. Most were portraits. My mother with her first grandchild on her knee. My best friend and her husband as a wedding gift, and then their baby years later. My maternal grandmother at age 18, painted for my grandfather who had lost her a few years before to Parkinson’s. This same grandfather, a man of few words, later told me that he talked to the painting every day, assuring me that it hadn’t started responding yet.

We weren’t an emotive family. Humor was our love language. But my son’s artistic generosity awakened me to a second language, quietly passed down through at least four generations. My paternal grandfather, a former police officer and World War II vet with half a finger missing from a carpentry accident, cross-stitched a large-scale version of my senior picture portrait for me. He painted ceramic leprechauns to place in his trees and to give away to friends and family. My Dad was fluent in this language too, I realized. He enjoyed spending days in his woodworking workshop making pieces for other people, mostly my Mom. This revelation helped me see that whether my paintings were any good or not was completely beside the point. It was how we said I love you. You can’t curate love. And AI can’t replace that.

My Dad died two weeks after Father’s Day in 2017. When I bought him a card, I knew it would be the last. I had no words to express what was in my heart, so I covered the card with little drawings from our life. Him at my softball games, fingers in the chain link outfield fence, where he wouldn’t have to suffer small talk with other parents. Him laying a blanket over me when I’d fallen asleep on the couch, and many more. He loved the card.

Is there anything you used to enjoy but stopped doing because it seemed pointless? Could it have been a way to say I love you, even if only to yourself?

If some of the work is esoteric, then basic science has become a misnomer, since “basic” has been co-opted to conjure pumpkin spice lattes and Top 40 music. If basic science were music it might be the band Neutral Milk Hotel—raw and truth-seeking and not for everybody but essential for its impact.

But I want to take a step back because even the misguided perspective that basic science is silly requires some knowledge of how science gets done. I have to admit that I was well over a year into my undergraduate chemistry degree before I understood that science wasn’t already finished, that new discoveries were happening all the time and all around me. Growing up I didn’t know any scientists. I majored in chemistry because I liked it but was pre-med by default until I discovered discovery in my undergraduate research labs. So if you are similarly unfamiliar or looking for a way to share with an unfamiliar friend or family member, then I hope the tiny glimpse of basic research below will help.

For this example, I went into the archives again. Eleven years ago my wistful yearning for lab journal clubs led me to create a series I called The Short Answer, wherein I would draw a comic about some hot-off-the-presses paper that I thought was cool. The one you’ll find at the end of this post—the last in the series—highlights work from Helen Blackwell’s lab in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Since then, I’ve learned from the book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker by Kathy J. Cramer1 that there is a large, hard-working swath of the Wisconsin population that doesn’t think much of people in Madison, particularly those whose jobs are paid for by the government. In chemistry professors, they may see their hard-earned tax dollars going to something whose importance we’ve failed to communicate. Would it help if they knew that the work the Blackwell lab is doing could inform medicines that may prevent a post-antibiotic world where a simple wound could lead to a deadly infection for which no antibiotics are available?

The reason is that the Blackwell lab studies a fascinating phenomenon known as quorum sensing—the coordination of behavior among bacteria who’ve gathered a large enough group of themselves. “I think we have a quorum,” they say with different types of chemical words. These conversations enable them to become virulent, form biofilms (every bit as ominous as they sound), and more. It may seem esoteric, but their ability to do this, and our ability to understand how they do this, became mortally relevant when, for example, ventillator-associated pneumonia became a major problem for COVID-19 patients.

I’m glossing over huge amounts of effort to understand quorum sensing from many scientists, but to boil it down, this work is particularly important because it is much harder for bacteria to develop resistance to an interrupted conversation than to murder. Finding drugs that kill bacteria is just an ongoing game of whack-a-mole as bacteria develop resistance to them. It only takes one bacterium with a lucky mistake in its DNA to survive and thrive and divide to make more. Here’s an animation I made 12 years ago of a bacterium that had, by chance, unwittingly developed the ability to destroy an antibiotic (arrows).

Targeting quorum sensing opens up enormous therapeutic possibilities. But we have to understand it first. Combating the existential problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is not something the private sector has typically funded. But don’t worry. The work will get done. It just might not get done here in the US. England, for example, is poised to open an institute dedicated to solving this problem. From their website: “At the Fleming Centre, Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust are driving solutions to antimicrobial resistance that are co-designed with patients, the public, and policy makers and underpinned by a rich and diverse evidence base.” How lovely. And thankfully, proving me partially wrong, companies like pharma giant Glaxo Smith Kline will partner with the British government to make this a reality.

Quorum sensing is also used by the commensal bacteria in our guts and on our skin to help keep us healthy. People here in the US can take a lesson from quorum sensing (and they are). As Bonnie Bassler, current chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton and leader in this field describes it, “The way bacteria get their power is that they communicate with a chemical language. They count their numbers, and then they recognize when they have the right number of bacteria locally that if all of them change their behavior in unison they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish as individuals because individually they’re too small.”2

And if you want a beautifully written book to illustrate what it’s like to try to make it as an academic in the sciences, check out Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. In the meantime, please enjoy this silly little taste of basic research. It gets a bit technical in the middle (this series was originally intended for a scientific audience) but stick around for the Kandinsky-inspired data visualization. I now realize it foreshadowed both my job in a data viz group three years after I made this comic and my ever-growing affinity for Kandinsky’s work in general.

I noticed a shrub that was still bare but for its yellow flower buds, straining against captivity, gasping for the sun, and I remembered a drawing I did in 2017. It represents the structure of a cube-shaped molecule with cobalt (flat-edged leaves) and manganese (serrated leaf). It was synthesized to mimic the water-splitting step in photosynthesis that generates oxygen (O₂) and hydrogen (H₂), the latter a highly sought-after renewable fuel that spews nothing but water vapor when burned.1 The apples are oxygen atoms, the pink flowers pyridyls, and the Gerbera daisy was a place where they tried many different additions to the manganese to tune the properties of the molecule.

The memory of this Springy little drawing gave me a strange sense of hope, making me wonder what’s been going on in the field of artificial photosynthesis since then. Turns out, a lot. I followed that bit of hope along the path of my own curiosity, and this is what I found along the way.

Act I: Mimicking the light-dependent reactions for electricity and fuel

Photosynthesis is a performance in two acts—the first a series of light-dependent reactions powered by the sun. Mimicking Act I of photosynthesis is how we got solar panels and devised catalysts to create liquid hydrogen from water.

Energy from the sun

In real photosynthesis, photons from the sun first liberate electrons from chlorophyll molecules. Electrons on the move make electricity. But you can’t even make your hair stand up by rubbing it with a leaf so how did we get to solar panels? Chemistry, physics, materials engineering, and a lot of basic research. Just two weeks ago a team at the Universität Würzburg in Germany published results on a stack of flat molecules that electrons hop along with high efficiency, as if through a wire.23 It could mean getting more bang for our solar buck.

In leaves, the electrons travel through a Rube Goldberg machine called the electron transport chain, storing energy that will then be used in Act II to turn carbon dioxide into carbohydrate. By the time they make that fuel that we love to eat, they’ve already made hydrogen like it was no big deal.

Harnessing the Hindenberg

But it is a big deal! Mimicking the water-splitting step like the flower power molecule I drew above allows us to store the energy in the form of liquid hydrogen fuel. Harvard professor Dan Nocera, perhaps the best known for this work, had already created and sold a company based on his “artificial leaf” catalytic technology many years before I drew that picture in 2017.4 More recently, the Department of Energy had seven “hydrogen hubs” planned, but four are now on the chopping block. It’s a controversial fuel whose safety is saddled with a dark history.

Liquid hydrogen is already used in rocket fuel but mimicking it at a practical scale to meet all of our energy needs requires massive improvements in efficiency, durability, and cost. But scientists and engineers have solved these problems before for things like semiconductors, solar cells, and even electricity itself.

Act II: Mimicking the dark reactions for CO₂ sequestration and useful products

In the second act of photosynthesis, known as the dark reactions only because they don’t need light, energy hoarded from the light reactions is used to convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Mimicking Act II of photosynthesis has inspired advances in sequestering carbon dioxide and turning it into other useful materials, including the final frontier: renewable fuel.

Concrete solutions to our carbon problem

Again, like all aspects of artificial photosynthesis, achieving these goals at a practical scale takes massive improvements in efficiency, durability, and cost. In the history of science, thorny problems have often been approached with contests that award large cash prizes for science and engineering solutions. From estimating the longitude of a ship at sea to reverse the epidemic of shipwrecks in the 1700s5 to laying the groundwork for germ theory in the 1800s6, these high-stakes competitions captured the public’s imagination. Even though the public is not as engaged as they used to be, because, Netflix etc., these sorts of competitions still happen. Inspired by the prize that led Charles Lindbergh to be the first to fly non-stop from New York to Paris, the X Prize (xprize.org) has been sponsoring competitions like this for 30 years with numerous concurrent privately funded prizes in the millions.

A recent $20 million carbon dioxide utilization prize was split between two companies, CarbonCure and CarbonBuilt, both of which have adjacent technologies for sequestering carbon dioxide into concrete, turning skyscraper construction into a carbon-negative endeavor.

But to really make a dent in our problems, any solution must be feasible on a massive scale. A current X Prize put an unprecedented $100 million up for grabs for the challenge of showing the ability to remove billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide from the environment without hurting it in any other ways.

Over a thousand teams entered. $1 million Milestone Prizes were given to each of 15 frontrunners after the first year, including teams using kelp forests to sequester carbon, electrochemistry to lower the acidity, and even the equivalent of a giant Tums for the ocean . The ocean is the world’s biggest CO₂ sink. The more CO₂ can be sequestered in or as other materials, the more of it can be taken in from the air. One team is piggybacking on existing infrastructure like desalination plants to scale up quickly.

The final twenty teams are now in the testing phase. The winner or winners of this competition are scheduled to be announced soon.7 X Prize just released the first 7-minute episode of a docuseries about the competition.8 There’s a lot to love about it and I recommend watching, but I couldn’t help but think if there was more focus on the humans themselves, it could easily be as compelling as The Great British Bakeoff. Why isn’t it on Netflix? You know there has to be all sorts of drama, tension, and even romance both on and between these teams. The humans behind the science are fighting for their livelihoods and for the entire planet. For us. How much higher could the stakes be? What if they could draw as much attention as The Bachelor or America’s Got Talent?

The final frontier

Perhaps the most exciting prospect for the future is to take CO₂ from thin air (or water) and turn it directly into renewable fuel. Last fall a team at the University of Michigan funded by the U.S. Army Research Office announced a soup-to-nuts system with huge leaps in efficiency.9 They created light-capturing gallium nitride nanowires so thin that a bundle of a thousand would only begin to reach the width of a human hair. Submerged in the equivalent of seltzer water and dotted with copper, the nanowires soak up light, split water, and convert carbon dioxide to the 2-carbon ethylene, a building block of plastics. If they can string more carbons together they will start to have a real fuel. For now, they’re licensing the technology to a startup called NX Fuels. Again, we’re back to needing great strides in improving efficiency, cost, durability, and scale. But again, we’ve done it before.

Thanks for joining me on this brief learning spree, all of which was inspired by a silly 8-year-old drawing and some flower buds that insisted on bursting out into our world, such as it is. Here’s what the intrepid Forsythia’s been up to in the meantime:

As I tried to make sense of the things that were happening, I decided we should rewind and start with a simpler question. What makes people care about something? My son and I brainstormed ways we might get people to care about the Amazon rainforest. His class had read the book The Most Beautiful Roof in the World by Kathryn Lasky about ecologist and biologist Meg Lowman, who has spent much of her life in the Amazon’s canopy.1 My son’s first idea was to make a graph about the loss of trees. It reminded me of a study I’d read a few years ago in Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick, suggesting that data aren’t what make people care about something. Stories are.2 Then I heard the kids were writing illustrated fictional narratives, and a plan clicked into place.

Arriving a few minutes early, I perused science illustrations pinned to the board outside the room—colorful drawings of flowers, annotated with intricate insets of stomata and chlorophyll and chemical formulas of photosynthesis. I felt wistful for the time when I would have come here just to make something like this with them.

Instead, I started by sharing this quote from an old Native American proverb with the class: “Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.”

Then I shared the aforementioned study. A group of participants was paid $5 each to take a survey about technology products. But this, I told them dramatically, was not the experiment! On their way out the door, the researchers casually asked them to read a brief letter and, if they wanted to, they could donate some portion of their $5. Half of the participants read a letter about hundreds of millions of people in multiple African countries facing drought, hunger, and forced relocation. The other half read a letter about a 7-year-old girl named Rokia facing the same challenges, whose life would be “changed for the better” by any donation. The group that read the first letter gave an average of $1.14. The second group, $2.38.

I shared a quote from Mother Theresa that reinforced these results: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”3

While educating myself about what makes people care, I had encountered another compelling idea. If you want someone to care about something, you need to show that you care about them. Storytelling with an awareness of your audience’s struggles is powerful. Some groups even weaponize it while others continue to fight back with data and logic. Would the latter be stooping to some level if they used anecdotes that connected emotionally with the lives of their audience? Not at all. Storytelling isn’t inherently good or bad—it just depends on whether it’s grounded in truth.

We should all be skeptical of stories, and data too for that matter. The question is whether there is solid data to support the anecdote. This is where my son’s tree graph comes in. I learned that a few years ago, scientists discovered that heavily deforested parts of the Amazon, once hailed as the lungs of the earth, are now emitting more carbon than they absorb.4 Climate change researcher Luciana Gatti took stomach-turning flights—far above the canopy where Meg Lowman had spent decades—to capture the air samples that would reveal this reversal in earth’s fortune.

But for the kids, I kept it simple. I said to them that if they told me some big number of panthers in the Amazon rainforest is endangered because of clear cutting and poaching, I would think, “That’s awful. I hate that.” But what can I do? I work all day, come home, cook dinner, make sure the kids do their homework and brush their teeth. Within a day or two I’d probably forget what you told me. But if you tell me a story about one panther who is worried about keeping her cubs fed and safe in a changing habitat as other panthers around her mysteriously disappear and she doesn’t understand why any of it is happening or if it will ever stop, well, that story will live in my heart. I probably won’t quit my job and become Meg Lowman, but the next time I see a news article about poachers killing panthers in the Amazon, I’m much more likely to click on it, thinking of that mama panther. I’m more likely to do something.5

Then the kids started sharing the bones of their stories and we all brainstormed ways they could use the ideas we’d just learned to make their readers care. One of the 5th graders planned to end his story with his main character, a spider monkey, in utter despair. A 2018 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review called The Science of What Makes People Care argues that while we want our stories to make people feel something, saddling our readers with guilt or hopelessness won’t make them care because we humans excel at avoiding these emotions. Rather, envisioning a hopeful future may be more likely to inspire action to achieve that future. I didn’t say any of this to the kids, and yet a wise student suggested to his friend a final act of kindness bestowed upon the spider monkey from a more fortunate animal.

Then, because they were tasked with illustrating their stories, I stepped onto more solid ground. I told them they didn’t have to be amazing artists to make people feel something with their drawings. I showed them Molly Bang’s beloved 1991 book Picture This, in which she watches herself respond emotionally while exploring with simple shapes. Using the story of Little Red Riding Hood, she casts the young prey as a red triangle. An assortment of vertical black rectangles soar off the top of the page, tucking her into a forest. Three black triangles become a wolf (later ten including teeth). She explores different compositions, relative sizes, and the emotional impact of colors, finding herself more connected to Little Red Riding Hood when she is closer to the foreground, and more afraid of the wolf when it is bigger. Tilting some tree trunks created a precariousness that added to the sense of foreboding and menace. Rounding out the sharp points of the wolf’s snout had the opposite effect. I wanted the kids to do this same kind of exploration on their whiteboards.

To make it relevant to their stories, I gave an example on the big whiteboard of a poison dart frog with a level of detail I knew many of the kids could easily pull off. I explained how placing it close up in the foreground made me feel more connected to it, and with it facing us, it couldn’t see what was coming up behind it. We imagined what that could be. Maybe fires set after clear cutting, often sweeping up unsuspecting little frogs like this one. (Later my son would start coloring it in but have to abandon it ultimately for recess.)

I also imagined a bird returning to what used to be her home, only to find farmland as far as her little avian eyes could see. Where once she had been protected by a canopy so thick it was nearly dark underneath, now the sun beat down on her. There arose such a murmur and burst of ideas that I didn’t even finish the sun’s rays.

Later a bespectacled girl who had been quiet until now showed me her drawing of a colorful macaw standing on a felled tree in the bright sunlight, gazing off into the distance. “Do you like it?”, she asked me. I did, very much. But I hope the 5th graders will learn to ask questions like, “Does this make you feel something? Does it make you care? Are you trying to make me feel something? What is the evidence that your story is grounded in truth? What is the evidence that mine is?”

We have reached the 2nd anniversary of this newsletter’s inception and I’m feeling immensely grateful to all of you who open this e-mail month after month. Without you, I don’t know where I would put all of these thoughts clanging around in my head. As English author E.M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”1 Thank you for listening.

I also find myself in a reflective mood. We set out two years ago on a mission to explore the role of art in the advancement of science. I used science communication as a jumping-off point, assuming that everyone agreed on its value. But as I explored beyond communication, I had the nagging feeling I’d left something important behind, like that time we went camping and left the tent poles at home.

Nevertheless, I forged ahead. We considered how poetry and music can make science more memorable and open it up to a wider diversity of personality types. We met a scientist who finds purpose in his artistic practice, creating glass-blown sculptures of T cells attacking cancer cells for immunotherapy patients. We saw how a drawing of d-orbitals on a chalkboard kept a preeminent scientist from dropping out of college. We found many, many connections between the pursuits of science and art. We’ve kept a close eye on AI and are not worried for science illustrators yet.

Sprinkled through many of these posts is my gathering drumbeat of making art with scientists. I argue that drawing shouldn’t start only when the science is done. Drawing what you think is happening can unlock insights and ideas that are just waiting for the right question to be asked. I ask lots of questions when I’m working on illustrations for people, and am gratified when the answer is, “Huh, I hadn’t thought of that.” Just last week someone said, “No one has ever asked me that before.” (Not necessarily a good thing.) But he realized he was resting on a certain assumption, and went away to think about it some more. I assure you that this does not reflect any brilliance on my part. I had heard him talk about this project twice before and never had this question. It was only when I sat down to draw it. And I’m not the first to notice this phenomenon. Janet Iwasa, a Ph.D. cell biologist turned scientific animator, has been saying this for many years. She collaborates closely with scientists on making highly accurate 3D animations of their research, and she has seen the aha moments. I think that the more we involve scientists in the process, maybe even putting the pencil in their hand, the more questions and insights will arise.

So why did I keep finding myself hesitant to do engage them more? I am fiercely protective of scientists’ time, but I see the clear value of this activity for innovation and avoiding dead ends. What was the problem? That was when I finally saw myself, scrabbling around under all that tarp with no poles. I had been resting on my own assumption that since everyone saw the value of art for science communication, it was hardly a stretch to use it for this other purpose, while knowing subconsciously that it wasn’t true.

As I’ve said before, the real tragedy of Gregor Mendel, posthumously named the father of modern genetics after dying in obscurity, was how many decades the field of human genetics was set back before scientists rediscovered his work on peas. He hadn’t been able to effectively communicate his results, which were complex and far ahead of his time. I’ll bet a figure or two would have helped.

So the stakes are really high, but nearly all of my freelance commissions are journal cover art. Cover art is wonderful for the publishers who get it for free. It is possibly helpful to the scientists whose work is highlighted (if their gamble of paying an artist to compete for the cover pays off). And it’s great for the artists, but I’d love to see that market move to the insides of the journals, where everyone—authors, readers, artists, and science—benefits.

Trying to make sense of this mismatch between need and demand, anecdotes from the past started popping into my head, like the last day of my postdoc, when a labmate asked me if I would miss being in lab. I was going off to teach college chemistry and start my science illustration business, but when I said I would miss doing experiments, he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll still do lots of experiments in the kitchen.”2

This may have been more a case of casual misogyny than dismissiveness about art, but then a few years later, I ran into a former female professor of mine who said to me, “So this is what you’re doing with your life?”

Sometimes people had no qualms about telling me exactly what they thought about my life choices. Here’s a gem: I was on a panel about non-traditional careers in science for an audience of younger students. A concerned parent came up to me afterward, genuinely curious how I justified squandering my MIT Ph.D. to do this.

I realize now that this is why I cringe whenever a well-meaning person innocently refers to my work as “prettying up”. I know it comes out as a compliment, but unpleasantness like the aforementioned makes it hit my ears with an unintended derisiveness. I feel compelled to argue that in science communication, pretty is the byproduct of good design, which considers things like principles of human perception and pre-attentive processing. I’ll have more to say about the important role of aesthetics in a future post, and I don’t always get it right the first time, but in my professional work, I try to adhere to the Bauhaus principle that “form follows function” and the Shaker design philosophy—“Don't make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful.”

So we still have some more work to do. Perhaps the need for clear science communication in our society has never been greater. Maybe it’s time to go back and get those poles.

This topic had already been on my mind because of an exercise I’m eager to try with the scientists I work with, but before I get to that I’d like to explore the issue by grappling with the times I’ve borrowed famous artists’ styles for my own work.

An obvious question is: why are you mimicking the style? In some cases, a client has asked me to, such as this candidate cover art in the style of French avante-gard artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), the first living female painter to have a retrospective at the Louvre.

The client had a specific reason for choosing this artist, and explained it in the submitted cover description. The journal’s editors said that even though it didn’t look like any one of her paintings, the style was too similar. As I wrote about in the September 2023 issue of this newsletter, we were sent back to the drawing board, and this artwork now only hangs in the office of one of the disappointed clients.

Another client asked me to create cover art in the style of Takashi Murakami (1962-). This was dicier because he is still living, but his paintings sell for several millions of dollars apiece. I made the cover below for a highly technical scientific journal, so it seems unlikely it would affect his livelihood. It is also much too different from any of his actual works to risk legal trouble. But, what would he think? I like to think he would say that he was influenced by anime and manga (which he was), and that every artist is influenced by previous ones.

“Good artists copy; great artists steal” is a quote usually attributed to Pablo Picasso but also sometimes to Steve Jobs. I’ve never liked the quote, but I understand the sentiment. Copying is what our 10-year old does when he draws characters from the video game Brawl Stars as impressively faithful representations of what he sees on the screen, then gives them away to his friends. It’s what Hunter S. Thompson did when he retyped large portions of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to get a sense of their rhythm and style. It’s artists training on other artists’ work. The second portion of that quote means taking elements of another artist’s style but making it your own. I considered whether it would bother me if someone used my style. My only somewhat discernible style is probably my proteins, which I would have to admit were inspired at least a dozen years ago by the character Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. In this cover art for the Journal of the American Chemical Society, I took elements from the style of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) but made it my own.

Much of Kandinsky’s work is now in the public domain in the US because they were made over 95 years ago. So technically I could have submitted an exact copy of one of his paintings for cover art with some hand-wavy justification for why it describes a mutagenizing chimera. But it’s better that I made this homage, right? Or is it? What if Kandinsky would have been horrified by this inferior piece that undiscerning eyes might have inadvertently attributed to him? What if it damaged his reputation? I could also consider whether it would have offended his sensibilities. Kandinsky didn’t create abstractions of real objects like Picasso and others did, but rather created harmonies of color and form on the canvas, inspired by his love of music. He believed his art should only come from within, from what he called an “inner necessity”. I used his style but not his intention, since my forms are abstracted proteins and DNA. Then again, maybe that is what makes it my own.

The piece below was inspired by advances in gene editing that enable deletion or replacement of long stretches of DNA. No one asked me to draw it in the style of Joan Miró, it’s just how I pictured it when I envisioned the molecular process. Like the Delaunay tribute, it was passed over for cover art so not used for anything, and like Kandinsky’s work, many of his paintings are now in the public domain. If it seems like I’m seeking absolution, it’s worth noting that the AI field is still figuring out the ethics themselves. The generative AI image-creating Midjourney has a pre-set called “Joan Miró style”. But if you ask Adobe Illustrator software to generate “bowl of macaroni in the style of Joan Miró”, it will nobly respond, “One or more words in your prompt violate user guidelines. Please edit and try your prompt again.” I doubt the problem is macaroni.

What about Andy Warhol (1928-1987)? He had his own habit of appropriation, so I don’t feel too bad about this one. I think he would have approved, even if it was used to “sell” science as journal cover art. Unlike Kandinsky, who vehemently opposed materialism, Warhol’s work celebrated materialism and consumerism. Likewise, Murakami (above) entered into a collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

Given the widespread use of the Picasso quote about copying/stealing, drawing on someone’s style for inspiration is a generally accepted practice, considered inevitable, and has even been co-opted by another group by replacing the word artists with designers. From my digging, the general consensus is that it can and should be done, but with proper attribution.

Believing strongly in the benefits of an artistic practice to creativity in science, I began planning an art workshop for the scientists where I work. Some of them are artists themselves, but most don’t identify as such. People often claim, “I can’t draw,” unfairly excluding themselves from a world that is so much bigger than representational art. My hope is that inviting them to make art about their science in an abstract artist’s style might free them to draw and paint without worrying about style or skills. (This is not to say that abstract artists don’t have skill, but that they used it to do the work of developing the style already.) I believe such an activity can help people ponder their scientific work in a new light, question assumptions, and surface new ideas. But I paused to consider the ethical implications posed here. Having mulled it over, I see zero harm in this activity because the purpose is simply the process. Though I do dream of filling a wall or two in our space with these artworks as a perpetual source of inspiration.