New Science Faculty Videos

Check out these 3 wonderful new films on the Faculty of Science website, a really fascinating look behind the scenes at what it means to do science. As the web page says:

Researchers working on everything from theoretical chemistry, to geology, to psychology, discuss what it means to be a scientist in the 21st century, and what it takes to survive the emotional rollercoaster that sees them tackle frustration and failure before critical acclaim.

Here's a taster, entitled "Quantum collision: A Meeting of Science, Art, Dance and Music" - a beautiful and thought-provoking film:



There are also lots of profiles of the scientists who were interviewed in the films on the website. Says Aliya Mughal, part of the team who made the films:

In a nutshell, the films explore some of the perennial issues in science – the role and responsibility of science and scientists in how their discoveries are used; how scientists feel about the role they play (or not) in influencing policy when it comes to issues such as climate change, global poverty, etc; how much of science is about progress and impact and how much is about pure curiosity. That’s the first film. The second explores the idea of failure and how scientists deal with frustration and mistakes, what gives them the resolve and determination to continue, basically what it takes to succeed in science when you are continually reminded of how much you don’t know versus how much you do.

The film above focuses on danceroom spectroscopy (dS) –  spearheaded by Dave Glowacki, a science-meets-art interactive installation that brings the atomic world to life and seeks to encourage non-scientists to engage with the world around them at a molecular level. Dave’s project debuted at the Barbican in November so we followed his group from Bristol to London to show just how and why it works, with some very interesting perspectives from members of the public who were quite philosophical about how dS made them realise their place in the world!

The films take quite a candid look at the reality of science, hopefully offering a more personable insight into the ideas, thoughts and people that shape scientific discovery. Our aim was to pitch them in such a way to make science accessible, inspiring and interesting, and to move away from a pure academic exploration to a more imaginative one – in particular, we want to encourage more students to think about science as a creative, exciting (ad)venture that is worth pursuing on a multitude of levels. We worked with some of the newest recruits to the University, selected for their passion, enthusiasm and understanding of the importance of communicating about science.

As Sandra Arndt says in her Q&A, “Science is not really a job, it’s a passion. You get to follow your ideas and do what you really want to do," and this is something that really comes across in these wonderful films!Find it all on the Faculty of Science website.

Evo Devo Artist

There's a fascinating interview over on the blog of US literary 'zine Tin House with Anna Lindeman, who has a BS in Biology from Yale and an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:

AL: My work integrates animation, music, and performance to tell stories about evolutionary and developmental (Evo Devo) biology. I consider myself an Evo Devo artist.

My performance Theory of Flight begins as a biology lecture with scientist Alida Kear describing the developmental mechanisms of wing growth. The lecture goes quickly awry, though, when Alida reveals a feather she has grown on her own arm through the successful co-option of avian genes. It becomes clear that Alida’s interest in biological flight is rooted not only in scientific investigation, but also in a deeply personal quest for flight. The episodes of biology lecture, featuring increasingly extreme experiments, are punctuated by dream-like interludes that combine music performed by a singing bird spirit and a look into a cellular world animated with simple materials—yarn becomes DNA, lace and buttons become proteins.

Evo Devo stories appear throughout Theory of Flight. The lecture delves into the genetic mechanisms of feather development, evolutionary theories of flight, and ultimately, investigations into regenerative limbs and transgenics.

I like the way Anna talks about her work. She says:

I never felt inhibited by the facts that science provides us with; to me they are the richest treasure trove of source material. Beauty, absurdity, poignancy, whimsy—all of the sensations I hope to craft as an artist have already had some masterful manifestation in nature, and science is a profound way of understanding these manifestations. 

 Very inspiring! Read the whole interview here.

Science, poetry, funding and innovation

Two interesting articles in the Saturday Guardian struck me as worth mentioning. First, poet Ruth Padel, author of Darwin: a Life in Poems, talks about The Science of Poetry, The Poetry of Science:

"Poetry is about feeling, science is about facts. They're nothing to do with each other!" The A-level students in a school I visited last week were passionate on this point. Behind them was Keats, urging them on. "Philosophy," Keats said – meaning science – "would clip an angel's wings." Science was out to dissolve beauty, "Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine – / Unweave a rainbow …" Edgar Allen Poe agreed. Science was a "vulture" that shrivelled wonder. "Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, / The Elfin from the green grass; and from me. / The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?" 

I think this over-romanticises both poetry and science, which have got on fine for two millennia and today are enriching their dialogue. Michael Symmonds Roberts's collection Corpus came out of a conversation with scientists mapping the genome. Jo Shapcott's collection Of Mutability is expanding poetry's audiences in the medical community.

Padel (who mentions Erasmus Darwin - see my previous post), sums up: "The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they're right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. "A scientist should be the first to say he doesn't know," a tiger biologist told me when I asked some detail of tiger behaviour. "A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there." (Read the full article here.)

This might not seem to be precisely the case if you head over to Philip Ball's article in another section of the newspaper, where he is bemoaning the conservatism of funding bodies:

The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein's grant applications in 1905. "I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits," one might say. "I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up," goes another. Imagine what comments these would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a technical expert third-class at the Bern patent office. And that is how he invented quantum physics and relativity. 

The moral seems to be that really innovative ideas don't get funded – that the system is set up to exclude them.

As Ball says: "your proposal has to specify exactly what you are going to achieve. But how can you know the results before you have done the experiments, unless you are aiming to prove the bleeding obvious?" He talks about a new scheme being initiated by the US National Science Foundation to fund "'unusually creative high-risk/high-reward interdisciplinary proposals'. In other words, it is looking for new ideas that might not work, but which would be massive if they do." Read the full article here.

This fund, called CREATIV (not a very creative choice), might want to take some hints from poets about unknowns and uncertainties, perhaps?!  What are your thoughts - whether you are a poet, scientist or scientist-poet!

The Guardian on Art + Science

Although "When Two Tribes Meet" is to me a rather divisive title, compared to the Royal Society's insistence that we are all One Culture, there's a nice piece in the Guardian today about artists and scientists working together:

Yes, Leonardo da Vinci was both artist and inventor. True, Brian Cox was in that band before he gave it all up for the Large Hadron Collider. But in general, art and science seem to eye each other uncomprehendingly. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust has long tried to make artists and scientists work fruitfully together by funding collaborations. Can the divide ever be breached? I talked to four scientists and four artists who have worked together to find out.

... read the rest of the article here.

Dirt Story

I thought hard about the title for this blog post... did I want to attract the kind of readers I never normally attract??! What is this all about? Well, on my first visit to the excellent Wellcome Collection, a place which bills itself as "a free visitor destination for the incurably curious, exploring the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future", to see their exhibition last year on Skin, I found the artworks and exhibits they had collected were really inspiring to me as a writer.

Then... I was asked by Danny at the Wellcome Collection blog to write a 2-part blog post about fiction inspired by science...

And then... I heard about the new exhibition, 'Dirt' (on til end August) and i thought, What if I write a flash story inspired by the exhibition and offer it to Danny for the blog? To my delight, he agreed. And the result, a short short story called Her Dirt, is now published on the Wellcome Collection blog. A quick taste:

She keeps her dirt, and at first her dirt is enough. But then it isn’t. So she takes to taking.

There is history here. A clean clean child. Or, rather: demands for a clean clean child. A pure-white home, a childhood washing and re-washing. Do you need to hear of distant mothers and of even further-spinning fathers?

You can read the rest here this is the first piece of flash fiction to be on the WC blog - please feel free to leave your comments there and let them know if there should be more!  

Beautiful data

A lovely article over at Wired today:

That science has benefited immensely from technological advances in the last few decades, or even the last century, is a fact. But one research tool that many scientists would argue need not be improved is the handwritten field notebook.

Go over there to see the stunning artwork >>

Angel: Manipulating biologies: convergences and divergences of bioart and biosciences event

Controversial and unconventional, those are the words that come up into my mind every time I remember the content of Tuesday April 12th's "Manipulating biologies: convergences and divergences of bioart and biosciences" event at the Grant Bradley Gallery. As a scientist, I have been interested about the kind of concept that makes art and science relationship closer or distant. Nevertheless, my interpretation is more related with art being source of inspiration to science and not in the opposite way. Kira O’Reilly and Professor Paul Martin showed up their experience trying to answer scientific and philosophical questions based in the human body as a subject of research performing biotechnical techniques.

My body as a specific place to experiment and create science...

Kira O’Reilly's art is able to shock any kind of person with sense of safety, or well, conventional people dedicated to experimental science. I mean, when the artist showed pictures about injuries in her body, evoking traditional Chinese medicine, this act wasn’t anything out of conventions, many people use piercings or tattoos over their bodies. However, the idea to use her body as a material to create art and to ask oneself where the border of life begging and end sounds strange.

...decontextualization of flesh from the body as material, as living, to understand conditions to exist what is life...

 Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet - Untitled (Hamster Ovaries Protocol) series - The Art and Genomics Centre, University of Leiden, The Netherlands, 2008 Photo: Rune Peitersen

Breaking every rule is a good start to ask new questions and as a consequence create new perspectives about daily activities that might to be common for each people, for example persons involved in science. Let’s use the infinity behind your eyelids, close your eyes for few seconds draw the naked body of a woman inside a fume hood in your laboratory – keep in your mind these questions: What does it mean for you? What if you are the person inside this small place used to protect you against toxic substances? To be honest, when I saw that picture I felt totally confused because the elements are familiar for me, but something inside me said: What is the aim of this? It’s wrong. The most important thing is that maybe this outrageous picture has changed something introspective about me and the lab environment.

...researching how to build or rebuild tissues...

Professor Martin is carrying out a research in embryology, their main interest is focused on understanding the mechanism involved in the creation of human tissues. Professor Martin  has the belief that there are aspects from life sciences that can inspire artists to create art. During the talk was cited the case of a woman that created some fashion designs inspired by embryos. On the other hand, he declare that scientist has to think a little bit as an artist but the work of a scientist because they have to be a good observers.

These talks showed that both disciplines can interact in a dynamic dialog using different and common techniques or methods that allows the expansion of the knowledge and understanding of life.

Posted by Angel

Imagination is More Important Than Knowledge: Science-inspired fiction and poetry open mic night!

A wonderful time was had by all last night at the Grant Bradley gallery at the University's Changing Perspectives science-inspired fiction and poetry open mic night. I was host for the evening and, to kick the whole thing off, read my stories Experimentation (from the lab coat I'd written the story on for the Changing Perspectives exhibition) and Healing Wounds.

I was then more than delighted to hand the mic over to 14 readers, who read short stories, poems and excerpts from longer works, all in some way taking science as their starting off point. We moved from oxo cubes to cockroaches, aspirin to drowned cities, speculative Wessex fiction to gifted children, Brian Cox (!) to Pingu the penguin.

I have to say that I don't know about anyone else but I found it all extremely inspiring! We had such a range of readings, across many "genres" (although I hate labels), different styles and tones and subject matter. I loved it all: thank you to Jo, Cath, Stewart, Mary, Mazzy, James, Caleb, Amy, Franca, Tom, Colin, Gavin, Andy and Katrina!

Becky Jones - PhD student from the biochem lab I've been embedded in and organizer of the Art of Science competition - and I had the impossible task of picking just four people to give these wonderful books (above) to, so congrats to Jo, Caleb, Amy and Franca - but really congratulations to everyone, it was a wonderful celebration of using science as inspiration, whether you have any scientific background or not, none is necessary. As Einstein said: Imagination is more important than knowledge. I think he would have enjoyed last night.

Win beautiful books - come and read your science-inspired fiction and poetry!

On April 19th at 6pm at the fabulous Grant Bradley Gallery in Bristol, I am hosting an open mic night for fiction and poetry in any way inspired by science. This is part of the amazing Changing Perspectives month of exhibitions and activities bringing together art and science.. This event is completely FREE to attend (but booking is required, click here) and you can win one of several great prizes, including these books:

Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss

Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

When It Changed: Science Into Fiction, an Anthology edited by Geoff Ryman

The White Road and Other Stories by Tania Hershman (yes, that's me)

I will be judging, and the theme of the evening can really be interpreted however you like - any genre, any style, as long as something scientific in some way was the inspiration. (I wrote more on my thoughts about this on the Wellcome Collection blog)

To prepare for the open mic, I will be jointly running a science-inspired fiction workshop on Wed 13th April, which once again is completely FREE, at the Grant Bradley Gallery, 2-4.30pm - booking is required, see here. Come and write!

Changing Perspectives - videos inspired by science-inspired fiction

The launch on Friday of the Changing Perspectives art/science exhibition at the Grant Bradley Gallery in which I have several art pieces (my first time ever attempting a piece of artwork featuring some of my stories) was great fun! Do try and get down there if you are in Bristol - and check out all the events during this month long celebration of art inspired by science.

If you can't make it, here are two brand newly-commissioned films inspired by two of my short stories - which in turn were inspired by science. Enjoy!


'We are All Made of Protein but Some of us GLow More than Others ' from richard ocallaghan on Vimeo.

Read the short story of the same title that inspired this piece here.


'Like Flowers' from James Murray-White and Steve Mazillius on Vimeo.