Hypothetically Speaking - Can Anyone Learn Biochemistry?

“I literally had to be able to think, for example, ‘What would it be like if I were one of the chemical pieces in a bacterial chromosome? and try to understand what my environment was, try to know where I was, try to know when I was supposed to function in a certain way, and so forth” (Joshua Lederberg in Judson, 1980, p. 6).1

Just as Nobel laureate scientist Joshua Lederberg, had to learn how to imagine biology, not from outside in, but inside out, so have many others as Michele and Robert Root Bernstein point out, the former being a dancer and dance theorist and the latter being a physiologist.

2 Indeed, as they note in their all-important article “Body Thinking Beyond Dance,” Richard Feynman the physicist “was often observed rolling on the ground, twisting, jumping, and tapping his way to physical solutions” (p. 3). And to give one other notable example, Zafra Lerman, a chemist dancer has proven the effectiveness of using dance to teach chemistry by having the students internalize scientific knowledge though behaving like atoms.3

1 Judson, H. F. (1980). The Search for Solutions. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Somatic

2 See Michele Root-Bernstein and Robert Root-Bernstein, (2005), “Body thinking beyond dance: A Tools for thinking approach.” In L. Overby& B. Lepczyk, (Eds.), Dance: Current Selected Research, 5: 173-202. Also see Glenna Batson, (2012), Ex-Scribing the Choroegraphic Mind – Dance & Neuroscience in Collaboration, ,available at: http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/ex-scribing-the-choroegraphic-mind-dance-neuroscience-in-collaboration/. More generally see, Root-Bernstein, R. S. and M. Root-Bernstein. (1999). Sparks of Genius, The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 3 See Zafra Lerman (2001a, December). “Alternative methods to teach and assess science,” Chemistry in Israel, Bulletin of the Israel Chemical Society, 8, at http://www.weizmann.ac.il/ICS/booklet/8/con8.html and (2001b, August 3). “Visualizing the Chemical Bond,” Chemical Education International, 2(1) at http://cssj.chem.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ctc/. Also see, D. N. Rapp, (2005). “Mental Models: Theoretical Issues For Visualizations in Science Education.” In Visualizations in Science Education, ed. J. K. Gilbert. Netherlands: Springer, pp. 43-60 and M. Stieff (2011), “When is a molecule three dimensional? A Task-specific role for imagistic reasoning in advanced chemistry,” Science Education, 95 (2): 310-336.

cognition, body learning, particularly through dance, is thus an established pedagogical field. In this essay, I consider how the same could be done in order to imagine yourself as a series of chemical transformations known as the Krebs cycle, to imitate and thus understand through imagining yourself within the sub-cellular environment of the mitochondrion. But what on earth is a mitochondrion or the Krebs cycle? - I hear the non-science reader saying to themselves as they read this? Often, for members of the public without a scientific background, their quest for scientific knowledge begins when they are struck by an illness in the family, when confronted with their mortality. Recently the increased incidence or recognition of the incidence of a newly discovered form of illness called mitochondrial disease has come to our attention through the mass media, most specifically because of the resistance on imagined ethical grounds to the genetic replacement therapy that can prevent inherited mitochondrial disease.4

Very simply put, mitochondria are tiny organelles which occur in vast numbers in our cells and which are constantly being broken down and created.

So in that sense, though everyone I feel should know what are mitochondria and why they are important, the issue is forced upon society tragically, through disease and through objection to scientific advancements specifically designed to prevent suffering as I will briefly conclude the essay with by way of returning to C. P. Snow and the art versus science debate that raged fifty years ago and rumbles still.

5

The Krebs Cycle. It’s like a holy grail to me. For some reason this biochemical system among all others has held my attention across the years. Ever since the first time I learned about it in high school I’ve been entranced. I remember that day in 1978 as clearly as if it was yesterday. A student biology teacher from the University of Rhodesia now Zimbabwe, almost beside himself with excitement, keeps blurting out “this, this is the stuff of life” while carefully drawing the process out upon the board, the cycle and the production of biological energy within the

Mitochondrion are essential to our health as this is where biological energy is produced, in that elemental sense then, this is the very engine of life and the chemical process through which energy is produced in these tiny packets is called the Krebs cycle. Though I will be explaining the basic details about all this very simply, and using visual illustrations, my point is simpler than that. To really know this cycle you must be able to internalize it. The best way to do is through multi-sensory somatic learning, specifically through a hypothetical embodied interactive exhibit or biochemistry learning machine I call The Dance of Life.

4 See Sabrina Tavernise, “His Fertility Advance Draws Ire: Shoukhrat Mictalopov’s Mitochondrial Manipulations,” New York Times, March 17, 2014. The burgeoning state of research in the field is perhaps best indicated in the choice of the topic “Mitochondria, Metabolism and Disease” for the conference Hot Topics in Life Sciences, The New York Academy of Life Sciences, April 10, 2014. 5 Though Wikipedia is sometimes criticized as an educational resource in K-12 environments, it is mostly an excellent and evolving introduction to such topics, as in this case for the entry on mitochondrial disease, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_disease

mitochondria. I know I’m not alone in this fascination, ask almost any biochemist. Oscillating synergistic membrane based systems, oxidative phosphorylation, chemiosmotictic systems, energy cascades, oh for the love of science. By referring the readers in the arts and humanities to such things, I am of-course not imagining that the complexity of the field and these sub-fields of research into such biological systems can be made magically accessible for that takes years of specialized education. My hope instead is simply that by using the arts to engagingly illustrate such systems through multisensory somatic interaction we might at least be able to invoke a rigorous sense of wonder and appreciation for the amazing world of this particular science and its history.6

By parting the veil of advanced and highly specialized study, perhaps a broader public could be allowed a glimpse into the numinous mystery of our innermost physical world at the sub-cellular molecular level just as the astrophysicists and astronomers have been able to do successfully for the universe.

7 I naturally would hope that at the simplest level, for instance of the molecular transformations in the Krebs cycle and the linked production of energy (oxidative phosphorylation), that hypothetically, more people could be drawn to science and that more scientists could be drawn into an academically supercharged sciart. I would dare to dream perhaps that some might find it intoxicating enough to pursue sciart beyond creative collaborative illustration, that is, to a more analytically and practically oriented task than is usually the case. Simply put, in my view, sciart to perform a transdisciplinary function, has to go beyond illustration and public engagement and education and ultimately directly advance science as the artsci proponents argue has been demonstrated.8

What then is the Krebs cycle and why is it my “holy grail”? The Krebs cycle is also known as the citric acid cycle (TCA). It is named after a scientist named Hans Adolf Krebs who conceptualized it in 1937 and for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1953.

9

6 For an example of what makes biochemistry such an enduringly interesting research field for those interested in such systems, see Peter Mitchell’s Nobel Lecture, David Keilin’s Respiratory Chain Concept and its Chemiosmotic consequences, December 8, 1978. Available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1978/mitchell-lecture.pdf 7 See R. Hoffman and I. Boyd eds., Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, (2011). New York: Oxford University Press. Also see James Elkins (2008), Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000. Stanford: Stanford University Press and Elizabeth Kessler (2012), Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 8 See R. S. Root-Bernstein and M. Root-Bernstein. (1999). Sparks of Genius, The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

It is a linked series of chemical

9 For the cycle, see the diagram and description at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle and for a more simple explanation and illustration, see: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebs_cycle. The quote is taken from the later. For a simple animation of the results of the process excluding the actual cycle in and of itself, see: http://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Biology/Bio231/krebs.html.

reactions that produces biological energy in cellular respiration. The process is very simply the chemical basis of all aerobic life, aerobic meaning oxygen dependant The Krebs cycle is also named the TCA cycle because one molecule of citric (a tricarboxylic) acid is broken down and then regenerated through a series of nine biochemical steps. The process takes place in the energy packets in the cells which are called mitochondria. During the process, hydrogen ions and electrons are produced and these are used to create the chemical energy on which life as we know it depends.10 The details as one can read at the links given here to Wikipedia and Simple Wikipedia are ancillary to this article. The point here is merely to propose to this Sciart audience the potential heuristic power of an experimental interactive dance machine for an art or science museum and of an associated mobile application. In effect it is an essay which merely presents something of the logic and history behind a hypothetical model for the potential conjunction of art and science as available and in an expanded form regarding musical chemistry on the Sciart America website.11 The primary hypothetical goal is again simply to make this cycle and the associated complexities more accessible to a general audience and to advance the field of somatic pedagogy or body learning.12

I find the Krebs cycle so interesting because it brings together biology and chemistry, the big picture and the small picture, the structure and function of cells and cellular processes. Here we see in action the wonder and majesty of how atoms, ions and electrons and molecules work in an all important system, the elemental details of complex systems in motion upon which all aerobic life depends.

13 It is ultimately so simple and yet so complex, so elegant, so marvelously precocious in its history, the gradual discovery of how the physical structure of the mitochondria, the molecular make up of the membranes creates an internal cellular environment, a physical topology in which simple molecules such as glucose are broken down and transformed through a series of cyclical reactions to release and capture energy.14

10 The cycle occurs in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic life forms, prokaryotes being single cell organisms without internal structures such as bacteria. 11 See J. Zilberg et. al., Can Art Advance Science: A Hypothetical SEAD Experiment at: http://www.sciartinamerica.com/canartadvancescience.html 12To the best of my knowledge, despite the various limited attempts that do exist, the field of interactive mobile 2d or 3d visualization for teaching biochemistry is vastly under-developed and hence provides a potentially productive field for sciart experimentation. 13 All life forms are divided into prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are simper forms such as viruses and bacteria that preceded prokaryotes in evolution and do not have internal structures, that is they have no nuclei for instance. Prokaryotes are more complex cellular life forms with internal structures constituted by membranes, nuclei, vacuoles, golgi bodies for transport and mitochondria for producing energy .etc as introduced in elementary biology Because the Krebs cycle takes place in eukaryotes and on a more complex organized level in prokaryotes it is not only important in terms of biological evolution but an elemental chemical process that we all should have some appreciation for because our very lives depend on it.

In my

14 By the use of “marvelously precocious” I naturally am referring to Peter Mitchell’s Nobel Lecture, David Keilin’s Respiratory Chain Concept and its Chemiosmotic consequences (1978). Mitchell concludes with a brief review of the history of the field of membrane chemistry and bioenergetics particularly

eyes, it brings chemistry to life and into multi-dimensional motion. That is why, as an iconic process in biochemistry this is a Holy Grail. For a geneticist, or the more genetically inclined in science and art perhaps, it might be the structure and function of DNA, RNA and mRNA. There too we find the constant advance and occasional leaping forward in knowledge across the decades, new discoveries and understandings which open up wholly new avenues for research and medicine and our evolving understanding of basic biological processes. For a chemist, their Holy Grail might be the periodic table.15

And now with the rising detection and incidence of mitochondrial disease and media coverage of gene therapy, the ever increasing relevance of science journalism, and interest in sciart, the mitochondria and the spatially bound chemistry of the Krebs cycle perhaps takes on or finds itself of greater potential public relevance or reach than might otherwise have been the case. Lastly, as it has taken me over three decades to publish this idea in a journal, and with the idea for this learning machine being still merely hypothetical, I should explain below how the idea came to me and something of how it has evolved and why.

Genesis

through the traumatic period of the 1950s and 1960’s. It reads as a wonderful testament to how science advances through the rigorous experimental testing of competing hypotheses. See also, R. Buvet et. al., Living Systems as Energy Converters (1977), Amsterdam: North Holland for the state of the art of this domain of science at that time. I emphasize such outdated references for those reading this article who are interested in the history of scientific ideas and the importance of models for visual representation of biochemical processes. 15 For a fascinating account of the discovery of the periodic table, see Paul Strathern Mendeleyev’s Dream: The Quest for the Elements (2001), New York: Saint Martin’s Press. For an equally important historical description of the advancement of science and illustration in this case rather than a representational model, see Rebecca Stott, Darwin and The Barnacle, (2003), New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, while waiting for the electrophoresis gels to do their slow separating magic on my sea cucumber blood in toluene, I would often find myself staring out the window of the biochemistry building, wishing I was outside feeling the wind whispering in the leaves. And thanks to the American elective system which had provided me the sustained transformative opportunities to take classes such as the History of Western Art among other fascinating subjects like Abnormal Psychology or The American Experience by the late radical historian Tom Philpott, I was drawn across campus. Into the arts buildings I’d go, an alien spy from another planet. There I’d observe strange things like the students’ rapture in a visiting lecture by the subversive social commentator Vito Acconci a radically creative artist of the time whose work was designed to shock and provoke one to ask questions such as what is art?16

One day at Corcovado, sitting on a sand dune at the edge of the forest, watching the sun burn into the Pacific, something happened that has brought me directly to this essay. I noticed a cone shell at my feet. In an instant unbidden it came to me how one could describe it through a

. Masturbation in the gallery! Picking up his mail! The students were over the moon. Later in the art building one Friday afternoon, nearing the end of my senior year, I remember the time exactly, it was 4:45pm. I was sitting in the back row of a sparsely attended visiting lecture by a sweet and portly old grey professor. He was coming to the end of his lamentation about how art education in America was going extinct. Bored I looked down at my feet. There in The Daily Texan a savage looking professor, a man called Lawrence Gilbert, was looking up at me. He was standing in a jungle with a butterfly net trident-like in hand. I jumped up, tore out the building and ran up along the creek, back across campus over to the zoology building. Within the hour, my fellowship to study monoclonal antibodies at the UT Cancer Research Center had gone out the window. I was off to the jungle to study butterflies instead of things that I could not see in test tubes and had to infer from stained chromatographic bands. And yet, though liberated from the clinical environment of the laboratory, from the white lab jacket, and though utterly possessed by the sublime complexity and beauty of that tropical rainforest in Costa Rica, I still had molecules and art always on my mind.

16 Acconci teaches in the Art Department and in the program for Performance and Interactive Media Arts Performance and Interactive Media Arts at Brooklyn College as well as at also at the Pratt Institute in the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design Department, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Acconci. As an outsider to the world of art criticism I have never forgotten how narcistic and unconvincing I found the public lecture and why the performance art presented there was such interesting art despite the excitement Aconcci had stirred. But I was a young scientist in training so who was I to say, it was all very much Greek to me. Many years later, in the later 1990’s, I by chance attended another much smaller public lecture by the artist at Illinois State University. To the audiences amused amazement he systematically went through his major works and revealed that the whole exercise had been a joke on the art establishment. No one was offended. Everyone, especially myself feeling vindicated, was simply amused. It’s not like that in science! Nevertheless, I find myself drawn to Aconcci’s more recent architectural installation work some of which shares common ground with what I am proposing here in terms of space, interactivity and light.

mathematical equation. Surprised I said to myself, if the math teacher had just walked into the class on the first day, held up such a shell, proceeded in silence to draw the equation on the board and then explain how it described the shell, everything would have been different – at least for me. From the simple to the complex, suddenly it all seemed so backwards, that if we were taught somehow to appreciate the big picture and the patterns first, the beauty and the complexity, the process, and then to break it down and learn the basics, getting from biology and chemistry to organic chemistry and on to biochemistry, it all would have been so much easier. Why? Because we would know where we were going and to what end, how the small details fit into the whole. It came to me that as with the shell and mathematics, as in the fascinating worlds of theoretical conchology and pattern formation in Lepidoptera, the same could and should apply to biochemistry and all science education, or so I’d like to believe, at least in an ideal world.17 I’ve been waiting thus, it seems, as if in a song, for sciart all my life – although in reality it turns out that I just thought I was alone when in fact there have long been many scientists engaged with embodiment and the arts. 18

17 See for instance, Hans Meinhardt, The Alogrithmic Beauty of Sea Shells, Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1995, Geerat J. Vermeij, A Natural History of Shells, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, Hans Meinhardt et. al. , “A model for pattern formation in the shells of mollusks”, Journal of Theoretical Biology 1987, 126: 65-89 and Jo Ellis-Monaghan, “Seashells, Math and the Natural World” for good models for teaching vector modeling. See also Lawrence E. Gilbert, “Adaptive Novelty Through Introgression in Heliconius Wing Patterns: Evidence For Shared Genetic “Tool Box” From Synthetic Hybrid Zones And A Theory of Diversification”, in Butterflies: Ecology and Evolution Taking Flight, Boogs, C.l., Watt, W.B. and Ehrlich, P.R., eds, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003,accessible at http:www.file:///D:/Biology/L_E_%20Gilbert%20-%20Heliconius%20Wing… As these references indicate, in sciart doctoral programs, artists would be expected, I hope, to be able to be conversant with engaging this level of science in these references should their projects engage such fields. 18 It is important in this regard to point out that Geerat Vermeij has been blind since childhood. His intimate knowledge of shells is thus dependent on physical rather than visual sensation. Surely Vermeij is then the ultimate inspirational figure for embodied learning in science.

How I wish for biochemistry and molecular biology that just like in math where the example of how shells embody mathematical equations, specifically the fibonacci series, is by now a classic example of finding mathematical patterns in nature, young students could be introduced to these worlds in similarly compelling ways. I wish that in the future young people and old for that matter, might be able through this computer mediated experience to physically, visually and sonically experience the Krebs cycle. Then perhaps more of them will be able to become scientists or better understand science, to be empowered to know something of this massive majestic inner complexity at work every second within us without the fear and suffering typically involved for those more challenged than others. It is precisely this fear and the sense that science is too difficult, too abstract, too removed from the world,that closes out science for most people. Sciart can and is opening it all up, joyously.

The Mitochondria, The Structure and The Function

And so here we are, to get to the point of this essay: an iconic cycle in biochemistry, the Krebs cycle that takes place within the mitochondrion (the context given in the figure above and the details of the chemical process given below and in subsequent figures) and whether anyone can learn it because of the way in which it would be represented and experienced. I realize too that in looking at this diagram, artists and non-scientists will probably think I must be delusional, that this is proposal for an interactive machine for learning such complicated material is a ridiculous idea. But bear with me – you did after all with Vito Acconci. And if a child can say Tyranosaurus Rex, the child can say Oxaloacetic Acid. If a child can play lego and enjoy the amazingly complex and rapid transformations of Optimus Prime, then so can the child understand something as simple as the chemical structure of glucose. It’s all a matter, or so I believe and argue, of how it is presented and experienced and in what context. And as I conclude the essay, I might be wrong, but we cannot know until we build and test such a hypothetical learning device. And then suddenly, in 2012, SEAD showed up on my radar screen. The National Science Foundation funded SEAD project was designed to take the pulse of global activity in the conjunctions of Science, Engineering, Art and Design.19 This context provided me with the long awaited opportunity to formalize and publish this idea of a new way for learning biochemistry. Through the SEAD project I finally had found the context to re-connect with Barrie Kitto, my biochemistry professor at The University of Texas at Austin and expand upon the idea for The Dance of Life that I had been intermittently thinking about. All these years, since working in Barrie’s lab on the structure and evolution of haemoglobin,20

I had originally conceptualized an edutainment game board called Biozopoly. In that incarnation the idea was to play the Krebs Cycle like Monopoly except that the real estate properties would be the molecules in the cycle, the money would be units of biological energy, the chance cards would be changes in temperature or limiting agents including toxins which affect rates of reaction and thus the player’s activity etc. Later, during my doctoral field research on art in Africa, a scientist mentioned that to have any effect in this day and age it would have to be a computer game. And later still, in the late 1990’s, while working with art educators in museums to enhance the quality of learning through using embodied learning techniques involving

since that fateful day in the art building which led to that shell by the sea and which gave me the idea for students to learn (note not be taught) the Krebs Cycle through embodied learning, all through graduate school in anthropology and beyond I had been waiting for a chance to publish this idea towards its realization.

19 Roger Malina et. al., 2013. Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation. Available at http://www.sead.viz.tamu.edu/projects/.../SEAD_WP_vol_1 20 Haemoglobin is a complex molecule in the red blood cells which allows the body to capture and transport oxygen, oxygen being essential to the cellular respiration process and aerobic life, the blood and circulatory system taking oxygen into the cellular matrix and removing carbon dioxide as waste and hence intimately connected to the larger topic of this paper,.

mimicry, dance and music as well as visual understanding through education and visual thinking strategies, I re-imagined the idea as an embodied, visual and sonic experience.21

As the following two diagrams show for the molecular and atomic processes which take place in the mitochondria and across the membranes in order to produce energy, the proposed idea is very precise in its pedagogical sciart function. If the participant, after repeatedly jumping around the cycle for a reasonable amount of time to embed the learning in the mind and body,

Fortunately in the interim the field of embodied pedagogy and its applications in science education, specifically biochemistry, has been well advanced as detailed as and where relevant in the notes in this essay. I dare say that in those days, the idea probably seemed a bit odd, and that even today the idea of this dance machine for learning biochemistry as presented below might seem bizarre. Typically when I present the idea to non-scientists their eyes begin to glaze over and they start to look at me as if I’m mildly insane. I need a demo model and I need a context to prove or disprove this. Today what with the nebular expansion in new fields and cross-disciplinary work in the sciences in American universities since the 1980’s, even with dance and science being a well established if minor field, and with the emerging cave laboratories, with the dramatic rise of sciart and art-sci collaborations in America, perhaps the time might be right for this project. So if anyone who might come to read this, particularly a caveman or a cavewoman in Texas, maybe we could have a chat around the digital fire in your experimental computer laboratory sometime. The original purpose of the SEAD proposal for myself and Dr. Barrie Kitto (emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin) was to create a context for generating a collaborative SEAD community which would participate in the conceptual design of a science learning device using embodied and aesthetic means. Though the passing expanded collaboration and final SEAD paper has not eventuated in any tangible results, being merely hypothetical, the formalization of the idea and its advancement through collaboration in that context was a significant step in the process towards the potential realization of the concept, described below.

21 See "The Africa Project" Kate Kuper, Jonathan Zilberg and Sandra Bales. “ Art Education. Special Issue: How History Can Come Together as Art 2000, 3(2):18-24. On Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and the organization Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a collaboration led by Philip Yenawin formerly the Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Abigail Housen a psychologist at Harvard, see http://www.vtshome.org/what-is-vts/about-us/history . Those two contexts were very different responses to the problem of the limitation of learning in museums. In the first case, the goal was to introduce high quality and complex information about African art and culture through museums into classrooms in order to overcome the typically facile nature of first through third stage multi-cultural education and the endemic reproduction of stereotypes of Africa. In the second and very different case of VTS , the idea is apposite, to give no information about art and instead to use an interactive method to scaffold the education process, see Philip Yenawine, 2013, Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across the Disciplines, Harvard: Harvard Education Press. This sciart project in a sense unites aspects of both those approaches.

if the participant did not come away with a clear understanding of these details and those presented in the figures above about the Krebs cycle itself and the cellular context, then this experiment would have to be deemed a failure. That is the difference between an art and a science project. In science then, in the context of sciart, at least in my view, the hypothesis here and the test must be unambiguous. Either the pedagogical value of this machine for a non-science audience is proven or the experiment fails. On the other hand, were the embodied multisensory aesthetics of the experience be of a high enough aesthetic order to convince some artists that it was worthy of the term sublime, and help young scientists to fall deeply intellectually interested in with such systems, then at least art will have helped to advance science education in and of itself. It would have provided an instance art of the sort of art that moves me in that as a scientist “beauty,” however you define it, matters.22

Leaving aside any explanation of the science in the diagrams that follow, providing them here to lure future artists into the mystery of the atom and the ion, the membrane and the chemiosmotic process, let us focus on the simplest aspect of the interactive machine for embodied learning and the whole.

22 See Sian Ede, (2005) Art and Science, London: I. B. Taurus currently in its fourth printing. Ede writes partly tongue in check perhaps, that It is “hard to believe” that some scientists interested in art “inhabit the same planet as contemporary artists and the theorists whose discourse underpins their practice. Because for them the idea of simple, beautiful equations [read beauty in art too] is barely conceivable.” P. 15. As she elaborates regarding Wendy Steiner’s book The Trouble with Beauty (2001) London: Heinemann: “to dare to speak of beauty seriously is to lay herself open to accusations of naivety, self-deception and a lack of humour. And, also of course, of gross political incorrectness.” P. 16.

The proposed Dance of Life is a hypothetical interactive computer assisted learning machine which would be installed in a museum. The Krebs cycle would be laid out on the floor in a gallery arranged to depict a mitochondria within a cell, ideally in an environment as aesthetically inspired as a visionary biosphere by Thomas Sarceno or Anisha Kapoor’s Leviathons, Dale Chihulli’s colorful imaginative worlds. The participant would enter the cell, then the mitochondria and physically activate each step in the cycle driving the consequent transport processes as shown in the above diagrams and briefly considered below. In the proposed machine, you would jump - not really dance – though one could if one wanted to. Into and around this circular step-wise reaction you would go. Every time you jump from one molecule to another, the lights in the pressure pads the plexi-glass platform below your feet activate. You see the chemical structure and hear the nomenclature for the structure. The processes in the figure above are important but would be secondary. As visuals projections on the ceiling and connected to the energy cascades and the tower of light, all integrated and created by the computer system, they would be active that is driven in direct relation to the amount of energy, ATP, produced by the jumper/dancer. But those are part of the bigger picture, the central goal is what is taking place on the floor and with each jump being projected onto the circular gallery wall space nearest that step. Hypothetically this will embed the visual knowledge of the biochemical process of the Krebs cycle in your mind and body. As simply put as possible then, in this embodied learning machine you would jump around this biological cycle depicted in pressure sensitive plexi-glass plates. Each time you jump, or dance, onto the next step in the cycle you would hear and see the images change. In this way theoretically you could learn biochemistry in an active and multi-sensory way. One would learn

the precise details of how the six carbon molecule of glucose is broken down to release energy in our bodies and in nature. Moreover, to add spectacle, and illustrating accurately the energy being used and produced during each cycle as shown in the above figures, the machine would generate energy cascades flowing down the outer walls and creating a tower of light energy in the very center of the machine. While we usually learn such things through simple illustration and rote memorization, it could be better conveyed through visual means, with sound and in motion and dimension. This would allow us to fix or rather grow a sensibility for and of knowledge in the mind and the body. It would make it something mobile and complex rather than reduced as snapshots as it is in college biochemistry today.23

As an artistic experience, the sounds or chords associated with each step, the resultant music from the process, the beauty and complexity of the visual displays of the chemistry, in 2D and/or 3D, voiced and/or unvoiced, each choice available to enhance learning in different ways, it should be an object of wonder and spectacle. As a scientist I am obsessed with beauty and pattern generated by order rather than random disorder.

It could only be done if scientists and computer engineers were able collaborate with artists, designer and musicians and create a multi-media spectacle.

24

The more lengthy papers at the SEAD site explain the idea in more detail but for this context my purpose is to emphasize again that as the individual jumps (or dances) from panel to panel, moving around and around the cycle, they will actively acquire this scientific knowledge through an embodied learning experience. They participant could move through it in anyway they want. For instance they could jump up and down to memorize a structure through single

As mentioned above, I often think of what an artist like Anish Kapoor could do with the set along the lines of Leviathon and what Chihulli could do with color and form for the 3 dimensional depictions and projects of molecular imagery as he does with glass. Every time I see a new conference on the sciart nexus and the media arts, I see artists and scientists doing things along these lines all over the world, more and more. Science, Engineering, Art and Design (SEAD) indeed, one could not possibly create such a machine without computer engineers, musicians, and artists each contributing their particular skill sets to the whole. Music, rhythm, art, it can all work together for the advancement of science education. In the case of the application for digital devices, one would simply touch the screen and this would activate the next image and sound. In both cases the system could run on autopilot at different speeds creating a heightened sense for the continuous and fluid nature of these synergistic systems.

23 See for instance Kevin Ahern’s illustrated lectures provided on-line. 24 As scientists we see things very differently in this regard to most artists, we seek pattern and experience awe in coherence. As Sean Ede notes in Art and Science, that “It is hard to believe . . . scientists inhabit the same planet as contemporary artists and the theorists whose discourse underpins their practice . . . (2005 p. 15) though “There are some artists and critics who dare to use the word ‘beauty’ unenclosed by the heavy quotation marks of irony. (p. 16).

repetition, go back or go forward, (but only one step at a time) the more creatively they engage and learn the better. They could choose musical styles and colors that best suit them. Special attention would be paid to the integration and progression of the music and visuals. It would ideally be beautiful, sublime, as utterly gauche such words and concepts are in most artistic circles. In essence then, through an appealing “artistic” experience, the machine would magnify embodied understandings and memories of the Krebs Cycle through a repetitive multi-sensate experience. Furthermore, by emphasizing the synergistic and synaesthetic potentials of combining sound, image, color and motion, the idea is to stimulate perhaps unconscious and latent perceptions that might ultimately have theoretical and practical consequences for the scientific study of the stochastic nature of the Krebs cycle in the future.

The essence of this proposed project is ultimately pedagogical.25 Perhaps this idea might have future theoretical value because it offers potential for us to see the bigger picture in one iconic system in biochemistry, to see it in a more fluid and process oriented way as educators in sciart are already doing. 26

25 My emphasis on active creative learning in this project and its potential for science education in disadvantaged communities is elementally informed by Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, Continuum: New York, 1986. 26 For a number of critical references on these issues , see the following articles and books by Robert. S. Root-Bernstein, Discovering. Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Knowledge. (1989). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, “Sensual education, ”(1990, Sept./Oct). The Sciences: 12-14 and “Teaching abstracting in an integrated art and science curriculum.” Roeper Review, (1991)13 (2): 85-90. Also see, F. Samsel, “Art - Science - Visualization Collaborations; Examining the Spectrum”. Available at: http://visap2013.sista.arizona.edu/papers/Samsel_ExaminingTheSpectrum.pdf

I like to imagine that the machine would make it more easy memorize the simpler sequential steps, the names of the molecules and their chemical structures, the inputs and the outputs, the cellular context etc, than the way we usually learn biochemistry as in math

and science except in fortunate an exceptional environments.27

I find this cycle enduringly captivating, so much so that I remain today as excited as that then young biology teacher who kept gesticulating and exclaiming “this is the stuff of life, this is the stuff of life.” As someone with a long term professional interest in museum education and the arts I’ve long wanted to see if one could advance this idea in the context of a museum science education project designed for the general public. In this, the idea that has been proposed to you here is simply one more example of how to use multi-media art and embodied multi-sensate learning to advance the current conjunctions in art and science and above all science illustration and education. This essay makes no claims as to whether art can advance science but it necessarily by way of conclusion returns us to C. P. Snow and his iconic 1959 lecture The Two Cultures in which he argued that the arts and sciences exist as separate worlds.

Might we be able to advance basic science one day by training future biochemists to think routinely from the inside out rather than outside in? That remains for me the ultimate question. For the general public, the non-scientists, artists and such, the question is simply will it advance their knowledge of and appreciation of science? Surely that is a no brainer. What I am proposing here, at the risk of coming across as deluded, is that ordinary people, even young children, might be able to learn, or at least appreciate, the essentials of the Krebs Cycle through a computerized machine which would allow for the interactive integration of sounds and images through physical interaction. Through such an experience, we might open the doors to science for a vastly expanded potential audience and bridge that gap between C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures of Art and Science. Perhaps I am wrong. However, we won’t know if it is not possible to conceptually invert the step-wise hierarchical learning process and thus bridge this gap until we can test this kind of an art machine for science learning.

28

Towards concluding then, C. P. Snow later regretted having used the example of the literati’s said ignorance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an example of the gulf between art and science. He had come to feel that it was too abstract a concept to have used as his pivotal example and that molecular biology would serve as a better example for talking across art and science communities because it is couched in visual language that can be easily shared. That being said, and I hope demonstrated to some extent in this essay, the Second Law of

In this context, this project is an attempt to bridge that divide as an ever increasing number of people are doing globally.

27 On somatic learning in math and physics, see G. M. Burton, (1982), “Patterning: Powerful play,” School Science and Mathematics, 82, 39-44 and Silvia, E. M. (1977). “Patterning: An Aid to teaching math skills.” School Science and Mathematics, 77(7): 567-577. For potential cross disciplinary applications relevant to this project, see: S. A. Sorby S. A. and B. G. Baartmans. (1996), “A course for the development of 3D spatial visualization skills,” Engineering Design Graphics Journal, 60 (1): 13-20. 28 C. P. Snow. (1961). The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution. The Rede Lecture. 1959, New York: Cambridge University Press. Available at: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf

Thermodynamics serves well to return us to the opening discussion on energy and mortality with which I began. Basically the law states that all systems tend to greater entropy, meaning that a hot pan cools down, the milk in your tea disperses etc. It takes energy to heat things up to create and sustain life and the role of the mitochondria is to capture and transfer and release that energy. When the mitochondria and the processes within the mitochondria start to fail, in the case of inherited mitochondrial diseases a fatal condition in which infants are doomed with before birth to typically die before adulthood, all manner of diseases and symptoms begin to take hold as the body slowly begins to loose this basic function, to produce energy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is normally balanced by a healthy system, begins to make its inevitable mark. Slowly the energy dissipates and eventually your child dies. At the larger level, it is of-course a natural process and the story of all our fate. So in this way I think we are returned to C. P. Snow and the power of sciart to empower education for the common good as was Snow’s primary goal.29

To end then, as far as I know, no other example of sciart has attained the long term public visibility and resonance of the British Museum’s exhibit of From Cradle to Grave, a the collaborative work by two artists, Suzie Freeman and David Critchley and Dr. Liz Lee, a group called Pharmacopoeia.

30 The winner of the Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, it has been placed in the center of the ethnographic hall in the British Museum - the title for the explanatory text being “Living and Dying.”31 It is such a successful installation that no longer do the visitors, by and large, take any notice of the masks and “fetish” figures with which “tribal” peoples maintained their relationships between the dead and the living through art, ritual and dance.32

2929 So much has been written on The Two Cultures debate at Cambridge, specifically on the critique by F. R. Leavis and the conflict between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, that any further comment along these lines would require yet an entire article for the sciart context today. However in regards to biochemistry, it must be noted that the second essay which accompanied Two Cultures: The Significance of C. P. Snow, Being the Richmond Lecture, 1962, London: Chatto and Windus was a more measured critique by a biochemist, namely Michael Yudkin’s “Sir Charles Snow’s Rede Lecture”, pp. 33-45. For a subsequent reflection, see Michael Yudkin, “King’s College, Cambridge, 1956,” The Cambridge Quarterly 1996 XXV (4): 424-425. As far as I know, very little if anything has so far been made of Yudkin’s all important essay.

There is a perfectly logical reason perhaps why this exhibition of pharmaceuticals and life and death is placed in this gallery being surrounded as it were by the objects which served as active

30 See: http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/. 31 See Camilla Mordhorst, “The Power of Presence: The ‘Cradle to Grave’ installation at the British Museum,” Museum and Society, November 2009, pp. 194-205. See: http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/1.-Cradle-to-Grave-Danish-Article.pdf. For the collective’s presentation of the exhibit itself, see: http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/. 32 And for an interesting anthropological critique matching my own observations, see Jonathan Jones, ”Drugs Have No Place in The British Museum,” The Guardian, July 24, 2009 at: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jul/24/medicine-cabinet-british-museum.

means for”tribal” societies to protect their health and sustain their societies through the ritual sciences. Instead, in droves, the visitors to the museum gather around this long glass case in which all the prescription drugs taken in two representative people’s lives, a man and a woman, are sewn into a long fabric. Perhaps people are so powerfully drawn to this work of art because they are looking at their own lives and mortality. The daily occurrence is a spectacle in and of itself and of considerable interest to museum ethnographers Perhaps it is because of the proximity, presence and flow of materials as Camilla Mordhost (2009), a museum specialist, theorizes, that it is in part so successful because the viewers interact with the art work through their bodies.33

33 See note 31.

But what I am proposing here is a very different form of embodied interaction, if indeed this learning machine experiment is ever built and tested. It would be a form of interactive, multisensory auto-didactic art that is designed to make learning fun. It would be an individual and collective celebration of life and scientific knowledge. If the learning outcomes compared to rote memorization could be tested and proven then it would achieve the dream of C. P. Snow to bridge the arts and sciences. Shall we not then dance to see how art might advance science?