The Alien Next Door

When I met up with UBC grad student, Krista Fogel, at Starbucks a couple of months ago, one of her other “subjects” joined us. David Walker is a biochemist who is also a sculptor. What I found marvelous was how we just gravitated toward one another in an effusion of dialogue that was exhilarating and thoughtful. So thoughtful was it, in fact that it sparked that climate change nightmare I had the next day. We talked about “the speed of life” and the suntelia aeon, the role of art in science, of holistic thought, autopoiesis and fractals. We were of like-minds; we were scientists who were artists or artists who were scientists. It didn’t matter. The two were inseparable.

I asked David if he’d like to see the view of Earth from Vinnie in orbit and he didn’t blink an eye before giving me an unequivocal yes.

~~~~~~~

Despite the rather rough ride for him, David braved the trip up to Vinnie and, after giving him a tour of the sentient ship, we settled in the aft lounge and Harry, my pesky bot, handed us two coffees. Mind burning with questions I set out straight away with my first:

SF Girl: “Do you use your art in your science and/or do you use your science in your art? And, if so, how do they help each other? How do they hinder each other?”

David: His eyes crinkle with a gentle smile and he replies in a soft spoken voice, “The short answer to both questions is an emphatic yes. As a morphologist I have struggled with defining the relationship between structure and function in marine algae and mammals. The artistic “eye” and involvement with visual arts has helped me in the recognition of the significance of morphological observations and in generating morphological hypotheses if you will. In other words formulating a visual hypothesis as to what the cells in question might look like if what I had conceptually hypothesized was in any way near correct. I have done all of the illustrations that I have used in my papers myself. This has been invaluable first in that I have to understand what I am illustrating clearly and then I can judge the accuracy of my illustration.”

SF Girl: “How would you describe the role of science in society?”

David: “From the basic science perspective, science is one of many ways to experience what it means to be. It is a way to “see” ourselves and the world we live in a way that is supposed to be an objective manner. Science in a way is supposed to tell us what it is like to exist and how things do exist in our world in a way that is supposedly objective. This is often construded to mean through various kinds of measurements often numerical. These stories or observations are believed to be objective. In a more practical sense or applied it is a tool for problem solving such as in agriculture and biomedical research. In short it is a tool we use to improve our manipulation of and understanding of us and our world.”

SF Girl: “How would you describe the role of art in society?”

SF Girl: “Art, or doing art, is another way of experiencing the world and sharing that with others. It is on the surface perhaps more subjective as it can be based on how a specific individual esperiences what it means to be. However, I believe the closer the subjective experience is to something that all humans have in common the more its potential is to become objective or common to all. A simplistic example might be my painting a portrait of my mother. It is on the surface very subjective in that she is only my mother. However, if in my painting I succeed in capturing something that is fundamental to the mother child relationship then it can become meaningful to others who have mothers and can speak to others about that relationship and in this sense begin at least to represent a more objective or ubiquitous aspect of maternity. In a sense when art attains the level of being more objective it can actually “speak the truth” about what it means to be just as much as science can. There are things for instance that Shakespeare has said about humanity and human behaviour that I expect most would agree is accurate. I don’t know if that qualifies as true.”

SF Girl: “How do you reconcile these two?”

David: His brows furrow in thought. “I do not know that the arts and sciences need to be reconciled actually. I would speculate that Leonardo de Vinci didn’t worry about the fact he was painting and designing flying machines or exploring the human anatomy. Perhaps the need to reconcile them is born of our suffering from the reductionist paradigm and our current compulsion to compartmentalize knowledge and activities so that many know much about very little.”

SF Girl: “Can you speak to the similarity or difference in finding ‘truth’ through science vs. art?”

David: “I believe that science like art is one way in which we can see what it means to be but then the understanding we gain is often used naturally by humans to manipulate our environment. For instance, the use of electric lighting drives the effects of diurnal rhythms into the background. Heaters and air conditioners eliminate the thermal evidence of seasonal cycles. Traveling in automobiles and trains and planes turns the outside world to images in a window. Urban living separates us even from what it takes to provide the food we eat. All that the cosmetic industry does to hide age fosters the denial of aging and death so that when the end does come it is a rude shock and not a natural punctuation at the end of a life but some kind of tragedy.”

SF Girl: “What advice do you have regarding the pursuit of art for young scientists just starting their career (e.g., your students)?”

David: “In hind sight I would encourage them to hang on to and if nothing else continue to “practice” their preferred form of artistic expression throughout their careers. They of course must be the judges as to how much is right for them. I believe that art provides a fine balance to all that is science and in addition can enrich the life and even the science that the scientist does. Balance in a busy career will always be an issue. I know that the halls of academia are littered with the wreckage of destroyed marriages and probably neglected children left acting out.”

SF Girl: “We are showcasing two pieces of your art. Can you talk a little bit about each of them?”

David: Now beaming with excitement, “the bust of Nefertiti is carved in alabaster. She is about 9″ high. The inspiration was a bust of Nefertiti that is in the Egypt Museum in Berlin that I have seen there and in photographs. Sculpting a portrait is a very intimate process in which you become extremely familiar with another’s face. In a sense it was hoped that in doing this portrait I might come even a tiny bit closer to comprehending who Nefertiti might have been. It certainly left me all the more impressed with her but wondering all the more about such a woman who could be so famous for so many thousands of years. The other work is my Golgi Apparatus carved from Yule marble from Colorado. The golgi apparatus is found in virtually every mammalian cell. It is sort of a round house of protein sulfation and glycosylation or the addition of sugars to the protein backbone of the molecule.It is made of a stack of membranous cisternae (pillow cases with no opennings). Synthetic product and membranes flow through the golgi apparatus.”

SF Girl: “Thanks, David! So, tell us a little bit about where has David Walker come from?”

David: “I have done two and three dimensional arts all my life. I began drawing for my father at 3yrs and playing with clay at 4yrs of age. My brothers and I played with clay all the time I was growing up. I played at drawing and painting all along as well. Early in my teens I became interested in biology but from a structure/function perspective. I followed this path as a profession through two bachelors degrees and a masters degree from the University of California in Zoology, Botany and Botany/Cell Biology. We came to Canada so that I could do a PhD in Marine Botany/Cell Biology. At the end of the PhD I moved to Pulmonary Research and then into the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at University of British Columbia where I am an Associate Professor. Although becoming a biologist may seem a diversion from art it actually has been a parallel realm in which I have explored the architecture of life and living organisms down to the supra-molecular level. For more than 30 years I have been exploring the cellular and subcellular realms of structure and trying to relate it to function. It has been a profound privilege and more and more it invades my art. (see my golgi apparatus, the most beautiful organelle in the cell). All along the way I have done drawing, water colour and oil painting. I took six years of instruction in Chinese brush painting here in Vancouver BC. Almost 10 years ago I took a one week stone carving course at the Vancouver Academy of Art and fell in love with it. I studied with Alberto Replanski all of this time until his untimely death the end of January 2008. Over the last four years I have gone to two marble carving workshops in Marble/marble Colorado and brought marble home with me. One piece is completed and two are under way. Stone carving is what I do mostly and it is what I love the most. Inspiration for subjects to sculpt range from figurative to biological topics all being related to my search for beauty in this word fraught with so much ugliness. Both visual arts and biological sciences explore what it means to be and to be alive. Both disciplines assist us in learning to see what we look at, something few really do. Both endeavors have enriched my life and also each other. I am profoundly grateful.”

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed—Albert Einstein

Last November, I was introduced to Krista Fogel, a University of British Columbia masters student, who was investigating the use of creative art in high-ability scientists. Her thesis was entitled: The Self-Perceived Experience of Investigating Science with an Artistic Spirit: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of High Ability Scientists Who Also Engage in the Arts. Hermeneutic, by the way, is the development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts (I had to look it up) and phenomenology is an approach to philosophy through the study of phenomena. Krista wanted to interview me as part of her project. I was flattered, of course. Me, a High Ability Scientist? Who told her that? Once I got past my own humble angst, I found Krista’s questions bracing; they reopened a world of compelling ideas I have carried with me for some time. The concept of using art to do good science has dwelled inside me since registration day at Concordia University when I quit my fine arts program to pursue a science degree only to come full circle and write fiction. I got my Masters Degree in Ecology and Limnology and now work as a scientist for an environmental consulting firm. I do research, drive boats, collect samples and analyze data then write up my recommendations. But I also write science fiction novels.

“History shows that eminent scientists also engaged in the arts, such as Leonardo da Vinci,” said Fogel. She went on to cite 400 other famous scientists who also practiced art at a high level. “If not entirely engaged in the arts, scientists throughout history have at least engaged in science with an artistic spirit. Scientists and artists use common tools for thinking such as intuition and imaginative processes.” Krista and I met several times at the local Starbucks, where I could get my “brain” fix as she fumbled with her notes. A young gal with a direct but unassuming gaze and a gentle smile, Krista asked me to talk about my personal experience of art in science. She then came up with this synopsis (summary below), which I thought interesting and illuminating of both me and my interviewer. Here are some excerpts:

In Nina’s experience of investigating science with an artistic spirit, she
holds her heart central, from which the artist springs: (Nina) “An artist—the
driving part, the creative part, the ingenius part, the genius part, innovative,
inquisitive, intuitive parts—all these are incredibly important in science, but
they have to come from the artist. So, I think that every good scientist is an
artist at heart.” From her heart, comes her motivation, which drives her
science: (Nina) “…science is the tool and art is the process—the
motivation.” The heart is central to being in tune with what is out there,
and [this] allows us to connect with serendipitous occurrences, which breed
discovery. Nina suggests three ways to tune-in her heart into getting into the
artistic spirit from which investigating science becomes more
meaningful:

1. Music: (Nina) “I use music to get me back
wherever it is I’m going. Music is art in one of its highest forms.”

2. Hardship: although hardships are certainly not
sought out, Nina uses them as an opportunity for tuning-in. When reflecting on
such hardships, she explains: “there’s a part of me that wishes they didn’t
happen. But on the same token, they created an opportunity for me to grow and
learn. Another important part of the whole [hardship] experience is that when
you’re way down there in wherever that bad place is, something special happens
too.”

3. Training: Nina also talks about training her
mind to become more aware of serendipitous occurrences around her: (Nina) “So
often, when I’m doing research for a novel, I pick up things serendipitously.
Something will come up that just fits with what I was searching for. This new
article pops up in the news. I seldom watch the news, and there it is! Or I’m
talking to someone and they bring up just the topic I am researching. These
things are always happening to me.” In her scientific pursuits, Nina suggests
that her reactions to serendipitous occurrences and consequent discoveries are
motivated by the artist in her: (Nina) “I was doing a comparative pollution
study using glass slides for colonizing algae, comparing an urban stream to an
agricultural stream. I was really looking to see the difference between streams
when I made a discovery that the algae were colonizing the glass surfaces
according to the current. How and why? That’s more of an artistic question. I
decided to pursue this new line of research (which turned out to be far more
interesting than my original research) and wrote several papers on
it.” Indeed, questions like “why” and “what if” correspond with Nina’s
artistic work as a science fiction writer, where (Nina) “the ‘what if’ question
is the science fiction writer’s mantra, the premise, which comes from the artist
part of you.” Nina makes sense out of the experience of connectivity and
being in tune, by first recognizing that there is a reason for it; furthermore
she attributes it to something more, something greater: (Nina) “There’s a reason
for everything. I think God is everything. I believe we are more than we
are.”

According to Mark A. Runco (California State University) creativity depends on originality, while accomplishment and achievement reflect other problem-solving skills. “Creative thinking involves at least three things: the cognitive capacity to transform experience into original interpretations, an interest in producing original interpretations, and discretion.” The title of Piaget’s monograph, To Understand Is to Invent, reflects that fact that we do not have an authentic understanding of our experience until we construct that understanding for ourselves. “It is one thing to memorize some datum; it is quite another to discover it for one’s self; only then do we understand,” says Runco. This is what I do in science all the time. I agree with Runco: what Piaget called “invention” is a kind of creation, a creation of personal meaning. Piaget tied assimilation to imaginative play into creative interpretation. Yet, creativity seems to operate differently than talent or expertise. According to Dean Keith Simonton (University of California), even the most illustrious creative geniuses of history have careers riddled by both hits and misses, both successes and failures. He uses Albert Einstein as an example. A man who has achieved almost mythical status as a genius, Einstein’s career “was plagued by terrible ideas, false starts and surprising disasters.” Simonton tells the story of Einstein’s debate with Niels Bohr over the implications of quantum theory, in which Einstein offered a series of arguments that Bohr countered. “Once Bohr even demolished one of Einstein’s attacks by pointing out that Einstein failed to take into consideration the theory of relativity!” Einstein apparently wasted the final years of his career working on a unified field theory that was almost universally rejected by his colleagues. Einstein defended his missteps by noting that errors can advance science so long as they are not trivial.

Imagination is more important than knowledge—Albert Einstein

The only real valuable thing is intuition—Albert Einstein

I happen to believe that everything that happens in life happens for a reason. This type of logic removes a lot of stress because it allows you to not focus on things that are outside of your control—Teresa Young

I met Teresa many years ago when I moved to Victoria, British Columbia to do my PhD and teach biology. She was this energetic, eccentric, wild-eyed student who worked in the lab that I was instructing. At the time, she was more of an artist than a scientist, and after she broke the last test tube in the lab, we gravitated toward each other like opposite charges and made fast friends.

After getting her degree, Teresa moved back east (that’s to the east coast in Canadian), got married and had a son. She couldn’t stay away, though, and has returned to work and play in beautiful British Columbia. Her surrealistic-abstract work has been described as fluid, bold and explosively introspective. A native of British Columbia, Canada, Teresa has been drawing and sketching pretty well all her life. She paid her way through college doing portraits in the tourist section of Victoria, BC. Now she helps design and implement relational database systems as senior implementation engineer with a web-based software company in Burnaby, BC.
She will be illustrating the PDF/Audio Book of Darwin’s Paradox, expected to be released this summer. I asked her if she’d like to see our beautiful planet Earth from Vinnie in orbit and she didn’t blink an eye to say yes, like I knew she would (she always knew I was an alien, though we never discussed it):

~~~~~

Like everyone before her, Teresa makes the ride via the crystal transporter without so much as a tummy rumble. I can’t say the same for me. Bathroom break later, I show her to the aft lounge where Harry, my irreverent droid, awaits with two Kokanee beers.

I settle into my chair and give my “old” green-eyed friend an appraising look: she’s matured. Gray flecks her thick mane; she’s let her hair grow long and flowing, like her art, and looks relaxed, awaiting my onslaught (she knows me).

SF Girl: I eagerly take the bait and send a barrage of questions at her like a machine gun: “How did you get started in art? How did it develop to what it currently is?”

Teresa: She takes an appreciative sip of her beer and beams an urchin smile at me. “When I was growing up, I was very interested in science fiction and fantasy books. This naturally also influenced my artwork in a big way, but the strange thing about this is, I drew largely in a realistic fashion in my youth. And I never pursued this artistic talent in a serious way as a career option. I think on some level, I had decided that doing it for a job would take the fun out of it. Also, doing portraits as a sideline for about fifteen years soured me quite young on selling my work. It’s very rigid, only drawing what people want to see, especially when you are too young to realize that maybe what you want to see might be more valuable to you artistically. To this day, I shudder if someone asks me to draw them!”

SF Girl: I gasp and I’m about to ask another question when she blithely continues.

Teresa: “When I was fourteen, I started drawing in a surrealist style, but never showed this part of my artwork to too many people, perhaps thinking that it wasn’t acceptable or something like that. So this part of my style developed separately from my “normal” artwork. I think it’s like growing mushrooms in a back room or something.”

SF Girl: “You mean, like crack? What if—”

Teresa: She cuts me off, “Over time, the surreal and the abstract took over my art life. . . . Still in the shadows, developing in its own direction, it had a life of its own. When I am doing a piece, it is an expression of emotion, rather than a representation of a concrete reality. Life flows, emotions flow, and people grow. . . . So my artwork flows. I coined the term “emotional landscape” for some of my paintings; that is what they feel like to me.” She beams.

SF Girl: “But how does that—”

Teresa: She talks over me, “Lately, I have been wanting to seek an audience, so I have been getting some of my art out into the public eye. I was featured in December on an ezine called Latchkey.net. IAnd you can view a gallery of my work on Strange Horizons. I recently illustrated a story for a new magazine coming out in the next few months called !Ultra. Good thing the editor wasn’t looking for strictly realistic pieces!”

SF Girl: I laugh. “But you also do—”

Teresa: She cuts in, “So if you would like to see more of my work, I have some pieces on a community website called webshots. It is quite nice, and they maintain it. (An added bonus for me!)”

She must have met my marketing manager, Karen Mason (SEO), I think, watching her pat a chortling Harry on the head and realizing that I haven’t gotten more than three words in edgewise and she’s marketed her work with the ease of a seasoned entrepreneur. Then, seeing that her beer is empty, Teresa leans forward and claps me hard on the back, then gets up to leave. I sigh…some things never change…