Stylized Science

Art/Subjective:

Leonardo da Vinci

Michele Banks

Art/Objective:

David Goodsell

Drew Berry

Cameron Slayden

Science/Subjective:

After some insane number of hours e-mailing people, I've finally got a list of people willing to be interviewed or at the very least give permission for their work to be used in my project. 

1. Cameron Slayden: Artistic Director and CEO of Cosmocyte and UMBC INDS graduate

http://cosmocyte.com/

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/cosmocyte

CONFIRMED. INTERVIEW SCHEDULED FOR THURSDAY, MARCH 1ST.

2. David Goodsell: Molecular Biologist and Molecular Illustrator

http://mgl.scripps.edu/people/goodsell/

CONFIRMED. INTERVIEW SCHEDULED FOR WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21ST.

3. Blake Porch: Animator for HHMI's Biointeractive

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/

4. Drew Berry: Biomedical animator, MacArthur Fellow, Emmy winner, and "Steven Spielberg of molecular animation" - NY Times

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/biomedical_animator

5. Michele Banks: Local Artist who uses cellular imagery in her artwork

http://www.artmonger.net/

6. Graham Johnson: AMI board member and Renaissance man of biomedical illustration

http://grahamj.com/

7. Gael McGill: Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School, President and CEO of Digizyme, co-developer of Molecular Maya (mMaya)

http://www.molecularmovies.com/

http://www.digizyme.com/about/team.html

8. Ian Thorpe: UMBC faculty member studying molecular simulation and modeling

http://www.umbc.edu/chem/general/user/ithorpe

9. Darrell Hurt: NIH x-ray crystallographer

10. Donnie Bliss: NIH biomedical illustrator and animator

http://science.education.nih.gov/LifeWorks.nsf/Interviews/Don+Bliss

There is controversy about whether the term "medical illustrator" is an appropriate professional title. Though many medical illustrators seem to agree that the general term "medical illustrator" does not always seem to convey the variety of skills that medical illustrators, animators, and visualization specialists use in their practice, many seem content to use the term "medical illustrator" or more commonly "biomedical illustrator" as a professional title. Even those that don't care for the term acknowledge that there probably is no perfect term to describe everything medical illustrators do, and thus feel that it would be unwise to change a title that has over 100 years of professional recognition and history.

Perhaps one of the best ways to study the present state of any given profession is to examine those who have recently been rewarded for their exceptional work in the field. The field of medical illustration is no exception. Each year at their annual meeting, the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) holds a salon in which members of the association can submit their artwork to be judged in a variety of categories. The 2011 Annual Meeting was held in Baltimore, MD in June, and I was lucky enough to be living down the street and got to experience many of these award winning pieces in person.

When one examines the winning pieces as a collective whole, one can truly appreciate the variety that exists within the field of contemporary medical illustration. Awards are given to both students and professionals for traditional as well as digital medical and scientific illustrations, editorial and fine arts pieces, marketing and advertising pieces, animations, medical-legal exhibits, and interactive media pieces. These artworks are singled out for being exceptional examples of what today's medical illustrators actually do. In terms of my capstone thesis, I was excited to find that individual artistic style seemed to play an important part in the judgement of many of the winning pieces.  

Under the mega-category of medical illustration (illustration, in this context, meaning a traditional 2D drawing-based approach), awards are given for exceptional achievements in the use of color, value, and line. 

In the category of Instructional Color: Transmission Electron Microscopy, Fabian de Kok-Mercado 

Credit: Fabian de Kok-Mercado, Victoria Wahl-Jensen, Laura Bollinger, NIAID IRF

The editorial category emphasizes not only the illustrator's formal technique, but also their consideration of compositional unity.

What I found somewhat surprising was that the judgement of categories based heavily in computer graphics (such as animation and interactive media) also emphasized the importance of aesthetics. 

In examining the illustrative methods and techniques employed as well as the subject matter studied by last year's salon winners, it is clear the field is breaking out of the rut of neoclassical realism that has permeated the profession for much of the past 100 years.

In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks relates to the reader the interesting case study of a man who sees completely in abstractions. Though he is able to describe the color, outline, and texture of an object, he seems entirely unable to recognize the most common of items. Sacks notices that his inability to do so results from his scanning “computer vision,” in which the patient simply focuses on individual characteristics of the item, completely unable to connect them in any way and understand that a “container with five out-pouchings” is, indeed, a glove.

This story reflects the problem with approaching the concept of form in a quantitative manner. Though the object can be described with precise detail, the true identity, and thus meaning, of the object is lost on us. We simply cannot see the forest through the trees.

The study of form is essential to biology, as form often dictates function. To study the physical processes that occur in a living organism, we must have an understanding of the form of its internal workings. This holds especially true for those specialists involved in the field of molecular biology. Molecular biologists study life on its smallest scale, a scale that cannot be seen by the human visual system alone. Thus, molecular biologists rely on what can be described as extensions of human vision to reveal the form of the complex macromolecules that make up a  living cell.

  What is revealed by these methods of visual extension is quantitative data that then must be translated into a manner the human visual system can understand. An object’s entire form can be understood solely through qualitative means. Though we can quantitatively measure the length of an edge, the distance between two points, and the angle of light bouncing of a face, these alone are simply not enough to produce a complete understanding of the form of an object.

"Style" is a particularly amorphous term. While we inherently know when to use it, it is difficult to define. Google has informed me that style is, "a kind, sort, or type, as with reference to form, appearance, or character."  This definition is left intentionally vague. Style can mean different things to different audiences, so without proper context and clear definition, the word is essentially meaningless.

I have searched for a definition of style that I feel has the ability to transcend its meaning in the traditional visual arts and be applied to medical and scientific illustrations and visualizations. I have settled upon something I stumbled upon in a book entitled Style in Art History: An Introduction to Theories of Style and Sequence by Margaret Finch. Finch states that:

"Style is any factor pertaining to form, subject, or meaning which is sufficiently constant in a group of artworks to establish a relationship among the works."

The molecular artwork of David Goodsell. He is currently an associate professor of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute.

Fig. 1: Escherichia coli "This illustration shows a cross-section of a small portion of an Escherichia coli cell. The cell wall, with two concentric membranes studded with transmembrane proteins, is shown in green. A large flagellar motor crosses the entire wall, turning the flagellum that extends upwards from the surface. The cytoplasmic area is colored blue and purple. The large purple molecules are ribosomes and the small, L-shaped maroon molecules are tRNA, and the white strands are mRNA. Enzymes are shown in blue. The nucleoid region is shown in yellow and orange, with the long DNA circle shown in yellow, wrapped around HU protein (bacterial nucleosomes). In the center of the nucleoid region shown here, you might find a replication fork, with DNA polymerase (in red-orange) replicating new DNA."

Fig. 2: Blood "This illustration shows a cross-section through the blood, with blood serum in the upper half and a red blood cell in the lower half. In the serum, look for Y-shaped antibodies, long thin fibrinogen molecules (in light red) and many small albumin proteins. The large UFO-shaped objects are low density lipoprotein and the six-armed protein is complement C1. The red blood cell is filled with hemoglobin, in red. The cell wall, in purple, is braced on the inner surface by long spectrin chains connected at one end to a small segment of actin filament."

An excerpt from "Style and Non-style in Anatomical Illustration: From Renaissance Humanism to Henry Gray" by Martin Kemp:

"We are used to the idea that ‘style’ is a key element in the study of art, even if it seems less central than it used to be. Considered in its broadest sense, style speaks not only of the maker’s mode of presentation but also about aspects of production, patronage, intended reception, visualization and visual language – in short, about every aspect of the process of communication between the originators of the image and the viewers. Style is not normally taken as one of the prime criteria when we analyze a scientific activity. In the specific field of scientific illustration, it has been seen as having some limited degree of relevance, if only in relation to the era of the illuminated manuscript and earlier phases of the printed text, when the provision of lavish picture books for noble patrons was one of the standard types of production. Considered from the standpoint of the prevailing orthodoxies in much 19th-century and subsequent science, style is at best regarded as a rather irrelevant adornment to the business of communicating information and at worst as a positive liability. However, every made image of what is seen – every representation of nature or attempt to model some aspect of the world in visual terms – unavoidably has its own style, in as much as it has a visual ‘air’ or ‘aura’ through which its origins are recognizable…

...The tendency to regard evident stylishness as an irrelevance or encumbrance in scientific illustration has arisen as the result of a concerted ambition in science and technology from about 1850 to achieve ‘style-less’ images in which there has been nothing more to the presentation than the direct communication of objective information in the most functional manner. This aspiration apparently contrasts markedly with the overt espousing of style in Renaissance and Baroque illustration, in which the production of a fine display through the visual equivalent of rhetoric was either an explicit or implicit goal. I will also be arguing that the ‘style-less’ manner is as much a style as any mode of presentation and exhibits its own kind of contrived rhetoric."