Dance and Biochemistry: A Hypothetical Experiment in Embodied Learning

8/12/2019 Dance and Biochemistry: A Hypothetical Experiment in Embodied Learning

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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

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

Somatic

2See 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.3See 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 theChemical 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.
http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/ex-scribing-the-choroegraphic-mind-dance-neuroscience-in-collaboration/http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/ex-scribing-the-choroegraphic-mind-dance-neuroscience-in-collaboration/http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/ex-scribing-the-choroegraphic-mind-dance-neuroscience-in-collaboration/http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/ex-scribing-the-choroegraphic-mind-dance-neuroscience-in-collaboration/http://www.weizmann.ac.il/ICS/booklet/8/con8.htmlhttp://www.weizmann.ac.il/ICS/booklet/8/con8.htmlhttp://cssj.chem.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ctc/http://cssj.chem.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ctc/http://cssj.chem.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ctc/http://cssj.chem.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ctc/http://cssj.chem.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/ctc/http://www.weizmann.ac.il/ICS/booklet/8/con8.htmlhttp://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/ex-scribing-the-choroegraphic-mind-dance-neuroscience-in-collaboration/http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/white-paper-abstracts/final-white-papers/ex-scribing-the-choroegraphic-mind-dance-neuroscience-in-collaboration/


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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. Its 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 Ive 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 learningmachine I call The Dance of Life.

4See Sabrina Tavernise, His Fertility Advance Draws Ire: Shoukhrat Mictalopovs 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, 2014.5Though 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 casefor the entry on mitochondrial

disease, see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_disease


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mitochondria. I know Im 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 canbe 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). Itis named after a scientist named Hans Adolf Krebs who conceptualizedit in 1937 and for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1953.

9

6For an example of what makes biochemistry such an enduringly interesting research field for those

interested in such systems, see Peter Mitchells Nobel Lecture, David Keilins Respiratory Chain Concept

and its Chemiosmotic consequences, December 8, 1978. Available at:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1978/mitchell-lecture.pdf7See 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.8See 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

9For 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 .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cyclehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cyclehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cyclehttp://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebs_cyclehttp://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebs_cyclehttp://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebs_cyclehttp://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Biology/Bio231/krebs.htmlhttp://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Biology/Bio231/krebs.htmlhttp://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Biology/Bio231/krebs.htmlhttp://www.science.smith.edu/departments/Biology/Bio231/krebs.htmlhttp://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebs_cyclehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle


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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 ionsand 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 toadvance the field of somatic pedagogy or body learning.

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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.

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10The 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.html12To 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 internalstructures 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

14By the use of marvelously precocious I naturally am referring to Peter Mitchells Nobel Lecture,

David Keilins 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


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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 andunderstandings 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 1960s. 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 thisdomain 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.15For a fascinating account of the discovery of the periodic table, see Paul Strathern Mendeleyevs

Dream: The Quest for the Elements(2001), New York: Saint Martins 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.


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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 theHistory 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 Id go, an alien spy from another planet. There Id 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.

16Acconci teaches in the Art Department and in the program for Performance and Interactive Media

Arts Performance and Interactive Media Arts atBrooklyn Collegeas well as atalso at thePratt

Institutein 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 artpresented 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

1990s, 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. Its not like that in science! Nevertheless, I find myself

drawn to Aconccis more recent architectural installation work some of which shares common ground

with what I am proposing here in terms of space, interactivity and light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_and_Interactive_Media_Artshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_and_Interactive_Media_Artshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Collegehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Collegehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Collegehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_Institutehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_Institutehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_Institutehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_Institutehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Acconcihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Acconcihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Acconcihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_Institutehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_Institutehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_Institutehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Collegehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_and_Interactive_Media_Arts


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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 taughtsomehow 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 Id like to believe, at least in an ideal world.17

Ive 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

17See 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 SyntheticHybrid 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.18It 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 sciencefor most people. Sciart can and is opening it all up, joyously.

The Mitochondria, The Structure and The Function


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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 thatin 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. Its 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.19This 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

Barries 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 players 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 1990s, 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 itsrealization.

19Roger 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 20Haemoglobin 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,.
http://www.sead.viz.tamu.edu/projects/.../SEAD_WP_vol_1http://www.sead.viz.tamu.edu/projects/.../SEAD_WP_vol_1http://www.sead.viz.tamu.edu/projects/.../SEAD_WP_vol_1


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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 Im 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 1980s, 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.

21See "The Africa Project" Kate Kuper, Jonathan Zilberg and Sandra Bales. Art Education. Special Issue:

How History Can Come Together as Art2000, 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, seehttp://www.vtshome.org/what-is-vts/about-us/history . Those two contexts were verydifferent 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.
http://www.vtshome.org/what-is-vts/about-us/historyhttp://www.vtshome.org/what-is-vts/about-us/historyhttp://www.vtshome.org/what-is-vts/about-us/historyhttp://www.vtshome.org/what-is-vts/about-us/history


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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 thepedagogical 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.

22See 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 Steiners 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.


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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 Kapoors

Leviathons, Dale Chihullis 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 visualknowledge 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


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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 ofscience 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.

23See for instance Kevin Aherns illustrated lectures provided on-line.

24As scientists we see things very differently in this regard to most artists, we seek pattern and experience awe in

coherence. As Sean Ede notes inArt 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).


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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.25Perhaps 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


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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 Ive 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. Snows

Two Cultures of Art and Science. Perhaps I am wrong. However, we wont 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 literatis

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.

27On 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 toteaching 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


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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. Whenthe 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 Snows

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 Museums 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.

30The 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

2929So 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

Yudkins Sir Charles Snows Rede Lecture, pp. 33-45. For a subsequent reflection, see Michael

Yudkin, Kings College, Cambridge, 1956, The Cambridge Quarterly1996 XXV (4): 424-425. As

far as I know, very little if anything has so far been made of Yudkins 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/ .31See 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 collectives

presentation of the exhibit itself, see:http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/ .32And 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.
http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/1.-Cradle-to-Grave-Danish-Article.pdfhttp://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/1.-Cradle-to-Grave-Danish-Article.pdfhttp://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/1.-Cradle-to-Grave-Danish-Article.pdfhttp://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/1.-Cradle-to-Grave-Danish-Article.pdfhttp://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jul/24/medicine-cabinet-british-museumhttp://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jul/24/medicine-cabinet-british-museumhttp://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jul/24/medicine-cabinet-british-museumhttp://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jul/24/medicine-cabinet-british-museumhttp://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jul/24/medicine-cabinet-british-museumhttp://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/http://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/1.-Cradle-to-Grave-Danish-Article.pdfhttp://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/1.-Cradle-to-Grave-Danish-Article.pdfhttp://www.pharmacopoeia-art.net/


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means fortribal 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 peoples 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 theproximity, 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?

Documents

Dance and Biochemistry: A Hypothetical Experiment in Embodied Learning