Some biologists see the beauty in their work. More than a few artists draw inspiration from the natural world. But stem cell researcher and artist Ariel Ruiz i Altaba successfully integrates the worlds of art and science, creating biology-inspired art while keeping up with the daily rigors of scientific research.
"Eclipse" from Ruiz i Altaba's Possible to Forget series Image: Ariel Ruiz i Altaba
"Mostly for someone to be professional in one field necessarily means that something else will suffer," says Mark Kessell, a doctor turned artist in New York City. "But I've never seen any sign of it with Ariel."
Ruiz i Altaba has always been spellbound by the structure of the natural world, collecting snails and shells and insects as a child in Barcelona, Spain. But when he started studying biology in college, he discovered molecules, and became fascinated by "the development and maintenance of form from a molecular point of view," he says.
His interest in art also began in childhood, when he was "surrounded by canvases and the smell of turpentine and oil paints" from his mother's paintings. Then, when he was 8 or 9, his grandfather gave him a small camera. "That was a turning point for me," he says. "Since then I have been fascinated by images" -- viewing, capturing, and even creating them.
Now, as a stem cell biologist at the University of Geneva and a professional artist with gallery shows around the world, Ruiz i Altaba somehow finds the time to entertain both of his passions. "He is neither a part time scientist nor a part time artist; he's a full time both," Kessell says. "I have no idea how he does it actually."
And with a foot in both the science and art worlds, the two pursuits have become very much "intertwined," he says. The work he does in the lab "is a very clear source of imagery" for his art, inspiring pieces depicting various aspects of human and animal development. Using a variety of photographic techniques, including superimposing photos, scratching negatives, and even old-fashioned photograms, which creates a negative impression of the object, Ruiz i Altaba plays with light, shadow, movement, and form to create series of related science-tinged images.
While the influence of his research can easily be seen in his creative endeavors, his art, in turn, guides his research, he says. In 1995, when he first started thinking about cancer and hedgehog signaling in his lab at the Skirball Institute of Biomedical Research in New York City, he recalls "trying to understand how pathologists were so good at telling what kind of tumors" they were looking at in biopsy pictures, and realizing that the process was quite similar to what art historians do when they trace where a painting came from. "What it means is that tumors have a pattern, [and] that there's enough information to tell the origin or history of that tumor," he says. "My interest in form in understanding landscapes became essential to understanding tumors as patterning diseases."
Indeed, "what started as trying to understand how beautiful structures in nature are built by molecules and cells during development has turned into a field with tremendous connections to issues of human medicine," says developmental geneticist Matthew Scott of the Stanford University School of Medicine. "[Ariel's art] helps us to constantly appreciate that beauty and also how that beauty can be a starting point for original artistic work."
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