Having always found science a rather beautiful endeavor, I thought the NYTimes slideshow of pieces from Princeton University's "Art of Science" Competition to be both visually and mentally stimulating. The winning piece (on the last slide of the show -- called "Chaos and Geomagnetic Reversals" by Christophe Gissinger) is something I can imagine buying a print of. Although it's over my head in a very serious way, I think some of the theory/models behind that image are explained in Dr. Gissinger's latest manuscript.
In my time at Michigan State, I did quite a bit of imaging work -- less now that my graduate work is more molecular-biology focused. Scientists often pride themselves on quantitative results, work which fits into graphs and numerically describes the work at hand. After all, the Holy Grail of science is statistical significance, and pictures have a difficult time fitting to truly quantitative statistical tests (this problem is sometimes averted through the use of normalization factors and pixel quantification). However, I think on some level as human beings we find the pictures are more compelling. I have to remember this as I seek to make evidence for my hypothesis visually meaningful for my audience.
Below is my own science-art. It shows a pair of cultured rat aortic smooth muscle cell mignified at 60X, and stained with fluorescent-labeled antibodies to show the nucleus, in blue, alpha-actin (unique to smooth muscle cells), in red, and biotinylated serotonin, in green. Yellow indicates an overlay between green and red staining -- a colocalization. The image is published in a manuscript I co-authored as part of Figure 6a in which we were investigating the possibility that serotonin can act as a covalent modifier on intracellular proteins, particularly those important to vascular function.
0 Thoughts:
Post a Comment