If you have ever taken a biology class (and even if you haven’t!) chances are, you’ve seen some of David Goodsell’s illustrations. But glancing at them in a textbook, it’s easy to dismiss these drawings as scientific representations, or hardly art at all. Even David Goodsell himself claims that his drawings are primarily meant to be purely scientific. He bases each one off of resolved protein (and other cell) structures from scientific databases, and in addition to illustrating cell structures, he is a scientific researcher seeking better methods to predict and analyze biomolecular complexes. His illustrations aren’t meant to please the eye, rather, they serve the greater purpose of helping scientists understand incredibly important and complex microscopic structures we will never see with our naked eye. Clearly, however, these amazingly intricate and beautiful paintings have incredible artistic merit. But if Goodsell’s drawings are based on biology, is there art in biology itself? I’ve often thought so. You only have to look at the perfect cylindrical shape of a membrane channel protein (exactly as we might build a tunnel in the macroscopic world) to marvel at how brainless molecular interactions can create structures that are so fascinating and complex. The famous golden ratio can be found with abundance in nature, and the brilliance and variety in flowers of different species is simply astounding. Perhaps then, nature is truly the best artist.
Click here to look at the structure of the incredible protein that inspired this post!
https://www.rcsb.org/3d-view/jsmol/1dfj/0
2 Comments
Alina Chen · November 23, 2021 at 12:33 am
I hope all of the illustrations in my Bio textbook looks like this:)
Anna Duan · November 26, 2021 at 5:45 pm
These are beautiful! I wonder how accurate they are – does he enhance colors/size ratios to make some elements of the drawings more interpretable?
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