Being in the process of developing an art/science piece involving poetry and visual metaphors as realized through video, I was quite fascinated to read about someone else’s process and issues in Stephen Curry’s and Drew Berry’s June 9, 2015 joint post on the Guardian science blogs (Note: Links have been removed),

Yesterday [June 8, 2015] I [Stephen Curry] was trying to figure out why it seems to be so difficult to connect to the biological molecules that we are made of – proteins, DNA and such like. My piece might have ended on a frustrated note but I have no wish to be negative, especially since the problem has only arisen because animators like Drew Berry are now able to use the results of structural biology to make quite exquisite movies of the molecules of life at work inside the cells of our bodies. As I was working though my difficulties, I wrote to ask Berry how he approached the task of representing molecular complexity in ways that would make sense to people. This is his considered and insightful reply:

“The goal of my [Drew Berry] work is to show non-experts – the general public aged 4 to 99, students of biology, journalists and politicians, and so on – what is being discovered in biology, in a format that is accessible, meaningful, and engaging. I hope that my work provides some sense of what biologists and medical researchers are discovering and thinking about, to provide the public with a framework of understanding to discuss these important new discoveries and the impact it will have on us as a society as we head into the future.

These passages, in particular, caught my attention as they are descriptive of the art and the science inherent in Berry’s work,

… I should avoid overstating how accurately I have depicted the reality of the molecular world. It is vastly messier, random and crowded, and it’s physical nature is unimaginably alien to our normal perception of the world around us. That said, my work is not intended to be a lab-bench-calculated model for research use, it is an impressionistic, artist-generated crude sketch of phenomena and structures science is measuring and discovering at the molecular scale.

… I would then assert that the animations are firmly founded on real data and are as accurate as I can possibly make them, while making them watchable and interpretable to a human audience. By far the largest portion of my time is spent conducting broad ranging literature reviews of the topic I am working on, gathering the fragments of data scattered throughout the journals, and holistically reconstructing what currently we know and do not know. Wherever data and models are available, I incorporate them directly into the construction of the animation, including molecular structures, dynamics simulations, speed measurements, and so on. My work is most akin to a ‘review’ paper in the literature, presented in visual form.

Here is one of the problems Berry and other animators struggle with,

… I am friends with the dozen or so people who are at the top of the game at creating biomedical animations (most have a PhD scientific background) and we all struggle with the problem of having a molecule arrive at a particular location from the thick molecular soup of the cytoplasm and not look directed. I can make the molecule wander around in a Brownian type manner, but for story telling and visual explanations, I need it to get to a certain point and do it’s thing at a certain time to move the story along. This can make it look determined and directed.

Berry also discusses the unexpected,

An unexpected outcome I stumbled across more than a decade ago is that the public loves it when ‘real time’ speeds are displayed and the structures and reactions are derived from research data. This takes a lot of time to build, but then the animations have a remarkable longevity of use and strongly resonate with the audience.

For the last excerpt from this essay, I include Berry’s description of one of his most challenging projects and the video he produced,

The most heavily researched and technically challenging animation I have ever built is the kinetochore which can be seen in the video below . The kinetochore is a gigantic structure that assembles on chromosomes just after they have been duplicated and helps them to be pulled apart during cell division (mitosis). It has about 200 proteins of which I depicted about 50. I gathered data from more than 180 scientific papers with everything built as accurately as possible with hundreds of little scientific details built into the structure and dynamics.”

There are more illustrations and one more video embedded along with more from Berry in the essay, which includes these biographical details (Note: Links have been removed),

Drew Berry is the Biomedical Animations Manager at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. @Stephen_Curry is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College [London, UK].