Art/Science: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation By David Edwards Harvard University Press, 195pp. £12.95 In 1970s New Haven, Don Ingber was pondering the difference between the behaviour of healthy human cells - running into each other, stopping and snuggling together into perfect hexagons - and the tearaway movement of cancer cells, which stopped at nothing and sped around like spiders.
The difference between life and death seemed to relate to changes of movement and form. Newly attuned to these structural insights, Ingber noticed students emerging from an art class carrying cardboard structures that resembled the structures of viruses.
When Ingber approached the professor teaching the course, he learned about the tension structures of rods and strings pioneered by artist Kenneth Snelson and designer Buckminster Fuller, which stood up in apparent defiance of gravity, a phenomenon known as "tensegrity". Inspired by these structures, Ingber wondered whether they could form the key to understanding the architecture of the human cell.
His controversial approach, merging insights from art, architecture and science, was met with scepticism by many colleagues, but Ingber persisted and his idea was eventually the stimulus of a new biomechanical approach to cellular biology.
Don Ingber's courageous cross-disciplinary foray is one example of what David Edwards terms "artscience", a bringing to bear of aesthetic methods to scientific problems, or conversely, the application of science to aesthetics.
Edwards's book is something of a manifesto for artscience, and for the need to cultivate more porous cultural, corporate and educational institutions. The interactions between art and science - from Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings and Kepler's celestial harmonics to Goethe's colour theory and Gerhard Richter's experiments on vision - have been richly documented by authors including Martin Kemp, but what Edwards offers here is something very different.
Rather than providing an artscience manual, he recounts a series of epiphanies. The stories he describes range from innovation in drug design to the chemical analysis of paintings in the Louvre. We are regaled with the experiences of plucky individuals who were willing to risk their own careers to step out of their institutional comfort zones and share their ideas across traditional boundaries.
Predominantly these are optimistic parables about the potential for increasing the impact of ideas (both artistic and scientific) when they are brought outside a specialist domain. A counter-example perhaps is the now infamous case of Steve Kurtz, an artist belonging to the Critical Art Ensemble who was arrested by the FBI in 2004 when a biotechnology lab was found in his house after he called an ambulance when his wife had a heart-attack. Artscience, according to Edwards, "both produces disruption and helps us creatively respond to it".
While many authors have offered recipes for creativity at individual, institutional and regional level, from Edward de Bono to Richard Florida, a particular interest of Edwards's work lies in his discussion of innovation environments and the research-industry-society interface. Edwards's own story is particularly interesting from this point of view.
Having carried out research on breathing, on meeting MIT professor Bob Langer, Edwards was inspired to explore new approaches to drug delivery via the air we breathe. After challenging the received wisdom concerning the size of particles that could be easily inhaled into the lungs, Edwards, who was also flirting with a career in creative writing, created a company aimed at developing an aerosol method to provide insulin to diabetics, removing the need for an injection. The company, Advanced Inhalation Research (AIR), was sold to publicly traded pharmaceutical company Alkermes, resulting in "the largest accrual of value at the time in biotechnology history".
WAS EDWARDS'S INNOVATION triggered by artistic insight? Not directly, but entrepreneurship and a deep sensitivity to the economic and social impact of ideas permeate these pages, differentiating this book from armchair studies of creativity and more academic treatments of the art-science interface.
Artscience itself is really part of a bigger picture for Edwards, best characterised by the phrase "idea translation", which is about designing processes and environments that accelerate the transition from conception to implementation of ideas of potential benefit along four key "impact axes": educational, social, industrial and cultural.
The proceeds from the sale of AIR enabled Edwards to create an art-science laboratory, Le Laboratoire, which opened its doors in a stunning building in central Paris in October as a physical locus for interdisciplinary collaborations and "idea translation". The results of these projects often involve the creation of new "product", rapid "idea prototypes".
Is idea-translation an inevitable natural process or does it require such an artificial greenhouse environment? The barriers to idea translation are not simply cultural and institutional inertia, according to Edwards, but often economic factors and the maximisation of shareholder value can prevent ideas realising their potential social impact and impede their circulation.
As an example, a biotech startup Pathogenesis developed a drug that appeared to treat tuberculosis better than anything available, but the market opportunity was not favourable so the social impact could not be realised.
Similarly the World Health Organisation developed a drug to treat leishmaniasis, a disease spread by the bite of the female sandfly, but subsequently abandoned it due to the lack of a business model for its development. In both cases, the drugs were subsequently brought to production through the intervention of innovative not-for-profits.
Arguing passionately for the need for new collaborations between scientists, artists, industry and the social sector, Artscience: Creativity and the Post-Google Generation is ultimately a collection of enticing tales from the trenches for would-be practitioners.
David Edwards will participate in a discussion on innovation environments followed by a signing of his book on Thurs at 7pm at Science Gallery, Pearse Street, Dublin, as part of the Lightwave festival. For more information visit www.sciencegallery.com
Michael John Gorman is director of Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin