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Beauty
and Proportion: Science and Art
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If you look at the artistic event and the scientific
event in the beginning, they're the same. They start with
a hunch, and you begin to refine.
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Alan
Alda: Here you have this whole other life, not only have
you had these apparently varied careers, varied areas of research,
you play the violin...
Gerry
Edelman: Used to...
Alan
Alda: At an expert level, you're also an artist, therefore.
Or used to be, can be. Does that come into your work, do you
think in terms of art when you're thinking about the brain?
Gerry
Edelman: No, of course not. I don't think consciously
about it, but if you think about the process of art, look,
my eldest son is an artist, a painter and sculptor. My daughter
is a composer and she's a rising star of bluegrass, believe
it or not. But if you look at the artistic event and the scientific
event in the beginning, they're the same. They start with
a hunch and a feeling and a pattern, and you begin to refine.
In violin playing you better play in tune, that's the minimum,
unless the deliberate instruction of the composer is otherwise.
In science you have to run controls, you want to be quite
careful about thinking out everything. But in the long run,
I think that the difference is that in the scientific pursuit,
you are not inventing most of the time, you are uncovering,
and you don't have quite the freedom that you have, I think,
in an artistic sense, since it has to correspond.
Andy Warhol said, 'Tell me, why does science take so
long?'
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Let
me tell you about Andy Warhol. He came to see me once, and
he said, in his very wispy voice, he said, 'Tell me, why does
science take so long?' And I said, 'Mr. Warhol, when you do
Marilyn Monroe, does it have to be exactly the way she is...?'
He said, 'Oh, I don't do it. We have something called the
Factory, they do silkscreen.' And I said, 'Well, in science,
it has to be the way she is.' He said, 'That is powerful.'
And he went away. So the point is, when you discover something
in science or uncover a relationship, others will come in
and transform it again, and your signature, the thing that
you needed to do it and that they need to do it will naturally
go to one side. So style, which is important in telling the
story, say, is not really at the center of science. But the
sense of beauty and the sense of structure and proportion,
they are shared. 
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