The Seeds of Scientific Illustration and BioArt

Another notable scientist was Santiago Ramón y Cajal. He was a Spanish neuroscientist, pathologist, and histologist of the late 19th century. He and Camillo Golgi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for their work on the structure of the nervous system.Ramón y Cajal’s main interest was recording the structure of the brain, specifically, he created commendable drawings of the anatomy of the brain and nerve fibres. He simply replicated what he saw under his microscope and transferred it to paper for further study. The beauty of these drawings were the intricate branches of the neurons that he observed and drew himself. It can be said that he was the seed of Scientific illustration that has now become a recognized career.

However, the father of Bioart can be considered to be Joe Davis. He’s a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT, and in the George Church Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. Apart from using pastels and paint, he also uses genes, bacteria and magnetic fields. His collaborative piece with Dan Boyd, titled ‘Microvenus,’ involved the use of genetic and molecular biology to encode a symbol of life and femineity into E.coli.