A few days ago, Ben put up an interesting article about Natalie Jeremijenko, regarding artistry as it relates to various scientific nuances - an essay that showed one of many many cracks in the "Two Culture" ideals that sprang from C.P. Snow's head. It got me thinking a bit, in that it occurred to me that a place such as scienceblogs.com mostly represents a perhaps more subtle take of the opposite notion: of "the scientist as mad artist." I mean, blogging in itself is a kind of creative outlet, with opinions and commentary that run a wide spectrum of tone and subject matter.
Anyway, we can let that sit for a bit, but there are certainly countless examples in the scientific literature where the title "mad artist" may ring true. Here's one that involves this lovely piece of music.
This is actually reprinted from a wonderful paper entitled "The all pervasive principle of repetitious recurrence governs not only coding sequence construction but also human endeavor in musical composition" (link to pdf of first page) and the above image is a figure depicting musical notation as translated from the last exon of the largest subunit of mouse RNA polymerase II. As if this isn't delicious enough, the article goes on to show that the musical piece shows strong similarities to Chopin's Noturne OP55. No. 1.
The principle author* Sosumu Ohno begins the paper with an awesome beginning. He writes:
"Whereas ordinary mortals are content to mimic others, creative geniuses are condemned to plagiarize themselves" is my shorter, albeit inarticulate, version of what Van Veen said in Ada by Vladimir Nobokov. Indeed, it seems that vaunted geniuses seldom invented more than one modus operandi during their lifetimes, and even civilization has largely been dependant upon plagiarizing a small number of creative works; e.g. the multitudes of Gothic churches can be viewed as pan European plagiarism of the abbey church of St. Denis and/or the cathedral at Sens. This is not surprising for new genes sensu stricto hae seldom been invented. Evolution rather relies on plagiarizing an old and tested theme..."
And then continues to make a case for great works (musical composition) to be inherantly derived from DNA coding sequence.
I often use this paper in a little game I play in class called "Is this real?" and this paper in particular has been the cause of much controversy over the years. Ohno, himself, was a celebrated geneticist with many accomplishments, perhaps the most famous of which was being one of the first to notice that one of the two X chromosomes, in females, existed in a heterochromatin (silenced) form. He was also one of the first geneticists to look into the potential importance of repetitive genetic elements in a genome.
It was from this (and influenced heavily by his wife, Midori) that he developed an interest in expressing DNA code as musical pieces - the obvious advantage being that repetitive elements are likely easier to "hear" than to "see."
Anyway, a few years back a number of high profile clients cried foul when I had to correct them and tell them that the paper was real, and so I made the additional effort to contact him. Unfortunately, he had just passed away, but the office that looked after his trust wrote back saying "it's real." Nice.
For more on Sosumu Ohno, click here for a nice biography.
*The second author is his wife, the more musically proficient one.
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I am not too impressed. By mapping DNA sequences to notes, you basically have a semi-random 4-note pattern. The compositional decisions that Ohno took then are rather extensive. He had to decide what style to write the piece in - he happened to choose a nocturne as his model. After that he had to decide the harmony, phrasing and rhythm. No different really than what many composers have done with mapping their names into their music (Bach and Shostakovich are notable examples). I would however no more compare this piece to Chopin than I would my child's scribbling to Picasso.
While the fact that the notes were mapped from DNA is meaningless, the underlying form he chose does go to support the contention that "civilization has largely been dependant upon plagiarizing a small number of creative works". The nocturne is a set form, developed by John Field and adopted by Chopin who developed and expanded upon the concept.
per Wikipedia:
In its more familiar form as a single-movement character piece usually written for solo piano, the nocturne was cultivated primarily in the nineteenth century. The first nocturnes to be written under the specific title were by the Irish composer John Field, generally viewed as the father of the Romantic nocturne that characteristically features a cantabile melody over an arpeggiated, even guitar-like accompaniment. However, the most famous exponent of the form was Frédéric Chopin, who wrote 21 of them. Later composers to write nocturnes for the piano include Gabriel Fauré, Alexander Scriabin and Erik Satie (1919). One of the most famous pieces of nineteenth-century salon music was the "Fifth Nocturne" of Ignace Leybach, who is now otherwise forgotten
So the form, one could say, evolved over time to the point where its possibilities were largely played out and then it was abandoned in favor of newer forms and expressive possibilities.
Thanks Steve for the music lesson and the great points made. Whilst, I managed to get an answer as to whether this paper is indeed a "serious" look, there's a lot of debate over the issues you presented above - particularly in that his examples aren't nessarily the most robust, and whether a large part of getting a paper like this to fly or published in a respectable journal was due to his substantial credentials as a geneticist of note.
Apparently, he and his wife did perform some of these works (it would be interesting to get a copy somehow), and it did lead to some devotees.
I should also add that I know a recent UK top ten hit was penned using DNA sequence, but unfortunately, I promised not to divulge any details.
I guess in the long run Ohno`s "Evolution by Gene Duplication" had much bigger impact then his work on X-chromosome inactivation.