Art Meets Science

Right: Artist Roger Berry with his sculpture "Portrait of a DNA Sequence."

Suspended from the apex of the building's four-story stairwell, the sculpture extends 48 feet in length, yet measures just 18 inches wide, reflecting the long, thread-like nature of DNA molecules. Berry selected stainless steel to represent the two sugar-phosphate backbones of DNA, which twist to create a spiral, or helical, form. He used shapes of colorful dichroic glass, which both transmits and reflects light, to simulate the four nitrogenous bases—adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.

"The structure of DNA can be deceptively simple, yet it is intensely complex," Berry says. "You have to break it down to this kind of silhouette to make any sense of it."

The inspiration for the sculpture came one day in 1996 when biological sciences dean Mark McNamee was visiting the unfinished Life Sciences Addition. The central stairway had just been installed and its spiral design reminded him of the double helix shape of DNA.

"The double helix is at the heart of modern molecular biology and symbolizes the common themes that link together research programs in the building," he says.

Before Berry could start designing the piece, he learned all he could about DNA. Like many undergraduates in biology, he began reading The Cartoon Guide to Genetics, an unconventional textbook coauthored by Mark Wheelis, senior lecturer of microbiology, and syndicated cartoonist Larry Gonick. Berry then met with division researchers who described the particular segment of DNA that he would be depicting in the sculpture. The 201-base-pair segment is the genetic code for a portion of a protein called kinesin that was determined by Professor Jonathan Scholey of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

The resulting sculpture is a marvelously complex lattice of silver steel and shimmering color. The backbones contain 400 feet of stainless steel, and the base pairs contain 603 wafers of glass that variously appear as magenta, green, yellow, red, and blue-green. Gazing up or down through multiple layers of bases turns the pattern into a confusion of other hues--deep blue, forest green, and scarlet—"a visual noise," Berry says, much like the jumble of information within DNA that scientists are striving to understand.