SG: Hello, we are here today with Dr. Wally Gilbert, who won the Nobel Prize
in Chemistry in 1980 for discovering one of the first methods
for sequencing DNA. Dr. Gilbert is an incredibly accomplished scientist.
He actually started out as a physicist
and became interested in molecular biology
after he was faculty at Harvard and met Jim Watson
and started working with him on mRNA.
Since then he has made key discoveries in how translation works.
He biochemically isolated the first genetic control element.
He proposed... he was the first to propose the existence of introns and exons.
He was the first to propose the RNA world hypothesis.
He's made significant advances in biotechnology
and recombinant DNA and in cloning.
And he co-founded Myriad Genetics and Biogen.
And since about the early 2000s, he's actually started another field,
and that is that of photography,
where he's become an incredibly accomplished photographer.
And he's had over 40 solo exhibits.
And we are actually here today in his studio in Somerville, Massachusetts.
So thank you so much for joining us today.
WG: Thank you, Sarah.
SG: I thought we'd just start by... I'd start by asking you how you got interested in photography.
WG: In some ways I've been interested in photography all of my life.
I used a camera as a child, and I had a wet darkroom
and did that sort of photography
where I would use a camera, record objects in the world,
photograph a bit as I traveled. I didn't do anything in particular with those images.
And I traveled at one time around 2000 in Italy, and the photographs
I took, from that trip and a trip in Egypt before that
struck me as very, very lovely,
and I began to explore whether I could make large images from those.
And in those days it was a 2 mega pixel camera.
People insisted that you could not make a large image
They were suitable only for postcard size images.
And I was assured by everybody that I couldn't make large images.
But I simply tried to do it and discovered that one, it was very easy to do,
and the large images had an emotional impact that small ones didn't.
And so I began to do photography seriously as an art form.
At first I would show just to friends
and people began to buy some of the images.
And a professor, Jan Kubasiewicz at Massachusetts College of Arts
saw some of the images and gave me an art show in 2004.
And we did a very large show down at the Mass. College of Art
and that included 8 foot by 12 foot images.
And I've been doing the art more and more seriously ever since.
We did a very large installation in Poland.
Again we did it through Jan Kubasiewicz and a friend of his, Zuk.
A friend of his in Poland who had access to a site in the middle of Warsaw
that was an ancient factory and now was used, and then, somewhat as an art display space.
And they invited me to come and photograph in the factory,
thinking we would do some sort of installation.
And I went and photographed and then we created an installation
with 8 foot by 12 foot hangings
of photographs of fragments of machines hung throughout the factory.
And about 30 two foot by three foot images,
and that display was up in Warsaw for 2 months,
and then again in Lodz and in Posnan. It's been put on again in several places.
SG: And then you moved into more abstract art?
WG: Then I moved from these fragments of machines
to a set of photographs of ballet dancers.
I was invited to illustrate a book that a friend, Christine Temin,
one of the writers of the Boston Ballet
so I photographed ballet dancers rehearsal for several years.
And those photographs are quite beautiful.
They are very lovely people and lovely bodies and lovely emotions.
But that led me from photographing the people to making abstract images
from the dancers,
and that led me to into a series of abstract works,
of which one of them is here behind you.
These abstract... I spent a year sort of working with these abstract forms,
first with these abstract forms based on a human face,
and then moved into more and more strange color spaces and pattern spaces.
And then I spent another year or so working purely in abstract forms
based on geometric figures,
squares and triangles and lines.
And we have actually a show up right now in Germany, in Lindau.
You can see them there of those abstract, geometric, abstract figures.
And then in the more recent years, I have gone back to pure photography
and I do photographs of black and white,
and very brilliant color, and I have no idea what I will do next.
SG: What made you decide to explore different mediums?
WG: Umm, well it's again sort of constant curiosity.
The... Again one of the similarities between the curiosity that drives
one as a scientist, which is a curiosity about the world,
and if you are driven by that curiosity, you change mediums that you work with.
You change what you are doing. You change the technologies you use.
And so I find it perfectly natural to explore different mediums.
SG: So, many people think of art and science as being two completely separate things,
what do you think about it? WG: I think they both
have great similarities between the art and the science.
I find that the creative drive is very, very similar.
And the fascination with what is new. Both in science and in art,
the drive is a creative drive to create something new.
In science, you try to create something that is new
and a new fact about the world.
Something that is new and different.
And true and beautiful.
With art you try to create something that is new,
beautiful and true. The stress in the art is on the beauty.
The question of truth is a much more minor one.
And the stress in science is on truth
in the sense of a socially defined sort of truth,
in which the rest of the world has to agree that what we found
or the theoretical idea or the experiment can be built upon or can be reproduced.
The art is a lot more individual than the science.
And the rewards are in the effect the art has on the viewer.
The rewards in science are finding something that is new,
and again, passing that knowledge on to the world.
I am laughing because I was also thinking of another view
of science. Al Hershey was a great scientist and used to talk about Hershey heaven.
Hershey heaven was having an experiment that worked
and doing it over and over and over again.
And some people do art that way.
They find an art form that works and they do that over and over and over again.
I have a slightly different cast of mind.
I can't bear to do things over and over again.
I constantly go on and do something different,
and that was true both in the science and in the art.
I never continued doing the same thing in science for very long.
And that had problems, I should say.
That has grant problems. It also has other problems,
but I'd be constantly trying to do something different in science
and I find myself doing something different in the art.
SG: So has your time as a scientist influenced the way you approach doing art?
WG: I was originally a theoretical physicist.
And the theoretician tries to understand the world within a grain of sand.
Something to be sketched on the back of an envelope.
I then became an experimental biologist.
An experimenter has a somewhat different view of the world.
They are trying to find the world through struggle with it,
through experimentation, rather than through what would necessarily be broad concepts.
The art that I do I think of as an experimental art,
rather than a conceptual one.
I am not trying to see if a broad idea that I could have somebody else do
because it can be outlined for them.
I find the photography sort of constantly to be doing.
I find the art that I do in the computer almost a constant experiment,
almost like experimental science.
I treat the computer program in the computer as an experimental instrument.
I build the art up piece by piece
as an experimentalist, creating forms in the computer either based on a photograph,
or based on a drawing, and continuing until I find something that I like.
When I find something I like, I keep a copy of it and go on and see how else I can modify it.
It's a very experimental approach.
SG: You've been very successful in many different areas.
First as a theoretical physicist, and then as a molecular biologist,
and biochemist, and then you went into biotechnology,
and now you are a successful artist.
Do you have any keys to success, or advice that you would give
to people who are interested in transitioning?
I do think that people do not change what they do enough.
It is often far easier to change what you are doing than you imagine.
Very often people think they have been trained to do a certain thing.
When you run across students, you feel you are being trained to do something
and there should be a job just in that thing I am being trained for waiting for me.
And that is the future of my life. It is very important to realize that the real role in our education
is to teach us how to think broadly, not just about particular topics.
The PhD degree is an exercise in how to think, how to reason for yourself what is true.
And I learned that when I changed from physics to biology.
I got a PhD in Physics, theoretical physics, and now suddenly I found myself doing experiments in biology.
I realized that the underlying ability that I had learned doing the PhD
how to think about, how to convince myself that something is true,
or how to test some ideas for myself,
was the crucial element.
And the element in doing experimental biology
was an experimental technique that I could learn very easily
and facts that I could ask somebody else about.
But the real question is how do you put something together,
was something I learned much more broadly as part of the PhD.
I don't think people realize that enough.
People spend five years getting a PhD
and think that must mean that it takes five years
to learn how to do anything different.
But in fact, the five years, six years in this country,
is mostly spent in gradually learning how to reason for oneself
and decide for oneself what is true.
And that is not something we teach very effectively.
We teach it by example. We teach it by a sort of guild system
putting people to work gradually, questioning them gradually,
and letting them struggle and find the answers.
The actual material that is involved is something one can master within a year or a few months,
but the ability to work with it is what takes the time to develop.
And once that ability is developed it can be moved to other fields.
So it is much easier to change fields than people imagine.
SG: Well, thank you very much for speaking with us today.
And I guess we'll just end by could you tell people where they can find your work online.
WG: If you look me up online as Wally Gilbert,
you will find my websites listed under photography.
I am not the silversmith, and I am not the baseball player,
but otherwise you'll find me that way.