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GURNON: What you're looking at are some steel sculptures that we collaborated on.
We built these structures as representations of
data from Klaus Schulten's lab at the Beckman Institute.
The data was the folding of a protein called Villin.
And the protein folds in seven microseconds. So, I mean, it's thousands
and thousands of times faster than the blink of an eye.
And what we did was we took five snapshots along that trajectory
and with those coordinates
fed it into a program that would give us cutting diagrams for steel.
And then, really over the course of a month, students got to learn about protein folding,
some pretty difficult biochemical research problems, while at the same time
welding and grinding and creating the art.
SCHULTEN: The sculptures show wonderfully
how this protein is at first very elongated,
artificially elongated actually, and how
it then coils up into the characteristic shape that the protein assumes.
VOSS-ANDREAE: Proteins are amazingly beautiful structures. They make us run and they
are everything. They are the basic blocks of what we call 'being alive'.
They have a beauty of alien technology to me.
It is a world that is perfect and I just am amazed by how little we know visually
about that kind of world.
SCHULTEN: In the domain of living cells, which is at the molecular domain,
in this size scale, it is just difficult for microscopes to visualize things.
With light microscopes, you don't have the resolution.
And electron-microscopes are not really well-suited
for studying the processes in living cells.
GURNON: When a protein is produced, you can kind of think of it
as starting out as this floppy string of beads.
And then it folds into a final structure.
The string of beads, each bead is an amino acid, there are twenty of these things.
And the amazing thing about proteins is that they perform all kinds of different tasks
And the task that they perform is dependent on the shape that they take.
And the shape that they take is dependent on this sequence of beads.
SCHULTEN: The proteins in the cell have a remarkable ability
to find their proper form.
This is very essential for them carrying out their proper function.
And it is also very essential for avoiding
pathological circumstances like alzheimer's and other central nervous
system diseases which often come about from the proteins actually
misfolding and not assuming their proper form.
GURNON: Really one of the great unsolved problems in the area of biochemistry
is the protein folding problem.
That is one of the things that the Schulten lab is working on.
Can we, with a computer, watch a protein fold, trillionth of a second by trillionth of a second.
And from that get a movie of what it might look like as that structure forms?
SCHULTEN: I built over the years what I like to call a computational microscope.
That is a microscope not made of glass lenses and metal tubes, but rather made of concepts
and ideas from physics and chemistry and mathematics, and made of software
and computers that put those ideas and concepts together to simulate
what is happening in the cell.
Villin Headpiece is a particularly small protein that folds also fast
enough that the computer can just manage to follow its birth
from being a stretched out, completely nascent protein,
to a protein that is then functional after the villin has folded itself into the proper form.
GURNON: It is one of the proteins, one of the few proteins, that, with the state of our
computers today, we can accurately predict its folding trajectory from unfolded
to folded -- all the way.
For proteins that are slower than villin, we do not have the computer power to do it.
And I wanted the whole story.
SCHULTEN: So I published the work and I told the world about it in many lectures.
And so it happened that some artists and scientists became aware of it.
VOSS-ANDREAE: Klaus Schulten's work, I know it really well because I am always interested in
seeing what is beyond the static aspect of a protein structure.
For the last decades, people saw only the static aspect.
They see only a protein as something unmovable. But it turns out
that the moving aspect of it -- the dynamics of the protein --
is absolutely crucial.
And his group does an amazing job in visualizing that.
GURNON: I was out there looking for resources that would
help me teach concepts of protein folding. In particular, I was looking for something
that showed motion.
And these supplementary videos that they published really struck me as being very
powerful for communicating the idea that there are multiple paths to a single native state.
You could see these proteins getting stuck in local minima and getting out of it and
you could visually watch they things go through different paths to the same final structure.
SCHULTEN: Many people who see, for the first time, what we actually offer scientifically...
they think, 'Oh, they are just using beautiful colors and Disney-type movies.'
That is true in a way. But it is also much more than that because this is the
only way of grasping with the human mind the kind of complexity that is natural
to the living cell.
GURNON: What I really love to do is to walk around these things up there.
You look at them from one direction and you see a timeline -- you see that protein folding.
You go to the other end, you see it unfolding.
And as you walk around, you get a better sense, I think, then you would from a two-dimensional
still of the space that helices take up, of the proximity of one backbone to the next.
You get a better picture of a protein.
VOSS-ANDREAE: It certainly provokes people to ask.
And if they hear the answer --
that this is actually representing something and it is not a modernist abstract sculpture --
most people are actually quite intrigued by that and start asking more questions
and wonder about their own bodies.
GURNON: It is way beyond making pretty sculptures for the public and getting people to think
that science is cool. It is way beyond that.
You can see things through art that maybe you would have let slip past.
SCHULTEN: When you see dead objects under the microscope,
you are impressed with their static beauty.
But, when you see a cell,
you are impressed with the liveliness of it.
You see it streaming and moving and bubbling and sculpting.
And so that is life.
And that is what we want to show the world.
And art is an absolutely natural way of
bringing about the message.
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