So far I haven’t diagnosed myself or been diagnosed with psychopathology.
Creativity by itself…is not normal.
I could be your imaginary friend.
My name is Joe Davis and I’m officially designated as “Artist-Scientist” at George
Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School in Harvard Genetics.
He is a very creative interdisciplinary…scientist, pretending to be an artist.
A lot of what passes for true science is quite incremental and doesn’t really change things.
Joe on the other hand is more likely to contribute to transformative science, and that’s what
my lab is all about.
As new tools and new knowledge become available to the world of science and technology, they
also become available to art.
Their criticisms were: “Joe Davis thinks the laboratory is a playground,” well, yes,
I think the laboratory is a playground, it’s amazing.
These are my DNA prayer flags.
This is a horn coral.
This is a crystal radio.
And of course: Joe Davis, special addition primordial soup.
I have no scientific credential what so ever, but I like to create these situations where
the two so called opposites are merged is such a way that they can’t be discriminated.
That, that’s the greatest thrill of all, you know.
That’s the great unification of knowledge.
We recently realized this three year project to get silk moths to spin silk that could
metallize with metallic gold.
Mariko Kasuya and I created the first bio-metalized silk in the last several week.
Creativity is the ability to put things together in new ways.
These same materials can used to take up heavy metals from contaminated groundwaters at terrible
sites like Fukushima.
Art helps science understand itself.
SAM: So why don’t people feed artists?
JOE DAVIS: Why don’t they feed artists the way they feed scientists?
I hope that by my example, society, not just science will realize the value of what people
like me can do.
And that eventually, they will be payed to do these things.
They certainly deserve to be payed to do these things.
But somebody has to show them the way, and if nobody does then they’ll never get payed
so…here we go.
You got five bucks?
In this dictionary, it says, “Art is human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract
the work of nature.
Joe may or may not deliver the ideas directly, but he causes us to think differently.
Over the last 25 years, I invented various DNA programing languages to allow me to insert
information into organisms that’s not biological information but rather human intellectual
information.
This suggests a world in which the whole terrestrial biome is the message board.
Techniques for improving the information handling capacity of DNA are right now being created
with the potential to replace the internet.
Ideally, we could put all this information into everything that’s around us.
Everything could be there, and it could never be burned.
Art has always been involved in this struggle against the harsh forces of nature to hold
onto the legacy and the dreams of culture.
I think most of the problems that humanity has these days, is that we’re all expected
to do just one thing.
We go to work one way.
On the way to work we go the same way every day.
We sit in the same cubicle or the same office and do the same thing day in and day out.
I have great adventures.
You only have one chance in this world to make it a better place and often that involves
a great adventure.
Without them, life would probably be basically unbearable.
You see that light?
Yeah.
That’s the spectra of a G-Type star.
What’s that?
It’s an incredible thermonuclear reaction with enormous violence that’s going on at
this moment, ninety three million miles away.
And how does that make you feel?
Alive.
In your life, you gotta have time for work, and you have to have time for life.
You can’t have only work, and you can’t have only life, because either way it’s
self destructive.
You have to stop, on both sides, and make time for the other.
And of Crimmond, I bid the farewell.
We’re bound out for Greenland, and ready to sail, in hopes to find riches, in hunting
the whale.