The Intersection of Art and Science: Q&A With Dr. Joseph Regan | Organoid Cell Culture Poster Artist | Corning

People often talk about art and science as if they're at odds, but are they?

Joseph Regan, Ph.D., doesn't think so. A biologist and artist himself—the Corning customer who collaborated with the company on their limited edition poster series—Dr. Regan says creativity informs his work in the lab and vice versa. Whether he's studying complex 3D organoids or making cell images pop with color for a journal cover, the collision of both art and science is what he finds most inspiring.

"There's a common misconception that artistic and scientific domains occupy two separate spheres, but the processes used by artists and scientists to create and innovate are extremely similar," said Dr. Regan, a research scientist in Berlin. "There are many studies showing that artists and scientists share the same psychological traits and tend to be polymaths with broad interests across many domains."

He added that many scientists pursue creative hobbies and jobs outside the lab, from photography to writing to music. Albert Einstein played violin, Carl Jung took to the visual arts, and Nobel-winning theoretical chemist Roald Hoffman wrote plays and poetry. These dual interests very often align directly to make the living world more understandable.

"Prior to the invention of the camera, biologists were trained artists and relied on pencil, brush, and paper to catalogue and study the natural world," he said. "These pursuits generated exquisite works of art that were shared widely with the public through exhibitions and book publications, such as the 17^th Century illustrations of Maria Sibylla Merian, who became known as 'the woman who made science beautiful.'"

The first time I worked with organoids was during my Ph.D. at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. I was researching cell lineage hierarchies and the mechanisms that regulate stem cell self-renewal and differentiation during mammary gland development and cancer. This involved using a combination of cell type-specific cell surface markers and fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) for the prospective isolation and functional characterization of different cell types.

By seeding single cells into Matrigel matrix and observing their growth and morphology as organoids, I was able to determine phenotypic differences between the isolated cell types. The organoids faithfully recapitulated the behavior of the cells in vivo and formed multi-lineage "mini-mammary glands" that were even capable of producing milk.

Observing them down the microscope for the first time and being cognizant of their enormous potential to advance our understanding of human biology, and also their use as models to translate that knowledge into therapies, was a truly amazing and inspiring thing to see and still is today!

As a biologist, one is trained to take representative pictures of what is being studied but there is also an artistic impulse to make these images as aesthetic as possible and, certainly in my case, one often gets lost "through the looking-glass" and takes many more pictures than necessary for the simple joy of being able to witness and create something beautiful.

As a result, I've spent thousands of hours gazing through microscopes and created innumerable immunofluorescence micrographs, but only a handful of these images end up being used for publication in scientific journals. And these are, for the most part, only seen by other scientists working in the same field.

The idea of sharing these images with a wider audience was, therefore, always in the back of my mind so it was pretty serendipitous when an art gallery in Berlin approached me about having an exhibition exploring the interconnectedness of art and science, and also when the idea for the poster series came from Corning Life Sciences.