The meeting of creativity's 'twin peaks'

No one these days can afford to have only one thing on their mind, one subject with which they are preoccupied. The coupling of science and art might then seem quite unexceptional, fitting in along side links between say geography and history, physics and biology, football and economics. But the charged meeting between creativity's twin peaks has, it would seem, produced more than its fair share of new light. Maybe because they come from what are thought to be opposite ends of the spectrum of human understanding, there seems to be an added energy released when they embrace. Whatever the reason, it is tempting to conclude that contemporary science and art have found gaps in each other that require filling.

The uses that the arts have for science are possibly easier to identify. Any number of scientific tools have been employed as potentially rich new aesthetic techniques for visualizing phenomena and ideas. Specific scientific findings have frequently thrown up challenging new ways of thinking about the world and our place in it, ripe for artistic interpretation; while laboratories, hospitals, factories and even bunkers where science and technology are to be found have all provided new spaces in which to do or show art - new ways, that is, by which art can break out of its traditional ghettos of the gallery and studio. Science then has provided some artists with inspiration in the areas of medium, message and location.

Now if some art can benefit from science, might the opposite be true too? While some argue that art takes much and gives little to the scientific world, and so science should be left alone to get on with things, others argue forcefully that the world of science can gain in many different ways from the arts, bringing new perspectives and insights.

But the true power of science and art as a union is not what science can learn from art in terms of practical breakthroughs, but what it can gain from art in terms of building a more engaged relationship with the public. And in this arena the creative arts can have just as strong an impact as initiatives such as science centres, practical workshops, theatre in education or people's parliaments. More than simply a means of increasing public confidence in science, however, art can provide unique, and often unpredictable, viewpoints from which to marvel or decry, inspect or challenge scientific ideas and assumptions - in other words, a rather different pair of glasses through which to understand science. Visual, plastic, performance and dramatic arts all have a role to play, often uncompromisingly dissecting the social and ethical implications of science and, ironically, often dealing with the scientific subject matter in greater depth and seriousness than other necessarily 'fun' presentations used in some styles of public engagement.

The outcomes of both science and art have then recently gained from the seemingly unlikely interaction of paintbrush and test-tube. The encounter has been as much about process as product: about what happens when artists and scientists work together. In the area of clinical medicine, this focus on process has resulted in more or less a new discipline - medical humanities. 'Scientific humanities' might not need to become a university department in its own right to exercise a similarly softening influence on undeniably 'hard' subjects. For both doctors and scientists, the implications of dwelling on the connections between their work and other creative endeavours have been to remind everybody that science and medicine are, after all, fundamentally about people.

A version of this article appeared in the Wellcome News Science and Art supplement, 2002.

Ken Arnold is the Wellcome Collection's Head of Public Programmes