Art and Science

Spent an hour or three assembling a set of DNA sequences for ape sex-determining regions of the Y-chromosome (SRY's) as well as one or two for macaques as an outgroup.  Several sequences included the 5' region and some were partial coding sequences.  This means--given the wide variety of lengths and evolutionary time--the software sort of ate it on the alignment.

Basically, the software tried to start the sequences in the middle and blew them apart trying to line them up.  Happily, one sequence, a human reference sample, covered the entire span and I could manually put them together.  The thing that really got me was how much SeaView (a program to edit sequences) and MEGA (a general purpose phylogenetic software) made the sequences look like a Scottish plaid, especially when some of the sequences are partially aligned.

Of course, it's not the first time I've connected art and science.  My pet name for microbiology was "art for science majors" because the tendency for others to stain various parts of their body.  (A secondary reason I dropped the pre-nursing idea, another being the number of my classmates showing an inability or unwillingness to wash their hands.)

In that case, it was accidental.  In other ways, like the manual alignments, it's an interesting connection between the rational, logical way to execute tasks and the somewhat intuitive means to accomplish the parts around the logical core.   Not de novo intuition, but informed intuition to be sure. 

I think that's one reason I like science: the integration of creativity in building research ideas and solving problems and then the logic of analysis.