Art on a deeper level
Biana Godin is, first and foremost, a scientist. But she is also an artist.
Though she is quick to point out that she works with a team at Houston Methodist Research Institute — “I don’t want to take all the credit” — and that some of the images employ images from other scientists melded with hers, she is, after all, the artist.
Just don’t call her work photographs. No photons are involved. “They are electron micrographs, ‘photographs’ on a very, very tiny scale,” she says.
What her images capture is the beauty and drama of the worlds inside our bodies that we can never see.
And her work gets notice. For three years in a row, she has been one of 10 national winners of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s BioArt competition, which recognizes “the beauty and breadth of biological research.”
One of her winning images (actually one image superimposed on another) involves gold-colored man-made polymer microcarriers. Designed to carry chemotherapy drugs, they’re just 2 micrometers wide in real life. In Godin’s image, they’re heading toward purple-and-turquoise breast cancer cells. It’s as dramatic as a battle.
Godin, 41, was born in Tashkent in Uzbekistan, but upon the fall of the Soviet Union, her parents moved to Israel. Godin earned her degrees in Israel, including a doctorate in pharmaceutical science, and moved to the U.S. in 2008, just in time for Hurricane Ike. “We never had that type of cataclysm in Israel,” she says.
Godin came to art rather suddenly. One morning, after her first son was born, she simply decided she wanted to make oil paintings. She bought the supplies and began painting that night. (She has two sons now, 9 and 14, so night is painting time.)
In her day job, as an assistant professor of nanomedicine at Methodist Research Institute, Godin works on ways to attack cancer at the cellby-cell level (or injectable multistage nanovectors, if you prefer.)
In contrast to her scientific side, Godin put no research into painting. She learned the hard way that an oil painting needs 30 days for its initial drying, and a year to dry completely. One of her oils is a depiction of Hurricane Ike.
Another, which she displays in her office at the Methodist Research Institute, shows two intertwined figures, a female figure representing a blood cell and a blue male cancer cell, who is dying. She counts the Surrealists and Impressionists as her greatest influences.
“I think I am equally right- and left-brained,” she says. “I need my creative outlet.”
And somehow she has managed to find a way to make science art. “You can find so much beauty in what nature presents on a tiny scale that very few people can see,” she says.
More than a few people have seen her bioart. Mauro Ferrari, the head of the Houston Methodist Research Institute, has seen to that.
Ferrari’s wife, Paola, is the founder of the NanoGagliato Conference, held each summer in the tiny village of Gagliato in Italy. The conference gathers top nanoscientists who collaborate, think and engage with the people of the town for the better part of a week.
As part of the festival, Ferrari let the children of Gagliato look at some of Godin’s images and tell what they saw. Their description, and her art, were blown up to mural size and displayed around town. “The science, the kids, the community — it was unbelievable,” Ferrari says. “Biana’s artwork made a connection with the local population.”
The work also has won praise from Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health.
“I think what we are doing in science is creative, too,” Godin says.”But we need to be precise for solid science.”
Another of her images, from 2014, shows two cancer cells connected by a nanotube like a telephone wire. They look as if they are communicating.
She likes the process of creating one image from different images, fitting them together to make something new. She likens her images to the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which scientists shrunk to nano-size explore the body of a scientist with a blood clot.
One of her goals is to have a gallery or museum show to get wider exposure. “This is fine art,” she says. “This is the finest art.”