The aesthetics of DNA

It was Oscar Wilde who said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

To Wilde, that was a concept, but to Peter Gray, AS ’62, it is reality.

Gray has been a molecular biologist and an artist for much of his life. For more than 40 years, he made his living as a scientist, and in his spare time he used the phenomenon of genetics and gene expression as inspiration for his work on canvas and in metal and stone.

After 10 years as co-founder of a biosafety product firm, and co-inventor of several safety products for the food, electronics, defense and personal products industries, he left the company to become a full-time artist.

He now has a studio in Chicago called Metal-i-Genics Studio [www.metal-i-genics.com/] where he works in increasingly larger formats with a variety of materials including steel, lead, copper or aluminum in conjunction with acrylics, polyester resins and digital imaging. His nine-foot sculpture “Point Mutation,” made of steel and African red granite, sits on the DePaul University campus in Chicago. The sculpture depicts a mutation on mitochondrial DNA that is used for ancient ancestry mapping.

Gray also teaches a summer program on genetics and sculpture to sixth- and seventh-graders in a Chicago public school.

“All my art from 1963 on is science-based,” he says. “My work has migrated from the outer body shell (shape) to the genetics establishing the physical, emotional and behavioral blueprints.”

Last year, Gray was one of only 23 artist-scientists chosen to exhibit his work in the Arts and Sciences Collaboration Inc. (ASCI) juried traveling exhibition “Digital ’07: Pattern-Finding” [www.asci.org/artikel62.html]. The exhibition opened Oct. 6, in the Walter LeCroy Gallery of the New York Hall of Science and began its tour Feb. 13, at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. In April, it will move to another venue in midtown Manhattan.

ASCI’s web site describes Gray as “an artist/scientist whose recent works focus on the genographic mapping of human ancient ancestry. Primarily a sculptor, his sculptural works require information from DNA structure, sequences and single nucleotide permutations of non-expressed regions of the DNA in nuclear and mitochondrial chromosomes.”

The piece accepted by ASCI, “Mitochondrial Ancestry,” is a metallic print illustrating a conceptual DNA in the mitochondrial chromosome that is used to determine maternally inherited traits that can be traced back approximately 75,000 years.

Gray has been interested in art and science since junior high school. “When I went to UD, I wasn’t clear on direction,” he says. In high school he studied physics and polymers. During his first two years at UD, he discovered clinical microbiology as the precursor to molecular biology and began taking biological science and art courses hoping time would make his direction clear. During those years, he was painting, drawing and doing some sculpting using landscapes, animals and other objects around him as inspiration while also training at the Delaware Art Institute.

By his junior year, he decided his career path lay in the biological sciences, so he went to Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago to earn a master’s degree in medical microbiology and molecular biology.After serving in the Medical Service Corps during the Vietnam War, he attended the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Texas at Houston, where he received a doctorate in biomedicine.

It was in graduate school, while delving deeper into genetics by studying viruses on electron microscopic grids, that Gray began to see the scientific process in a different way. “At that time I was painting and sculpting ordinary subjects, but when I started doing research, I began to realize that what I was seeing was highly artistic--like the way colonies of bacteria would grow on an agar plate or 3-D electron microsopic images of viruses. Sometimes they also were very colorful. Then, I started noticing the combination of shapes and colors as seen through the devices we were using,” he says.

Gray can look at a herpes virus sore through a digital microscope and see color and movement, an ebb and flow that resemble an active volcano rather than a molecular marauder.
But, graduate school and life left Gray little time to concentrate on his art.

Accumulating the knowledge that would allow him to continue examining the genetic characteristics of human diseases took him to the U.S. Army’s William Beaumont General Hospital in El Paso, Texas, where he was director of clinical microbiology, serology and experimental immunochemistry in the department of pathology. From there he completed a two-year residency at the Centre de Biologie Moleculaire of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Marseille, France, where he researched ribosome subassembly.

After serving as a research fellow in the California Institute of Technology’s division of biology, Gray became an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Oklahoma Medical School. There he developed his primary research focus in Huntington’s disease.

In 1982, Gray left academia for industry. He worked for a few biotech companies including International Minerals and Chemical, where he directed development, research and support resources for Pitman-Moore Inc., supervising a staff of 200 people and coordinating multinational research and development. While there, he initiated new products and technologies and received federal approval for the first recombinant protein product used to make human vaccines.

As managing adviser for American Gene Therapy Inc. and vice president of research and development for Galagen Inc., he developed the background needed to start his own biosafety antimicrobial packaging company.
“We invented plastics that killed viruses, mold and bacteria in packaging for food, personal products and medical products for the pre-consumer market,” Gray says.

But, in 2004, when he decided to give up the commerce of science to devote all of his time to its aesthetics, he found another mission.

“One of my goals is making science available and understandable to the general public, and I think art is one way to achieve this,” Gray says. “Each piece is designed to bring the artistic aspects of science into the realm of each person.”

Gray says he is hoping to bring people closer to science through his artwork but also by expanding his summer teaching program.

He began by arranging showings of his work in galleries throughout Chicago in 2005. He expanded his work to larger public art sculptures, and now he has begun recruiting artists and scientists in the Chicago area for the school program.

-Barbara Garrison