Combating the Culture of no Culture

Hanging in the main common room of the Barresi Lab is a framed art piece—one that earned junior biology major Sophia Liu first place in an interlab art competition. The photo depicts two organic, almost celestial-like forms suspended in a field of black, floating as if in deep space. Green particles of stardust trace the contours of their bodies, while clouds of violet and ember-orange seem to glow from within.

At first glance, the mesmerizing alien image could be mistaken for abstract art. However, it takes a keen scientific eye to recognize exactly what we are looking at: thirty-hour-old, fluorescent zebrafish embryos.

Liu’s microscopic image captures the fish’s neurogenesis, or the beginnings of their nervous systems’ development. Meteorin, the proteins that control the development of the nervous system’s cells, glow purple and orange, while the budding neural stem cells dot the image with green. As the embryos develop, their bodies begin to arrange and orient themselves in space, with only their genetic code to guide them.

Artistic micrograph by Sophia Liu, made in the Barresi Lab.

In the Barresi Lab, this blend of art and science is central to how students see and share their research. As the lab’s walls fill with faculty and undergraduate artwork, the space becomes a gallery of science communication, displaying how art humanizes STEM.

“Part of science is the art of observation and the art of noticing small things about your data. And that's something that we share in common with artists,” said Liu.

Liu has worked in the Barresi Lab ever since her freshman year. Now a Junior, she continues her research through special studies. Alongside her, dozens of other students in the lab work with zebrafish to study brain development. They untangle the genetic code that allows the body to build itself from a single cell, functioning as it grows. The vibrant colors and clear imaging in Liu’s micrograph capture the hours of student work that go into the lab’s experiments. The students care for the fish, collect the embryos, then modify and image them—a labor-intensive, results-driven process. By isolating the beauty in what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill photograph from the lab, Liu emphasizes the magnificent, otherworldly processes that underlie her scientific work.

The Barresi lab is not the only place where art and science intersect on campus. In the PLACE Lab, run by plant physiologist Jess Gersony, students spend on average 20% of their time on art, an unusual emphasis for a lab to focus on. PLACE, Gersony explained, stands for plant, physiology, art, and community engagement; “we [are] all doing plant physiology research, thinking about plants and climate change.”

Artwork by Chlo Gold, Research Assistant in the PLACE Lab, made in Gersony’s BIO 368 seminar.

Members of the lab include a master's student, a PhD student, a postdoctoral researcher who already has her PhD, three undergraduates, and a research technician.

One of their biggest projects currently deals with the community engagement aspect of their program. Every week, they work with middle school students from Girls Inc. in Holyoke, teaching botany lessons through various art projects. Last week, they asked their students to look at stomata—small pores found on the surface of leaves—with a microscope, creating detailed drawings from what they saw.

Outside of the PLACE Lab, Gersony writes poetry influenced by her work in botany. With an interdisciplinary background, she spent years working as a professional tap dancer, performing in companies in New York City and Boston, and developing her practice as a poet through workshops and independent studies, all while pursuing a degree in ecology and later a PhD. For most of her academic and artistic career, she treated these as distinct identities. A conversation with one of her professors, Dory Graham, towards the end of her PhD changed all of this.

Graham posed a question: “Jess, why do you keep these parts of your brain so separate? You should just let them speak to each other.”

At first, Gersony was resistant, “kicking and screaming about it,” she said, but Graham pushed her to let herself “be a whole human.” Thus, in 2020, she began integrating more of her science into her poetry, but it was only a subconscious act at this point. “I’m always thinking about plants and water,” she said, and therefore, “all my metaphors and the ways I understand the world” come from it.

Nowadays, Gersony intentionally blends her botanical work with her poetry, finding that the material just so “happens to be very poetic.” While the visual elements of botany inspire her imagery, she says the deeper challenge lies in translating the science conceptually—thinking about processes like photosynthesis not just as biological functions, but as metaphors for relationships, reciprocity, and interconnected systems of giving and taking.

Often, people view science and art as two distinct fields, opposing realms that rarely, if ever, meet. While art is seen as a uniquely human expression, science is conversely seen as inhuman, demanding machine-like objectivity. “I think that is one of the biggest problems of STEM,” Gersony stated, “how people treat it as objective, but really, you’re still humans doing this work.”

There is a name for this in the scientific community. They call it “the culture of no culture.”

But in both the Barresi and PLACE Labs, that culture is quietly being dismantled. It is no coincidence that the members of the two labs use art to communicate science in their classrooms. Like Liu explains, the process of creating art out of scientific ideas, in a way, generates its own meaning: “There's so much passion that comes out of our admiration and our respect and our sense of wonder and awe that comes from looking at these animals. And I think art is a way of expressing that. It's a way of saying, I see you, I'm observing, I'm appreciating this beauty.”

By Natalie Fierro, Quinnlan Steele, & Heidi Liu