The Biological Aesthetic

Abstract

Aesthetics is concerned with beauty. Applied to science, the word suggests the elegance, logic, and discipline of thought (1). Beyond science, aesthetics relates to the visual vocabulary. For instance, art and design at the beginning of the 20th century were inspired by forms associated with machines and industrial production. This became known as the machine aesthetic. In science, the second half of the 20th century was a period of increasing prominence for biology. It was marked by the discovery of the DNA structure in 1953, the development of protein sequencing, and the progress in establishing the atomic structures of proteins with x-ray crystallography, the last of which led to elaboration of the vast array of molecular structures. The 1962 Nobel Prize in chemistry went to John Kendrew and Max Perutz “for their studies of the structures of globular proteins.” In the same year, the prize in physiology and medicine went to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material” (2, 3 …