motion. A key question that I wrestle with is:
How do cells maintain order while remaining
dynamic?
The fact that order emerges at all in the cell is
remarkable when you consider that water molecules are moving hundreds of miles per hour
in our cells right now. One would think that our
bodies would simply fly apart!
Forces between molecules allow interesting
structures to emerge, giving rise to order, such
as the flagella that power paramecium swimming.
However, unlike the usual order we seek in
our everyday macroscopic world, such as stability of houses, cars, and airplanes, the forces
between molecules are weak enough that they
can break apart on a time scale of seconds or
even faster. This allows flagella to beat and the
paramecium to swim. Achieving this balance of
order and dynamics is vital to life.
How I ended up in the cage
My fascination with the balance between
order and dynamics led me on many wonderful discussions with my brother, Thomas Carl
Odde, Ph.D., who is an expert on the representation of time in cinema. With support from
the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at the
University of Minnesota, then directed by Prof.
Ann Waltner, Tom and I organized a critical
discussion of “Catastrophe,” in cells, in cinema,
in engineering.
We have yet to produce this new dance piece.
Instead, we turned in a surprising new direction: using dancers to simulate cellular processes as an aid to our own research.
Gaining knowledge
My group’s usual approach to scientific research is to simulate cellular processes using
fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s
Laws, and then compare these model predictions to experimental observations. We rely
heavily on computer simulations, but these have
their own challenges.
Among the most challenging aspects is to
intuitively understand the computer model
behavior. In many cases it is not obvious why
the computer simulation did what it did, and
unfortunately the computer does not talk to us.
This is a major problem today, referred to as the
‘Big Data’ problem. In our case we are trying to
extract meaning from large simulated data sets.
In fact the US Government has made it a major priority to understand how to gain knowledge from large data sets generally, an initiative
known ‘Big Data To Knowledge (BD2K)’. It is
the ‘2K’ that we struggle with.
Through our interaction with Black Label
Movement dancers, we have found that it is
often easier to program “movers” to enact our
hypotheses and then engage the movers in
direct discussion. For example, we have simulated diffusion, reactions, membrane tension,
and self-assembly, and the effects that crowds of
molecules have on the rates of chemical reactions. In this last case, the brainstorming we did
It was through IAS that I met Carl Flink, pro- with the movers, which we call “bodystorming”
fessor of Theatre Arts & Dance at the Univer(brain storming with our bodies engaged), led to
sity of Minnesota and Artistic Director of the
more rigorous computer simulations of crowdBlack Label Movement Dance Company based ing and a better understanding of the phenomein Minneapolis. Carl was choreographing a new na. So, the ‘Moving Cell’ project is now starting
dance piece entitled “Wreck,” which explores
to guide our research directions.
the emotional space of the last few moments of
life on board a sinking ship.
Thoughts for the future
Our world has become increasingly virtual.
Drawn together partly through a common
language of sports, Carl and I formed a collabo- However, this virtual world seems to have its
most positive effects when it is integrated with
ration to develop a new dance piece to introthe embodied world, rather than when it reduce people to strange world of a moving cell,
garded as a retreat from the embodied world.
with its beautiful order in the midst of violent
collisions.
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SciArt in America December 2014