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REILLY, STUDENTS ‘COVER’ THE GAP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND ART
 

His first hangs on the wall, a model of modernist abstraction; the others are propped up on windowsills, waiting for coveted space in an office bounded largely by windows and bookshelves.

Created in collaboration with several of his graduate students, the “art” of Pete Reilly, Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has graced the covers of leading academic journals no less than five times in the past eight years.

“With this one,” says Reilly, indicating the neatly framed cover of Protein Engineering from 1998, “I got an e-mail one morning. They said, ‘give us a cover.’ I was leaving that afternoon—for Scotland!”

The senior author of the article was in Taiwan, and Reilly didn’t think he had an illustration anyway. So he tapped co-author and former student Pedro Coutinho (PhD’96), then in France, to send an illustration directly to the journal’s editors in the U.K. When the editors finally got it, Reilly recalls, they liked it so much they not only put it on the cover, but used it as a logo for several more issues.

“The article itself was one of the author’s smaller ones,” Reilly concedes. “But the illustration was great!” (And not just the illustration: the title of that article—“Mutations to alter Aspergillus awamori glucoamylase selectivity”—wouldn’t be out of place in the linguistic riot of James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, Finnegans Wake.)

If you’re wondering why it took Reilly so long to get the cover of a leading journal in his field—he earned his PhD from Penn in 1964—you need to consider the economics of academic publishing. First, the cost of four-color reproduction came down dramatically in the 1990s, putting it within reach of non-commercial publications. As a consequence, academic editors embraced whatever marketing advantages they could to distinguish their periodicals on increasingly crowded library shelves.

Cover, Protein Engineering 11:5, May 1998 (used by permission of Oxford University Press)

Their aesthetic charms notwithstanding, however, the best reason to put art on the cover of scientific journals is fundamentally scientific: specifically, the wide availability of powerful computation and software tools to visualize these images in the first place. In fact, the renderings are actually two-dimensional “snapshots” of computer-generated images in three dimensions based on coordinates drawn from the carbohydrate-active enzymes database, curated by Coutinho and his former postdoctoral supervisor.

“You can visualize these numerical coordinates in many different ways,” Reilly says, “and you can change the colors to show, say, helices, loops, and strands in different colors.” The images, he adds, can display varying degrees of information within each of those categories as well.

“This one,” says Reilly, pointing to the framed cover of a 2005 issue of Proteins, “is a very significant article, done by Chandrika Mulakala (PhD’05). The surface, in green, is many different chains of cellulose, making up a fibril. And this enzyme, a cellulase, has two parts. One is this big glob above, and it’s got a tunnel for an active site. This single chain of cellulose is being pulled through the tunnel. And then there’s this cellulose binding domain down below; it’s acting sort of like a bulldozer, scooping up this chain in yellow.”

Reilly pauses to admire his student and co-author’s handiwork, then adds, “She put a lot of effort into that. The whole thing is about 20 megabytes.”

Not exactly the language an art critic would use to characterize the brushwork of a Rembrandt. Still, in terms of the image itself, Reilly’s description transcends mere formalism to lend the otherwise abstract illustration an elegance of movement and function that might escape the layman’s eye.

Given a little critical explication, such “form into function” is apparent in all five covers in Reilly’s office. There’s another small masterpiece by Mulakala from 2002, again on the cover of Proteins (“quite an important piece of work,” says Reilly). A rendering of a starch chain bound on the surface and in the active site of glucoamylase by grad student Tony Hill appeared on all 12 issues of Starch in 2004. And late last year, Blake Mertz “covered” the issue of Biopolymers featuring an article he co-authored with his major professor.

No small accomplishment for one chemical engineer and his students. Still, while its formal aspects (not to mention scientific utility) may impress, abstract art can come off as, well, a little academic. And, on a purely personal basis, Reilly gives pride of place in his gallery to some earlier artists. Call them the “Old Masters.”

“Oh, that?” Reilly points to an old blackboard that covers enough wall space to hang a dozen journal covers. “I brought that over from my old office. My twins made those chalk drawings—almost twenty-five years ago.”

Ars longa, vita brevis, after all.