Two students are standing beside each other at a white board. One, a design student, has just drawn a color wheel; the other, from molecular biology and immunology, is sketching the mechanism for DNA replication. As they work, they're explaining their disciplines to each other. This is not a serendipitous encounter. The students are helping each other with a midterm project for a class titled, "Genetics and Culture: From Molecular Music to Transgenic Art."

"My students have the most amazing dialogue," says Ruth West, a graduate student in Design/Media Arts who designed the course and presented it through the Collegium of University Teaching Fellows. Still more amazing is the fact that this encounter-although it was an actual exchange between two real people-has been taking place metaphorically in Ruth's consciousness for most of her life.

From childhood, Ruth remembers being fascinated with "the shape of natural living things. I could sit and stare at trees for hours," she says. "I would look at the tiny, tiny details, and I was fascinated by natural structures." In fact, she didn't just sit and stare. She made drawings and paintings to depict what she saw on whatever was at hand-from palm fronds and soda bottles to the back of her bedroom door.

For many years, her interests in art and science occupied adjacent rooms in her life. In high school, she took chemistry and worked in theater production. In college she studied microbiology but spent hours on the required drawings of what she saw through the microscope: "For me, they were works of art."

If her choice had been completely independent, Ruth might have pursued an art career from the start. However, "life takes you different ways," she says, "and my family's values were heavily weighted toward medicine." Ruth built a career in health care at UCLA's School of Medicine and then Cedars Sinai Medical Center, first as a hands-on researcher in medical genetics and later in managerial roles. She never abandoned her art. "I had a commitment to myself that wherever I lived, there would always be a space for me to paint." Beginning in 1995, she was also exhibiting her work.

Then, a family illness left her thinking about an old question: What would have happened if I had focused on the art? In response, Ruth quit her day job and signed up for a course in graphic design at UCLA Extension. Her instructor, Adriana Bratu, had just received her MFA in Design|Media Arts and encouraged Ruth to consider following that road herself.

Ruth's application combined her paintings with scholarly articles about DNA sequences and chromosome maps. When she was accepted, "I was literally jumping up and down," she says. The faculty, she found, were "amazing in the scope of their interests and talent and the dedication they have to graduate students." Moreover, they were willing to take a risk: "They saw that I could pull science and art together and go forward at UCLA."

She had a lot to learn. "I could make transgenic animals," she says, "but I had no pedigreed history in the arts." One reason she chose a science career was her sense that she could contribute to society that way; now she is hoping "to find out how to contribute through making art." In particular, she wants to "work at the intersection of science and art."

Standing precisely at that intersection is the undergraduate seminar on genetics and culture she developed, the curriculum evolving quite naturally from her combined interests. "I felt that the greatest gift to me from my education was the desire to ask questions," she says. "I wanted my class to be an environment where people could develop their curiosity."

Indeed, their curiosity takes them beyond the realms of art and science into the social and political implications of discoveries in genetics. Eighteen students-about two thirds from the life sciences and the rest from arts and architecture-took the course this winter, producing art works for their final project.

They were asked to substitute media elements for the genomic bases, ATGC (for example, one student substituted the letters LIFE). Then, they re-created a genomic sequence with the substitutions, and in a final step, devised their own mutation. Works range from sculptural pieces to wall hangings and online art, embracing everything from colored lights and dice to Chinese calligraphy and the Arabic word for God. To see the outcomes of their work, go to the "Genetics and Culture" section of www.viewingspace.com.

"I had no idea how exciting it would be to create a context for these ideas and then watch people take it further than I could have ever imagined," Ruth said, referring to the student projects that were inspired by the class.

Now she has turned her attention to her own final research project, which will include both a conventional thesis and an artwork, also combining science with art. One of Ruth's recombinant painting pieces is composed of moveable parts, something like a jigsaw puzzle except there's no one solution. Viewers can reassemble the art work from time to time, in the same way that DNA is recombined. Another work, "Stars" uses an electronic sensor array to turn star maps of early women astronomer's birth and death dates into music. The astronomical data plays as a 12-inch LP on a turntable as an interactive sound sculpture. In this way, "the music mediates the relationship between the data and the history of its production." You can view "Stars" at www.viewingspace.com/ucla_mfa/project_index.htm.

When her MFA is in hand, Ruth hopes to find a PhD program where she can continue her quest to become an artist researcher. Ruth believes she's "getting closer to being able to ask the right questions. I can't wait to see what happens in five years."

Published in Spring 2002, Graduate Quarterly