Science in Culture 2015

COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS

Oppenheimer examines the Manhattan Project.

Oppenheimer Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK 15 January – 7 March The secret work of scientists in the Second World War has proved fertile ground for drama, from Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen to John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic (2005). The latest to explore that tension are British playwright Tom Morton- Smith and the Royal Shakespeare Company, who follow Adams by peering inside the Manhattan Project — the US programme that spawned the nuclear bomb. Morton- Smith has said that he sees something of the Bard’s conflicted antiheroes in the “ambition, frailty and indecision” of nuclear pioneer MAIN PICTURE: BERIT MADSEN; OPPENHEIMER: HUGO GLENDINNING MAIN PICTURE: Robert Oppenheimer. Whether the father of the bomb emerges as closer to Macbeth or Henry V remains to be seen.

Countdown to Zero: Defeating Disease American Museum of Natural History, New York City 13 January – 12 July Despite stunning medical advances, smallpox The Imagine Science Films festival in Abu Dhabi will showcase research in the Arab world and elsewhere. is the only human disease that has been eliminated worldwide. This exhibition at New LISTINGS York’s natural history museum focuses on what could be the next conquest: guinea- worm disease. Debilitating and extremely painful, the condition is caused by migration of the nematode Dracunculus medinensis Science in through tissues. In the mid-1980s, it affected 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia; incidence is now reduced by 99.9%. The show is a collaboration with the Carter Center culture 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia, established by former US president Jimmy Carter, which has led much Explore the gory glories of forensic science, grapple of the global fight against the disease. with Tom Stoppard’s take on consciousness, learn what Imagine Science Films it takes to live on Mars, re-enter Jurassic Park, dive New York University Abu Dhabi into a coral reef and dally with Robert Oppenheimer. 19–21 February Since 2008, Imagine Science Films has been Daniel Cressey reports. pushing scientists into close collaboration

Left: EXPO 2015 in Milan includes a digital ‘augmented’ supermarket; right: the Countdown to Zero exhibition looks at efforts to eradicate guinea-worm disease.

with film-makers for its annual multiregional sci-fi”. Art from dance to sculpture will appear festival. This year, the event — whose many across the enormous university campus, MY HIGHLIGHT OF THE YEAR sponsors include Nature — branches out exploring how scientists are shaping the future Philip Ball, science journalist and author with a satellite festival in Abu Dhabi, a alongside — or antagonistically to — the of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the relatively new arena for sci–art collaboration. creative industries. Unseen Sessions have been organized for fiction and documentaries focused on issues of Arsenic and New Medicine: Paul Ehrlich’s The Hard Problem particular relevance to the Middle East. Pioneering Research National Theatre, London From science-fiction exploring the region’s Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité 21 January – 16 April role on the world stage to factual forays into 15 April – 27 September 2015 The “hard problem” is consciousness neuroscience and resource exploitation, the Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich introduced — just the sort of intellectual puzzle that festival promises an edgy, multidimensional fundamental biological concepts, such as the excites playwright Tom Stoppard, whose look at the Arab world now. idea of cell-surface receptors and the necessity dramas have probed chaos theory and of quantifying data. He devised staining quantum physics. In his latest work, Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime techniques to identify and distinguish immune starring Olivia Vinal and Jonathan Coy, a Wellcome Collection, London cells, developed antisera for diseases such psychologist at a brain-research institute 26 February – 21 June FRUIT: CARLO RATTI ASSOCIATI; READING: THE CARTER CENTER/L. GUBB ASSOCIATI; RATTI CARLO FRUIT: as diphtheria and, perhaps most famously, confronts this issue while grappling with Flashy television programmes often warp the found a cure for syphilis with his ‘magic bullet’, a private sorrow, and is forced to question truth and obscure the uncertainty inherent in Salvarsan (arsphenamine, pictured). On the whether scanners and computers can forensic techniques such as DNA analysis and centenary of his death, this joint exhibition by provide all the answers about the human fingerprinting. Bioscience-funding behemoth the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the mind. Three major brain-research projects the Wellcome Trust promises a corrective in its Charité and the Historical Museum Frankfurt are currently hoping to do just that, so blockbuster show, aiming to reveal the realities examines Ehrlich’s extraordinary scientific life, Stoppard has proved himself as timely as of teasing truth from what crimes leave and looks at how he has been memorialized. ever — and we can be sure that he will not behind. The trust’s newly enlarged exhibition In his native Germany, for example, streets be offering any glib resolution. space will display disturbing evidence, named after him were renamed during the including a sketch of a crime attributed Third Reich because he was Jewish. The to Jack the Ripper. Forensic instruments, show will move to the Frankfurt museum 1851. Biodiversity Park’s 8 greenhouses artworks and films from the Wellcome’s from 29 October 2015 to 3 April 2016. will showcase agro-biodiversity in 250 plant archive and beyond will be on show. types, and Pavilion Zero will trace the EXPO 2015 transformation of environments by Emerge Milan, Italy agriculture from prehistory on. As the expo’s Arizona State University 1 May – 31 October tagline has it, “Nutrire il pianeta, energia per la March 2015 The world’s fair comes to Milan to vita” — “Feeding the planet, energy for life”. Arizona State University is becoming a ponder a pressing global concern:

CHRISTOPH WEBER, CHARITÉ/HOECHST ARCHIVE, FRANKFURT WEBER, CHARITÉ/HOECHST CHRISTOPH player in the confluence of science and food. Architect Carlo Ratti’s Future Jurassic World art. Its annual Emerge festival, which Food District offers a digital Director: Colin Trevorrow launched in 2012, brings together ‘augmented reality’ experience Opens 10 June artists and scientists, including digital- of the supermarket as a nexus of Resurrected dinosaurs, their photogenic performance pioneer Lance Gharavi products, producers and consumers. victims and scientists playing God get another and roboticist Srikanth Saripalli, in a Arts & Foods, curated by radical airing in Jurassic World. It is more than challenging public science carnival. This critic Germano Celant, will examine 20 years since Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic year’s will examine “the future of choices the edible in art — and its cultural Park (1993) ignited public fascination with and values” through “performance and industrial implications — since the revivification of long-extinct species

MY HIGHLIGHT OF THE YEAR Danny Birchall, digital manager at the Wellcome Collection in London

Designers in Residence 2015: Migration 9 September 2015 – 28 February 2016 CATLIN SEAVIEW SURVEY SEAVIEW CATLIN Design Museum, London In a world on the move, immigration is top of many government agendas. But subtler forms of migration are always happening, as reflected in the eighth annual Designers in Residence exhibition, where product technology meets the art of form. With the museum itself moving across London next year to the former Commonwealth Institute, early-career designers in a range of disciplines have been invited to ponder The Catlin Seaview Survey explores a reef at Bonaire in the Caribbean Netherlands. mobility in everything from data to people, and to explore the neutrality of migration Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea over the duality of emigration/immigration. Natural History Museum, London 27 March – 13 September Ruth Wylie, assistant director of the Center One of nature’s most enthralling tableaux, the coral reef, will be recreated alongside the for Science and the Imagination at Arizona dinosaurs in London’s Natural History Museum. More than 200 individual denizens of reefs — State University, Tempe both live and preserved — will be on show to create an artwork rivalling displays at the nearby design mecca, the Victoria and Albert Museum. Corals from Charles Darwin’s collection will be It’s Alive! — Frankenstein on Film joined by videos from the Catlin Seaview Survey — a global project to image the world’s reefs 23–25 January involving Google and the University of Queensland, Australia. Although visitors will not be able SIFF Film Center, Seattle, Washington to pop into the tank to join the live marine creatures, they are promised a virtual dive. For nearly 200 years, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has shaped how we see science and its ethical impacts. I am using DNA. How the franchise will fare in a extrapolating a technology-dominated future excited about this mega-screening of world where genome science is mainstream of shifting empires and nomadism. adaptations, co-hosted by the Seattle rather than a strange new rarity remains to International Film Festival and my own be seen. The fourth outing ups the role of The Martian university’s Frankenstein Bicentennial genetic modification, as a new generation is Director: Ridley Scott Project. Among the offerings are James introduced to heavy-handed warnings against Opens 25 November Whale’s iconic 1930s Frankenstein and tinkering with Mother Nature. Ridley Scott, director of science-fiction Bride of Frankenstein (pictured), and blockbusters including Blade Runner (1982), Paul Morrissey’s transgressive Flesh A Brief History of the Future is heading for Mars. His dramatization of For Frankenstein (1973). An electrifying The Louvre, Paris Andy Weir’s self-published 2012 sleeper hit weekend of film and analysis. Mid-September – mid-December The Martian, a scientifically grounded novel Delving into the past to conjure what comes about an astronaut’s struggle to survive on next is the focus of a major exhibition at the the red planet, is due to air in November. venerable Paris museum. A broad mix of Although Scott received mixed reviews ancient and contemporary art is promised, for 2012’s Prometheus, his much-hyped with specially commissioned pieces covering return to science-fiction, his take on isolation pioneers in engineering, science, architecture in space in Alien (1979) has never been and the arts. The exhibition’s overarching bettered. Hopes are high that he can translate theme originated in a 2006 book of the same Weir’s protagonist’s struggle to survive into

UNIVERSAL/THE KOBAL COLLECTION UNIVERSAL/THE KOBAL name by writer and civil servant Jacques compelling drama. ■ Attali. That volume chronicles the trajectory of humankind from prehistory, ranging Daniel Cressey is a reporter for Nature over innovations from printing in Belgium in London. Additional reporting by Alison to the piston engine in Massachusetts, and Abbott.

BRIEFLY Marvellous Creatures Frida Kahlo’s Garden Lava The Francis Crick Institute, London This exhibition at Qatar’s Museum In a display of flowers, paintings A singing volcano stars in this short These interdisciplinary medical- of Islamic Art in Doha, opening in and more starting in May, the New animation from Pixar, released research facilities promise to be an NOTED March, looks at how animals real and York Botanical Garden explores how with full-length film Inside Out in architectural highlight. Designed unreal feature in art and fables such artist Frida Kahlo’s was inspired by June. Geology has never looked so by HOK and PLP Architecture, they as The Thousand and One Nights. the plants of her native Mexico. adorable. open towards the end of the year.