Looking at Science

Science has largely been considered an objective field, outside of the influence of normal cultural context and influence, but science is no exception to the social contexts that form our understanding of life. We know this, for in the renaissance period science and art were one in the same. Even more, cataloging humans based on physical appearance and anthropometric studies once were considered science, showing the importance of cultural ideology at the time. As science continues to advance, visual imagery has become increasingly important in allowing doctors and scientists to “see the unseen”, particularly inside the body and at the molecular level. From looking at dead bodies in the past, to viewing displays of inside the human body today, scientific images have always fascinated people.

 

One way we can understand the link between art and science today is the way in which “scientific” pictures are made to be aesthetically pleasing. For example, let’s take the Time Magazine cover from 1965 where the reader is told the image is of a living fetus when in reality it was an isolated fetus removed from the mother, with color and special effects added for viewing purposes. Or more recently let us consider PET Scans displaying the elusive brain, and the colors used to clarify the “facts” that are still very tentative. The simplicity and power of these images can be quite moving for the viewers. We can see how this is also the case with the picture above of several sperm competing to fertilize an egg. The sperm here were dyed and the photo as a whole was brightened and enhanced giving a deceptive view of “truth”. However the image is culturally positioned to be most relevant and entertaining for the current time. Sperm could be thought of in thousands of different contexts and this picture shows just one of those many ways; this is a reminder that no one image can be objective, whether in the field of science or not.