若不是知道上面这幅画的出处,我大概会猜想:粗线条、浓色块,这是哪位小学三年级生对高更的《塔希提人》或是梵高的《星夜》的一次风格模仿麽? 事实上,这幅"画"使用的绘图技巧在刚颁布不到一个月的诺奖上也分得了一杯羹。这些五彩的颜色正来自在一块 Petri dish上度假的细菌菌落体内表达的各种荧光蛋白(fluorescent proteins)。恰似一位看上去冷峻、自洽,不苟言笑的科学"绅士",牵上了生动、感性,风情万种的艺术"小姐"的手,算是前者以这种方式向后者的一次致敬吧!
It's in my family. My father was an engineer, my mother was a nurse, which is pretty much as close as a Chinese woman could get to science during WWII, and my oldest brother, Dick, is an eminent neurobiologist at Stanford.
I have lots of engineers amongst my relatives, on both my mother's and father's side. My father's cousin was quite a famous engineer (H.S. Tsien). He was the head of the ballistic missile program for the People's Republic. It's actually a strange tale. He was at Cal Tech as an aeronautical engineer, but then got in trouble in the 1950s because he had some communist links in his past. He was put under house arrest and then deported. Back in China, he started up the ballistics program, I guess partly because he was mighty pissed off at the US!