Creative Catalyst Panelists Find Connecting Art, Science, and Entrepreneurship Is in Our DNA

The Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship’s (BerkleeICE) inaugural Creative Catalyst event brought together world-renowned scientists and Berklee chairs to discuss the commonalities between art, science, and the entrepreneurial mind.

April 7, 2015

The Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship’s (BerkleeICE) inaugural Creative Catalyst event, held on March 23 at Café 939, brought together world-renowned scientists and Berklee chairs to discuss the commonalities between art, science, and the entrepreneurial mind. Moderator Daniel Isenberg—BerkleeICE advisory group member and Babson Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Project founder—led the lively discussion, which explored the night’s themes of sustenance, resilience, and transcendence.

Setting the tone for the evening, Sujata Bhatia, assistant director for Undergraduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering at Harvard, captured the parallels between science and music, saying, “When scientists talk about DNA, they not only talk about base pairs, but they talk about the size of its groove. There’s a major groove and a minor groove to DNA.”

Generating Sustenance: Creativity Required

Bonnie Hayes, chair of Berklee’s Songwriting Department, discussed the idea of sustenance with Calestous Juma of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Juma is an internationally recognized authority on the role of science, technology, and innovation in sustainable development.

When asked if sustenance means sustaining the body or sustaining the soul, Hayes said, “It’s both. You have to sustain your body, but you also have to sustain your soul. I think getting food is a practical thing, and it does require creativity.

Juma added, “As a person who comes from Africa, where 350 million people don’t have enough to eat, I think of sustenance as something that humans actually create rather than something pre-ordained. There are moments where some higher cause may have to wait until you have dealt with some immediate one.”

Flexibility Breeds Resilience

Isenberg and Steve Bailey, chair of Berklee’s Bass Department, moved on to the theme of resilience. Isenberg took the discussion in an improvisatory and participatory direction, throwing an armful of Thera-Bands into the crowd and inviting attendees to stretch and wrap the elastics around each other to generate ideas about resilience.

“When you are talking about resilience,” Bailey said, “the more flexible you can be stylistically, the more gigs you will get. As a musician, I think of myself as one of the heart cells, but literally just one. I better find that groove of whatever that heart is, and that’s where resilience comes in.”

“In medicine, flexibility is important,” said Bhatia, pulling off a bracelet in the shape of a DNA strand. “DNA is a beautiful, rhythmic structure. This is universal to all of us, but it’s only because there are occasional mistakes in the body’s replication of this rhythmic structure that we have evolution.” Bhatia added, “There’s a reason why the American Heart Association uses the Bee Gees song ‘Staying Alive’ to remind people how to do CPR. If I want to grow a patch of cardiac cells in the lab, you actually expose them to rhythmic vibrations.”

Innovative Combinations and the Road to Transcendence

Delving into the theme of transcendence, Isenberg played video of an experiment showing how the skin of a squid hooked up to electrodes changed color and reacted in rhythmic patterns to the Cypress Hill song “Insane in the Membrane.”

In response, Sean Jones, chair of Berklee’s Brass Department, said, “For me, transcendence is this realization that everything is all one thing.” For Jones, that realization inspires the birth of new sounds, such as when genres as diverse as gospel and disco mix to become a single cohesive unit in song form.

Another panelist, Jané Kondev, a theoretical physicist at Brandeis University who works on problems in molecular and cellular biology, was quick to agree. “Transcendence is putting two things together that people hadn’t thought about putting together before. When aerial photography was born, there was a guy that took a camera up in a balloon and all of the sudden there was this completely new thing, which was aerial photography. As a scientist, you live for that moment every 10 years when you are the only person on the planet who knows something.”

The event concluded with an improvisational jam session in which chairs Bailey, Hayes, and Jones joined Berklee students on stage in a natural sonic expression of the evening’s complex but connected threads.