I have spent more of my life in a ballet studio than in a traditional classroom, let alone a laboratory. From a young age, I dreamed of a career as a ballet dancer, and ballet consumed my day-to-day life. I was homeschooled to accommodate my training schedule and moved away from home at sixteen to attend a professional ballet school. After completing high school online while training in the studio during the day, I joined a professional ballet company as a trainee. Recurring injuries eventually meant the end of my path in the ballet world, and I entered college.
As a dancer, I was drawn to biology because of its connection to the human body, but my fascination with the dynamic molecular mechanisms underlying life processes developed in college. In my molecular biology courses at Princeton University, I watched proteins dance and observed rhythmic waves of RNA transcription that the most brilliant choreography could not replicate. I found that I could apply both the discipline and the creativity I learned in the ballet studio to my work at the laboratory bench. As I became enchanted with the intricate choreography of life at the molecular level, I began to think about science as an artistic endeavor.
My background in the arts both informed my initial interest in biology and inspired me to continue to seek out and uncover the beauty within the design of the natural world. When I told my undergraduate thesis advisor that I had decided to do my Ph.D. at Rockefeller, he told me that he knew of only two science professors who were in the ballet world before becoming scientists—and both were at Rockefeller. Recently, I sat down with each of them to discuss their trajectories from dance to science and their perspectives on the complementarity of the two disciplines.
Erich Jarvis, Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language, was born and raised in New York City and grew up in a family of artists and performers. He attended the High School for the Performing Arts and trained seriously in ballet and modern dance both there and on scholarship at the Joffrey Ballet School and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Manhattan.
Despite his intense focus on the arts, Jarvis says he always had “the science bug.” At the end of high school, he had to decide between auditioning for professional dance companies and attending college. “My mother used to say she didn’t care what we did with our lives as long as it’s going to help society and do something good for humankind,” he says. “And I thought I could do that better as a scientist than I could as a dancer.” He ultimately decided to attend Hunter College in Manhattan, although he continued performing with the Westchester Ballet Company throughout his first year of college. Jarvis studied biology and mathematics at Hunter and joined a laboratory. There, he says, “I learned that training to become a dancer helped me to become a scientist,” as he redirected the work ethic, resilience, and artistry gained from dance to his work in the laboratory.
Jarvis performed both his Ph.D. and postdoctoral research at Rockefeller. He then spent eighteen years as a Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University before returning to Rockefeller as a Professor in 2016.
Vanessa Ruta is Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at Rockefeller. Both of Ruta’s parents were artists, and her family moved many times throughout her childhood. She trained in ballet and considered enrolling in a performing arts high school when her family moved to New York City. Instead, she attended Stuyvesant High School and continued her ballet training in the afternoons and evenings at the Joffrey Ballet School. As graduation approached, Ruta decided that, although ninety-nine percent of Stuyvesant High School students go on to college, she would be the one percent who did not. She then spent four years dancing ballet professionally in New York City, auditioning, performing, working with choreographers, and taking daily ballet classes.
Eventually, Ruta grew frustrated with the instability, low pay, and subjectivity of the dance world and decided to devote her energies elsewhere. Inspired by her high school chemistry teacher, Ruta enrolled in a chemistry course at Hunter College. Ruta says she was attracted to “the beauty and the logic of the periodic table” and the immutability of chemical principles that offered a welcome change from the volatile performing arts world. The discipline and drive she devoted to her dancing was now poured into her schoolwork, which she says made academics easy. “You put that much work into something that’s not dance, you do extremely well . . . that made me recognize that I probably had other things I could offer the world.”
Ruta started doing laboratory research as an undergraduate and, after obtaining her bachelor’s degree in chemistry, went on to the Ph.D. program at Rockefeller. She then performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University and was appointed as a Professor at Rockefeller in 2011.
Through my conversations with Jarvis and Ruta, it became clear that their years in the dance world were not merely a prelude to their scientific careers, but a training that has continued to inform and influence their work ethic, research approaches, and scientific sensibilities.
An all-consuming endeavor
When you are training to be a professional dancer, every aspect of your life becomes oriented towards that pursuit. In a discipline in which the end goal is perfection, there is always work to do. This mindset is first instilled in young dancers by their teachers, but for those who fall in love with the art form, it arises from a deeply intrinsic self-motivation that lends itself to the dedication and discipline necessary to progress. By the time Jarvis was in high school, he had devoted himself to “being the best [dancer] I could be,” and he realized that the life of an artist is an all-consuming endeavor, rather than a nine-to-five. Describing the work of her father, who painted every day if he could, Ruta similarly emphasized that the life of the artist is not confined to working hours, and that artists’ dedication to their craft extends beyond mere discipline or creative impulses—“You’re compelled to do it.”
When she stopped dancing, she stopped completely, and this provided space for her to discover a whole new world of possibilities that were open to her in science. “I liked the fact that science is almost limitless . . . You never really fully solve a problem,” she says. “I like to push things as much as I can. That’s why it wasn’t such a hard transition to go to science; there is so much to do that I never feel bored.”
Recalling a summer program at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Ruta says, “Woods Hole is a place where you go to the beach and see people drawing molecules in the sand.” There, she found great inspiration in experiencing an “environment where people are so passionate about the science that it doesn’t get contained in the walls of the lab.” Just as the work in ballet never stops because the aim is unattainable, scientists’ unending pursuit to uncover the truths of the natural world constantly reveals additional complexities and unlocks new questions, yielding a persistent positive feedback loop of experiments.
A choreography of experiments
Although science is objective, quantitative, and rigorous, Ruta says that “certain parts of it are also totally creative: how you think about a problem, how you design experiments, how you present data, and how you think about new directions,” and that these aspects are “extremely similar to the way artists explore new spaces.” Ruta compared how the scientific process unfolds to a painting or a choreographed work that develops over time. The end result may not be fully clear throughout the process, but through creative insight and methodical work, you can arrive at a complete story.
Choreography, the sequences of steps performed to music by dancers, allows dancers to tell stories and convey emotions in ways that may be beautiful and unexpected. This generation of new sequences is the most creative aspect of the discipline, and choreographers’ visions shape the evolution of dance. Choreographers draw from a repertoire of established movements, or create new ones, and combine them in novel ways to produce original choreography. Successful choreography requires manipulation of multiple moving bodies to achieve precision in timing and space, with each movement and phrase of the music contributing to the effect of the full, completed piece. While training, dancers learn and repeat this repertoire of steps in daily classes and rehearsals to acquire the technical precision necessary for eventually performing these steps in new sequences.
Laboratory research likewise has an ever-expanding set of experimental methods, with multi-step protocols that must be performed multiple times with diligence and precision. The scientist’s process is thus mirrored both in the role of the dancer performing the rote steps of an experiment or phrase of movement, and in the role of the choreographer, who must ensure that the steps being performed can coalesce into a comprehensive scientific narrative of discovery.
Jarvis also emphasized that the choreographic process requires trial and error. The choreographer must ensure smooth transitions and adapt to the needs of the music and the dancers. Similarly, partnering is a central component of ballet and other forms of dance, and good dancers must know how to work with their partners. Jarvis sees parallels to this choreographed, partnered work in the operations of a laboratory, especially in the collaborations among its members that are essential to moving science forward. He also has learned to know when to adapt and change course in order to create an elegant “choreography of experiments.”
The creativity Jarvis learned to embrace in his formal arts training has continued to shape his scientific approach. “My colleagues over the years have considered me a more creative scientist than the average,” he says. “And I attribute it—if what they’re saying is true—to being an artist.”
Science as performance
The creativity and discipline inherent in dance training are inward components of the art form, but this inner work is ultimately directed outward towards the end goal of performance for an audience. While scientific work is performed within the laboratory, presentations are a frequent and essential component of academia. To Ruta, the performance aspect of science is found in honing the ability to present to people “what you find beautiful within the complexity of the natural world” in a compelling way.
A fundamental lesson Jarvis learned in his dance training is that “there is a lot of failure before there is success,” and he emphasized that this is true in the scientific world as well. Jarvis also credits his performing arts training with helping him to be an effective and confident communicator and presenter of his research. When Jarvis was invited to give a Presidential Lecture to an audience of nine thousand at the Society for Neuroscience, he used the lessons he had learned as a dancer about stage presence, engaging with your audience, and calming nerves before he got up on the stage, another instance in which his dance training continues to inform his work as a scientist.
Uncovering the beautiful
People seek out both the arts and the natural world for sources of beauty and inspiration. To Ruta, there is “a lot to be said about beauty in science, both the appreciation of the natural world and the beauty in principles that are threaded throughout it at different levels.” Scientists have the privilege of being able to look at the natural world on the microscopic level, whether when admiring a particularly striking immunofluorescence image, or, for Ruta, when “looking at a protein structure which is so visually evocative about potential mechanism” or observing an “overt behavioral phenotype that you had predicted.”
Ruta also finds beauty in the scientific process itself, through which she seeks to systematically understand the world around us. She considers this understanding as a “certain type of revelation that is like seeing something beautiful,” and this motivates her to “design experiments that give you a crisp, clean, beautiful answer” so that “ideas that are elusive become more tangible.”
Jarvis finds beauty in the elegance of biological systems, from the muscles that allow animals to produce vocalizations to the complex, coordinated mechanisms that drive a host’s response to a microorganism’s attack. These biological solutions are often unexpected. For example, Jarvis’s research has revealed that, surprisingly, the specialized neural connections that control humans’ vocal organs may have arisen from a gene’s lack of function, rather than a gain of function. When a neuron loses a gene that typically plays an antagonistic role and inhibits the formation of connections in a certain brain region, it can then interact with another neuron. This has led to the formation of speech-brain pathways. To Jarvis, “That’s a beautiful solution . . . and a simple one.”
Science influenced by art
Dance has influenced not only Jarvis’s approach to science but also the scientific questions themselves, including ongoing work on the neurobiology of dance. It had long been thought that humans were the only species that could dance—that is, move our bodies rhythmically to a musical beat—but in 2009, several research groups discovered that vocal learning species, such as songbirds and dolphins, can also dance to music. Jarvis suggests that this indicates a relationship between the ability of certain species to learn and imitate sounds and their ability to dance. While a Professor at Duke, Jarvis showed that the neural pathways that control learning how to imitate sounds are directly surrounded by the pathways that control learned movement sequences. This tight integration of hearing with the movement of muscles that control sound is what enables vocal learning in these species.
While Ruta does not see her background in dance as directly influencing her research interests, she believes that it is connected to her research style, or her “research aesthetic.” Just as some people prefer classical ballet while others prefer abstract modern dance, she says that “there is also a personal aesthetic to the way you think about science. And so there are certain types of questions that I find very appealing intrinsically.”
Ruta’s laboratory studies the neural circuitry that underlies innate and learned behaviors in the well-established model organism Drosophila. She enjoys this model system’s tractability, and has found that scientists’ personalities and stylistic preferences often “color the way [they] do science in a very similar way to how artists have different visions for their work . . . I think there is something about the type of dance I liked doing and the type of science that I do that is related to something deep in my personality.”
Ruta also finds inspiration in the ways in which art is integrated into the campus and culture at Rockefeller, from the aesthetics of the campus design to its extensive art collection to the way people approach scientific questions. She says that Rockefeller “cultivates people to have the creativity [and] freedom to do the science that we want to do.” This culture provides room for scientists to hone their craft in a way that is similar to the artistic process, and Ruta describes Rockefeller’s model for their laboratories as, “Here’s a canvas . . . do whatever you want with it.”
Rockefeller’s emphasis on creativity stands out to Jarvis as a characteristic that is unique among its peer institutions, which he remembers making an impression on him when he was applying to Ph.D. programs. To him, Rockefeller has been a place where “creative thinking is not only fostered; it’s rewarded.”
In addition to this indirect emphasis on artistry in science, several initiatives at Rockefeller directly promote arts engagement and accessibility. These include the Bronk Fund, which provides reimbursement to Ph.D. students for art lessons and tickets to performances; the Peggy Rockefeller Concert Series, which brings world-renowned musical artists to campus for several performances a year; and free admission to the Museum of Modern Art. The existence of these programs at Rockefeller reflects a recognition that exposure to and engagement with the arts can complement scientific training.
When art and science converge
Jarvis and Ruta have both found that the life of the artist has many parallels to the life of a scientist. These parallels are found in the daily discipline—the methodical nature of the ballet dancer’s work at the barre and the scientist’s persistent work at the bench—and in the broader aim of, as Ruta puts it, “thinking about how to represent the world around you.”
Art and science are often perceived as separate, or even disparate, disciplines. This perception may be due in part to the fact that art is consumed by the public, while scientific research is primarily consumed by other scientists. Practically, due to the dedication of time and extensive mental or physical effort required of both endeavors, it is also difficult for someone to pursue both disciplines to the fullest. However, Jarvis believes that more people who are trained in the arts could pursue a career in science than they might realize, and both Jarvis and Ruta agreed that many artists may be uniquely poised to be excellent scientists.
Scientists who have some training in the arts may view art as a side pursuit or a refuge from their laboratory work. The ongoing influence of the dance world—its ethos, aesthetics, and practice—in Jarvis’s and Ruta’s science suggests that the boundary between the two disciplines is far more permeable. Science is not only influenced by art metaphorically; it can also be understood as a form of art that uses a particular language and medium.
The language of dance is also embraced by the world of science. A recent article published by Rockefeller’s Science News about Professor Shixin Liu’s work on the machinery and dynamics of transcription complexes refers to transcription as a “tightly choreographed event.” In recent guest lectures at Rockefeller, Harvard University Professor Philip Cole described the assembly of a protein complex as “intricate choreography,” and Nobel laureate David Julius, Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said of a thermosensitive ion channel’s conformation changes, “It’s quite a pirouette.”
In my own experience, the discipline, artistic eye, and attention to detail I learned from ballet have informed my approach to laboratory work and my research interests. Learning to design experiments in the laboratory has in turn influenced my creativity in the ballet studio (such as a short experimental ballet I choreographed titled IN VIVO), and my work in each area has enhanced the other. My time in the dance world, and my relatively brief time in the scientific world, have shown me that dance and science can be seen everywhere in the world around us—from the patterns commuters weave through each other during rush hour foot traffic at the subway station to the geometric patterns of flower petals that arise from precisely and elegantly choreographed genetic regulation.
Ruta believes that the creative, iterative, exploratory, and performance-based elements of science are things that are “missing fundamentally in the way people represent scientists.” Her own appreciation for the artistic nature of her work has developed throughout her career. “It’s been fun to see how similar I am to my father,” she says—a man who devoted his life to his art and was a huge source of inspiration to her.
Jarvis has also come to “see science as a form of art” throughout his career. “I always thought I was going to totally give up one or the other,” he says. “But I never stopped dancing.”