Your Future Self:
A Journey To The Frontiers Of Molecular Medicine

by Hank Whittenmore

Thames and Hudson, New York, 1998. 160 pp. $ 27,50, hardcover. ISBN: 0-500-54223-6.

Reviewed by Istvan Hargittai

The opening quotation of one of the 10 chapters of this book is from Albert Einstein, ?The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.? With the rapid advances of biomolecular sciences our knowledge is multiplying at a high rate yet the field does not seem to loose its mysteries. This is so, notwithstanding the fact that an increasing amount of the rapidly acquired information is also becoming visually attainable. Yet these mysteries are at least becoming more accessible to broadening audiences and this is not a small achievement either. Direct microscopic photography and computer imagery have contributed to the progress and its opening up for a the public too.

Hank Whittenmore is a true master of sorting out and presenting the available information. The material of this volume has grown out of a project, which carried the very telling title, Out of Sight: Imaging/Imagining Science, presented in 1998 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. In fact, as this volume witnesses, all this is not so much out of sight anymore. Jonathan Lipkin is quoted as saying. ?Visualization is key to science.? Indeed it is to all cognitive processes.

The book contains 120 illustrations in color and a few in black and white. We see cells and DNA molecules, genes and viruses, the brain and even the mind(?). The commentaries help the reader get oriented among the abundance of illustrations. The author was assisted by outstanding scientists and artists, schools and organizations in compiling this uniquely attractive collection of images. The introduction is followed by 8 chapters of collections drawn from scientific research and experience. The last chapter has a direct involvement from the arts in it. I say direct involvement because the previous chapters are also artistic in their choice and presentation. The book closes with a helpful glossary of biological and medical terms and with the listing of the sources.

The subtitle includes the term ?molecular medicine,? doubtless a popular expression. Some will remember though that a few decades ago the introduction of this term was viewed as quite extraordinary. However, healing at the molecular level, genetic engineering, and even cloning, have, indeed, become part of our lives and expectations. This book brings then these and many other concepts much closer to the reader and browser by appealing to our probably most sensitive sense. It is also remarkable that many of the microscopic and computer images appear so artistic. For this reason the boundary is blurred between the purely scientific sections of the book and the last chapter with the direct involvement of the arts.

And this makes me feel strongly about issuing a caveat to point to the importance of delineating the two roles lest some think that one can be replaced by the other. Although art and science appear in unison in depicting the mysteries of molecular medicine, there are vast differences between them. Scientific research consumes tremendous resources in bringing out the understanding of the molecular world and the living organisms, leading to the utilization of this knowledge for the betterment of human life. The visualization is a useful and instructing byproduct in this endeavor. The arts provide helpful means both in sensing these mysteries and communicating them to broader audiences but this also shows their much more restricted role in this improbable undertaking of learning and subduing our worlds.