I am missing class this week, turning my responsibilities over to Jonathan Weiner, while I travel to the meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Crick Institute in London.

On the way, I have stopped in Paris for a few days, in part to view the exhibit celebrating the life and works of Leonardo De Vinci‹-best known now as the artist who painted the Mona Lisa but in his time recognized as an scientist and engineer, famous for his thoughts and observations about anatomy, geometry, mathematics, military science, architecture, and many other things.   The Louvre museum has pulled together several of his paintings (only about a dozen survive) but also many pages of his thousands of sketches and writings that reveal his dedication to science. One of those [0434] shows his meticulous observations of the human body, with the various lines showing his obsession with the proportionality of distances between body parts. If you want to see more of these or sketches of his proposed inventions (for flying, fighting, building, etc), do a Google search and much will be available to you.   Or look at the recent biography of Leonardo by Walter Isaacson.

While waiting for my appointed time at the very crowded Leonardo, I drifted through the Louvre galleries of art to look at their holdings of the Flemish masters of the 15th century.   As usual, I found several that reflect the interest that artists of that time displayed in discovery (astronomy especially) and the practical sciences (alchemy, pharmacology, medicine, etc).   Since we will soon talk about ³Longitude² and will talk more about the science of medicine (as in ³Arrowsmith²), I have included two particularly memorable images (of a physician diagnosing heart failure by examining urine, by Gerard Dou [0428] and of an astronomer by Johannes Vermeer [0421]).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I look forward to talking more about these and other adventures when we meet again on February 26th.