Science through a blind eye

Full article here.

Excerpts:

When Forest met Cordes in 1998, she was new to the faculty and had hardly worked with graduate students, much less a blind one. But she saw no reason Cordes could not contribute to her team. For one thing, he was a computer whiz who had written code since he was 10. Forest initially figured he would dive into the mountain of data created by crystallography trials and help resolve the structures of the bacterial proteins her lab was studying. But when that task was completed, “ Tim’s project evolved in a different way,” says Forest. “He ended up doing a lot of lab work, which I wouldn’t have expected to be right up his alley.”

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TimMol’s alternative concept is quite simple. It replaces the three spatial dimensions with three different kinds of audio cues, so that atoms inside a protein become like speakers in a surround-sound system. From a given point inside a protein, a user can hear what other atoms are nearby, placing them by the pitch and orientation of the sounds they make. A higher or lower pitch indicates that the atom is above or below the user’s position. Louder means closer, while softer means farther away. Atoms to the left play in the left ear of the user’s headphones, and those to the right play in the right. To help distinguish different kinds of atoms, Cordes assigned each a musical instrument—piano for carbon, organ for oxygen. “I picked kind of a cool, jazzy vibraphone for nitrogen,” he says, “ because nitrogen is usually shown in blue in models.”

Partly for amusement, Cordes included a function that plays an entire protein by tracing its backbone of amino acids, creating a meandering trail of rising and falling notes. It sounds like some kind of minimalist sonata, but the tune is deep with significance. “Usually, when I come to a new protein, one of the first things I do is to play it atom by atom,” Cordes says. “It helps you get an overall sense of what you’re looking at, and you can get a feel for its shape and structure.”

My reaction to this is not so much "wow amazing a blind biochemist" as "good grief this guy is a bloody genius".