Although he’s one of the leading contenders to win a Nobel Prize for his path-breaking stem cell research, MIT Professor Bob Langer puzzles about the meaning of innovation. And though he’s one of Paris’ best known and most successful graphic artists, Fabrice Hyber trained as a theoretical mathematician. Hyber often collaborates with scientists, yet he worries about being isolated and cut off from the world.

This winter, the two men’s perspectives converged at one of the most peculiar addresses in Paris, a building that doubles as a gallery and a research lab just behind the Louvre. The place is called Le Laboratoire, and its objective is modest: to heal the irrational wound wrought when, during the birth of the Enlightenment some 300 years ago, the methodology of modern science divorced itself from the technique of making art. 

Langer’s work at MIT, considered anti-intuitive and revolutionary a generation ago, formed a new kind of reparative tissue between human and plastic cells, creating special physical niches in which stem cells could be “fed” to generate replacement body parts. At Le Laboratoire, that process led Hyber to depict and build a series of giant plastic hourglass figures through which objects could pass on their way to being transformed into organs. Hyber’s intention—nixed by the lawyers—was to allow visitors to slide from one level down to the next through a mass of soft, white plastic beads in the neck of the soft hourglass.

Just in front of the hourglasses runs a 50-foot, V-shaped double wall of paintings, lashed together by ropes intended to suggest the myriad linkages visible and invisible within the body. On the other side of the paintings a soft, pink, rope-like column hangs between floor and ceiling, representing a gargantuan neuron, or nerve cell. Hyber and his team spent the better part of a day—depicted in a video—chewing several pounds of Malabar bubble gum to form the neuron.

Le Laboratoire was the brainchild of David Edwards, the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University. This current show is the culmination of 25 to 30 years of creative work that ranges from stem cell research to theater lighting and reflects a deep frustration he and many others at Harvard felt with the school’s institutional culture. The sort of scientist who likes complicated projects full of uncertainty, Edwards says he has always felt like a weird outsider. 

“Complex problems today tend to require collaboration,” he says, as we stand on a steel balcony in the middle of the three-level exhibit, where Hyber had originally hoped that visitors could hop into one of the hourglasses. “At a place like Harvard where there are very strong departments and expertise within those departments there’s a sort of instinct not to collaborate.

Edwards has been writing fiction for years and has been involved in the theater as a personal passion. “It has always been a stimulus to my work and to my creativity, [so] I began to look for others at Harvard who were not only not frightened by that interface but who were actually catalyzed by it,” he says. “That led me to the music and medicine and architecture departments, and it also led to several conversations among us. We had this sense of finding your lost brother or sister.”

The story that linked them all—elaborated in Edwards’ new book, ArtScience: Creativity in the Post Google Generation—is how innovators engage in the process of creativity by pressing deeper into uncertainty until an actual moment of insight arrives. Fuzzy stuff, conventional researchers might say, but vital. The keyword is “ArtScience.”