In the Fall of 2009 and Spring of 2010, Jane Nisselson, founder of the film and design studio Virtual Beauty, served at Resident Scholar in the OSU Libraries. The intent of her visit was to gather research in support of a film which examines the importance of model building in science, both historically and in present day.
The above clip is a rough cut of part of this work. It features OSU historian of science emeritus Dr. Mary Jo Nye discussing Pauling’s early breakthroughs in structural chemistry and the importance of model building within the chemical world. “The iconography of chemistry,” she says, “is molecular representation.” All of the artifacts shown in the clip are held in the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers.
Nisselson’s film, tentatively titled “Unseen Beauty: The Molecule Imagined,” is still in development. For more preliminary clips of this project, see the Virtual Beauty website and the Virtual Beauty channel on Vimeo.
