in Environmental Exposures and Health
The Senses Bureau was a primarily undergraduate research group at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Our mentor, Kent Wilson, died in 2000; read his obituary in Nature 2000 Jun 22;405(6789):902 or here. A festschrift in his honor was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A 1999; 103(49); it includes Kent's moving "Summing Up".
Kent R. Wilson
photograph by Marc Tule
Senses Bureau projects ranged from studies of air pollution--including early work on environmental justice (Anderson et al 1978)--to computer graphics and virtual reality. The group made several films or film fragments, including:
- Photodissociation of ICN
- Myoglobin (1971)--computer graphics film of the structure of the myoglobin protein
- Lysozyme
- Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level (1971)--A dance, really! Very 60s
- The Tainted Sky (1973?)--about air pollution
- Atomic D-Orbital and Wavefunction
- The Human Brain: A Dynamic View of its Structures and Organization (1976, with Robert B. Livingston et al.)
frame from Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level (1971)
article about the film and a recent molecular happening
The cover of the September 1979 issue of Scientific American was made the same way as the images in the filmThe Human Brain.
“The picture on the cover is a computer-generated display of the normal human brain. The surface of the cerebral cortex is dark blue, that of the cerebellum purple and that of the brain stem light blue (or yellow where other structures are not superposed on it). Here the front of the brain is rotated slightly toward the viewer. The display was created by a group in the laboratory of Robert B. Livingston at the University of California at San Diego. It is based on images of the cut surface of a brain sliced in a giant microtome. Images of the surface made at regular intervals were traced into a computer memory and displayed as a three-dimensional object on an Evans and Sutherland picture system.”--description of the cover from Scientific American, September 1979, pg. 6
Some former members of the Senses Bureau: Bill Atkinson, Tom Richard, "Bud" Tribble, Tom Webster, Michael Zyda