John Doucet

In 2025, the Division of Sciences and Humanities of the Louisiana Academy of Sciences (LAS) celebrated 15 years of symposium.  Its origin is found in the University Honors Program at Nicholls State University (NiSU).  With a superabundance of science majors in this thesis-based program, sciences faculty struggled to support mentorship of all students.  Science leadership reached out to colleagues on the arts and humanities faculties to help mentor science students in interdisciplinary thesis research.  What resulted was not only a series of remarkable hybrid projects that won for students competitive awards and scholarships but also an enduring collaboration between silos of faculty engaged in collaborative mentorship and scholarship.  This success convinced the LAS in 2009 to create a Division of Sciences and Humanities, which held its first session at the Academy’s annual meeting in 2010 and has continuously held sessions now for 16 years.  With its 100th anniversary celebration in preparation for the 2026 annual meeting, the Academy will honor this effort by hosting a day-long Science Humanities Invitational Symposium, inviting scholars from around the state and the region to share their work with the Academy and the general public.  For its efforts at heeding C.P. Snow’s call to bridge the great intellectual divide, the Academy was nominated in 2011 for an Arts and Sciences Advocacy Award, sponsored by the Council for Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS).  

Chris Brown

The Louisiana Academy of Sciences and Centenary College of Louisiana have a shared history stretching back to the Academy’s origins.  This presentation explores that relationship over time by highlighting the founding of the Academy at Centenary in 1927, the availability of the Academy’s organizational records at Centenary’s Archives and Special Collections, and the possibility of digitizing the Academy’s journal for public access.

Dr. Israel Maizlish, of Centenary’s Department of Physics and Mathematics, was instrumental in founding the Louisiana Academy of Sciences, and he served as the organization’s first president from 1927 to 1929. Over the years, Centenary has hosted ten annual meetings of the Academy, and members of Centenary’s faculty have served as officers in the organization.  Around 1995, the Academy’s archives were transferred to Centenary’s Archives and Special Collections.  These files include meeting minutes, membership records, newsletters, reports, the organization’s peer-reviewed journal, and more.  Centenary’s Archives is currently exploring digitization of the Academy’s journal for the Archives’ online collections.  This project would result in researchers being able to access the journal online for free, page through each volume, and search the full text.

John Doucet

Historical Baroque artwork features ornaments borrowed from biological nature: flowers, leaves, animals, and the general shapes they represent.  Broadly apparent in the visual arts and architecture, this aesthetic is also apparent in music composed during the period (1600-1750).  Beyond sensorial appeal of visual and auditory art, however, what is the influence of biological nature in the "silent" art--that which doesn't directly stimulate the sensorial areas but rather the orthographic cortex of the human brain--namely, literature?  Despite the fact that biology was not recognized as an academic science during this period, the broad exposure of Europeans to art based on natural forms drove an awareness and curiosity among the social classes that ultimately demanded investigation and deeper knowledge.  English polymath and poet John Donne, a keen observer of science and nature, was one who demanded.  Writing in London during the Second Plague pandemic, Donne's poetic frolic "The Flea" predates identification of that infectious vector and its blood-bearing diseases by 300 years, and his descriptions of contemporaneous disease and personal illness have been lauded by the medical community as valuable beyond diagnoses.  Donne is not immediately known as a naturalist, but his keen observations and descriptions during the Baroque made a lasting influence not only to literature but also to the emergence of biological science.

Robert Alexander

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is revealed as 42. That the answer is presented as a number and not a profound philosophical statement is in keeping with the comic tone of the novel, but that is just part of a more complicated narrative. The reader ultimately learns that this answer, generated by the Deep Thought supercomputer after millions of years of calculations, can only be understood if we know the question that generated the answer. Similarly, in the non-fiction world we inhabit, billions of dollars are being invested in a race to develop our own supercomputers that supposedly will provide us, through artificial intelligence, with the answers we seek. While there are undoubtedly computer engineers who understand how all of this will supposedly work, for we non-experts, the whole gambit seems a bit far-fetched. Our doubts may make us out to be modern-day Luddites, but there is certainly much historical precedent for serious thinkers to voice doubts about unfettered technological developments. What this presentation aims to do is to take a look at that historical resistance from figures such as Thoreau and to assess whether we should also consider such resistance, or at least consider the importance of the questions prior to obtaining the supposed answers.

John Doucet

The modern science of genomics has provided not only new ways of envisioning information molecules but also suites of new illustrative images such as chromosome maps and large data graphics.  Frequent use of such images extends beyond the science into other areas of understanding, such as the humanities.  This presentation will sample a collection of original explanations and diagrams based on images from the genomics repertory, together with concepts from the genomics literature that remarkably resemble historical ideas from the humanities, including poetry, ethnography, fine art, music, and mythology.  Specific examples will include a representation of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line based on retrovirus genome structure, line settlement pattern along Louisiana bayous as a model of genomic retroposition, the stunning similarities between musical scores of circular canons and maps of circular genomes, and personification of DNA enzymes as the Fates of Greek myth.  This sampling represents the pervasion of genomics thinking across disciplines and suggests a dependence of genomic illustration on historical ideas in the humanities. 

John Doucet

Despite the long literary relationship between poetry and science, little of what Aristotle recognized as “the language of all higher learning and thought” survives either as functional or even memorable writing.  What remains recognized as separate cultures in the 21st century is well bridged by historical and modern examples of poets using scientific diction (Chaucer, Donne, Poe, Hardy, Auden, Wilbur) and, less frequently, scientists writing in poetic forms (Maxwell, Oppenheimer, Huxley), not to mention the casual use of terms like “DNA” and “electrons” in modern poetry.  In revival of the tradition, this presentation is the tenth annual reading of original poetry on scientific topics. The poems are predominantly written in formalist structures with concise, epigrammatic narrative emulating the nature of scientific writing.  Poetic subjects in this reading center on aspects of DNA and genomics, inspired by the passage of James Watson (06 Nov. 2025) and publication of Matthew Cobb’s critically acclaimed biography of Francis Crick, “A Mind in Motion,” (11 Nov. 2025) which both occurred within one week this past Fall.