Tag: health

On Living Systems: A Love Letter to New York

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
Photograph of bacterial colonies growing on Manhattan-shaped agar media in a petri dish, scaled to reflect the geographical distances of locations from where those bacteria species were collected and isolated

The unparalleled predisposition of visual, literary, and performance art in New York sets an extraordinarily high bar for any creative expression.

Even a personal love letter to this city can feel insignificant before it begins, overshadowed by my admiration for the standards set by E.B. White’s Here is New York, Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York. Their New Yorks feel complete, as though the city has already been fully observed, fully interpreted.

And yet—here goes an insignificant love letter.

Eight years ago, when I moved to New York for good, I set one non-negotiable rule for myself: I would pursue cancer research and visual art in parallel, in the city I had long believed to be my final destination.

Arriving here on my own terms took years of preparation. But once I was here, what surprised me most was how quickly strangers became friends, and friends became collaborators—each of them bound by a shared, almost reverential love for this city.

Perhaps it was that collective passion that gave rise to an idea—one that brought together biomedical research and visual art, rooted deeply in New York itself.

We set out to explore the extent of diversity in this city—not just through its people, natives, commuters and transplants alike, but through the invisible ecosystems beneath our feet.

Our team collected soil samples from 25 public parks across Manhattan and isolated the dominant bacterial species from each.

The scientists among us pushed further, asking whether natural secretions from these bacteria might possess the ability to eliminate cancer cells.

The artists, meanwhile, followed a different instinct. They sought to reimagine neighborhood boundaries—not through maps or history, but through the growth patterns of these microbial colonies.

Slowly, patterns began to emerge.

The scientists found that several Bacillus species produced natural compounds capable of clearing out lung cancer cells—and the effect became stronger as the amount increased. What began as an exploratory exercise evolved into a discovery platform—one that hinted at the potential of urban soil bacteria as future microbial cancer therapies (link).

The artists observed something equally striking. When each dominant bacterial strain was allowed to grow from its original geographic position within a Manhattan-shaped nutrient landscape—scaled to reflect the distances among neighborhood parks—the colonies did not remain confined. They expanded, collided, competed, and overtook one another. Boundaries dissolved. Territories shifted. What emerged was not a static map, but a living, contested, ever-evolving city.

And somewhere between these two trajectories—one seeking to heal, the other to interpret—I began to understand New York in a new way.

This city is not defined by its borders, but by its collisions.

Its energy comes from overlap—of disciplines, of cultures, of ambitions. Just like those bacterial colonies, we arrive with origins, but we do not remain contained by them. We expand, we adapt, we collaborate. We shape the city, and in return, the city reshapes us.

And cancer, in its own unsettling way, reflects this truth back to us. It is not merely a disease to be eradicated, but a distorted echo of life’s most fundamental processes—growth, adaptation, and possibilities. To study cancer is, in part, to study health itself: to understand what happens when the very systems that sustain life lose their balance, their restraint, their sense of collective harmony.

In that sense, the bacteria beneath New York and the cells within us are not so different. Both reveal how life organizes, negotiates space, responds to pressure, and, at times, spirals into chaos. And yet, within that chaos lies the possibility of orderly insight—of learning how to restore equilibrium, how to guide growth back toward coherence.

Perhaps that is what this city has been teaching me all along.

That health—whether of a body, a community, or a city—is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to hold it, regulate it, and evolve through it.

Perhaps that is why New York feels alive in a way no other place does.

So yes, this may be an insignificant love letter.

But what I have come to understand is that neither the city nor the body is defined by its boundaries alone, but by the conditions that allow those boundaries to hold, to shift, and, when necessary, to be reimagined.

And in that recognition, New York is no longer only a place I inhabit.

It becomes, instead, a way of thinking about life itself.

NYC Reality: Between the Microscope and the Canvas

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
Understanding the unpredictability of cancer using techniques from chaos theory and modern art, Dhru Deb, 2015

I grew up in a place where nothing was guaranteed.

We didn’t always call it scarcity. It was simply the engineering of daily life — how far a lunchbox could travel, how long a fabric could endure, how a roof could mean gratitude and uncertainty in the same breath. Safety was a rumor adults tried to make believable. I learned to notice what held and what trembled. I learned to look twice.

That is where my way of seeing began. Maybe that is where a scientist is born. Maybe that is where an artist is born too.

I loved two ways of seeing. One wanted proof. The other wanted meaning. For years I thought they would diverge, like railway tracks leaving a crowded station.

Cancer made sure it didn’t.

I came to the United States and earned my PhD, pursuing cancer as both puzzle and adversary. In the laboratory, the world could be persuaded to answer. There was discipline in it, and aesthetics — the quiet thrill of a signal emerging from noise. A future was beginning to assemble itself, piece by deliberate piece.

And then time changed. Hours refused to move in a straight line. The life I was constructing — ambitions, plans, the careful architecture of becoming — loosened its grip. Cancer has a way of doing that: it does not knock; it rearranges gravity.

When my mother was diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer, I felt carried by a force I could neither measure nor resist, flung out of momentum and into an older knowledge of uncertainty. The ground I trusted remembered how easily it could give way.

Then time thickened and slowed further. What I knew how to calculate remained true. But it was no longer enough. Mechanism could not contain mourning. No p-value could quiet a hospice room after the machines stopped. I needed a vocabulary with edges wide enough for love, anger, memory, and the unfinished nature of goodbye.

So I spoke with art. The work that grew from that turn — paintings, collaborations, experiments in translation — lives at dhrudeb.com, an evolving record of the questions I am still trying to ask.

Art let me remain with uncertainty without demanding closure. It stretched my tolerance for ambiguity. It taught me to circle a question, to feel its weather, to imagine beyond the frame. And slowly, without announcement, it began to change my science. I asked broader things. I listened differently. I began to understand that empathy is not separate from innovation — it is one of its engines.

I built a life in New York City, where urgency hums in every direction. I serve in organizations helping steer research toward futures where loss might arrive later — or not at all. I founded a network of researchers, patients, caregivers, artists and musicians, because I have seen what becomes possible when we allow our intellectual lives to remain porous to our emotional ones.

I once believed cancer only took from me.

I understand now that it also revealed a responsibility — to widen the culture of science, to insist that imagination belongs in the lab, to help build communities where grief can transform into momentum for someone else’s survival.

I still live in the space between the microscope and the canvas.

In the hour when pigment forgets itself and becomes radiance, a presence gathers — not absence, not memory, something still arriving.