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Edgar Meyer began his career as a PhD chemist and crystallographer, with post-doctoral experience at the ETH-Zürich and MIT-Cambridge. Early seminal contributions include the first use of color graphics for molecular modelling (1968), the founding of the Protein Data Bank (1971), and the first use of networking in the life sciences (1971). For 36+ years as an academic scientist, he and his research group explored the structural characteristics of molecules, large and small. In addition to publishing ~100 papers in reviewed scientific journals, he has authored a number of chapters and review articles. An abbreviated curriculum vitae is available.  As he approached retirement from a career in academic research, he began to learn all the skills needed to create molecular sculptures and models. He wrote a computer program (SCULPT) that is an artistic creation in itself, in that it is a dynamic program that can be modified as needed for each specific project. The program accepts the input of atomic coordinates (e.g., from the Protein Data Bank, v.s.) and other parameters to create a ‘G code’ file for a cnc milling machine or a plasma metal cutter. The program also creates a postscript file that is enormously useful in designing new projects to be sculpted. This project was funded by the US National Science Foundation, permitting the purchase of a cnc milling machine for the shop he set up in Taos, New Mexico. In addition to various models and sculptures illustrated on these web pages, he was commissioned by the Boston Museum of Science to create a scaled model of the binding site of aspirin (ibuprofen, etc.) and by the Smithsonian to create bronze sculptures of the polio virus and its cellular receptor. He was invited to organize and present the concluding lecture in a symposium “Art in Crystallography” at the 20th International Union of Crystallography meeting in Florence, Italy in 2005 and the saye year was invited by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Foundation to present several lectures in their “Creative Mind” series. His scientific research plays a significant role in the choice of topics for sculptures and models. Some sculptures are derived directly from structures determined in his laboratory, while others come from review papers and his broad interest in biomolecules. Most recently, he has extended his sculpting to atom-based abstractions and, as a flight of fantasy, to imaging how molecular sculptures would appear in public spaces and superimposed on flowers. His work has been exhibited at several galaries, including the juried exhibition "Taos Invites Taos". Selected sculptures are on exhibit at the Wilder-Nightingale Gallery in Taos. The study below, an early sculpture from the 'trinitatis series', came from following a curious question: how many repeats of a single amino acid can one find in protein sequence data bases??? - the answer is mind-boggling!
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