When Harold Varmus, the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, gives a lecture, he usually talks to a scientific audience about health, or government policy, or the discovery that won him a Nobel Prize (with J. Michael Bishop), in 1989—the proto-oncogene, which enhanced our understanding of cancer. But last week he filled the auditorium at the Guggenheim Museum two nights in a row for a presentation entitled “Genes & Jazz,” in which he offered a primer on cell biology, evolution, and cancer, all to the accompaniment of a jazz quintet under the direction of his son Jacob, a thirty-five-year-old trumpeter and composer.

The program was part of a series called “Works & Process,” which usually includes performances by musicians like John Zorn and Philip Glass. Mary Sharp Cronson, the series’ producer, likes every so often to include a program with a scientific bent—once, a string quartet played music intended to evoke a black hole—and last year she approached Varmus, and Varmus approached his son.

“Biology was always Harold’s territory,” Jacob Varmus said. “It was a long, long adjustment for him to accept what my path would be. For a long time, he still had designs on my having a career more like his.”

“We both felt that there were unexplored similarities between jazz and science,” Jacob said. “They both involve investigating patterns and structures and how things work. Science and jazz are also both fringe communities in this country, and so we figured we could tell a parallel story.”

At first, they talked about working up a program on evolution—of species and of jazz—but that felt too didactic. “We decided we had to start with the simplest thing, the cell, and use music to try to express it. I was trying to use cell structure, like the double helix, to mirror that in the music.”

Exactly how a composer could express the idea of cells dividing became the subject of some dispute between Varmus père and fils. “We had our ups and downs,” Harold said. “Whenever I was in town on a weekend, I would ride my bike to Queens to have lunch with Jacob, and he would sit at the piano and I would talk. Jacob has a good layman’s appreciation of science, but sometimes his understanding of the science didn’t agree with mine, and that’s where the father-son relationship began to break down. We had different interpretations of things.”

Then Harold came across some computer simulations of basic cell processes which had been produced by an Australian biomedical animator named Drew Barry. The animations, which are speeded-up renderings of cells dividing, are astonishingly beautiful. Harold decided to use them to illustrate his talk, and Jacob started thinking of his music as a kind of score. At the Guggenheim, the stage was arranged with a large screen in the middle, making it, in effect, a bridge between the two Varmuses. Science and music, father and son, were separated by the width of the auditorium.

Jacob Varmus’s music is lyrical and self-assured, more Miles Davis than Dr. John. During the presentation, it was sometimes hard to tell that it was intended to evoke cell biology, but, then, the notion that a jazz composition might enhance your understanding of the way cancer cells divide is not really any more far-fetched than the idea that “Take the A Train” puts you in the right frame of mind for the subway. Harold Varmus seeded his lecture with musical metaphors. “Cells are like tiny orchestras, and they contain several instruments,” he said. “Cells use their instruments to create the harmonies of life.”

“I now understand the difference between giving a talk and doing a performance,” Harold said the next day. “It’s a whole new thing for me, these cues and lights and timing.” He paused. “You know, later today I have to go to Washington to give a talk at a neuroscience meeting, and I actually wish I had some music.” 

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