Swing Science.(The Talk of the Town)

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 pere and fils. "We had our ups and downs," Harold said. "Whenever I was in town on a weekend, I would ...