Editor's note: On Friday, April 24, at 11:15 a.m., artist Roger Berry and dean Mark McNamee will be in the Life Sciences Addition lobby to discuss the new sculpture with a group of visiting Modesto 8th-grade students. Members of the media are invited to attend. Art and science converge dramatically in a new University of California, Davis, sculpture -- a suspended ribbon of coiled steel and colored glass, 48 feet tall and only 18 inches wide, depicting a snippet of human genetic code. "Portrait of a DNA Sequence" is the latest addition to the campus's growing collection of works of art in public places. Others include the whimsical "Egghead" series by the late faculty member and noted ceramist Robert Arneson. Clarksburg artist Roger Berry created the sculpture of DNA to celebrate the pioneering cellular and molecular research occurring in the campus's state-of-the-art Life Sciences Addition building, completed last year. The work was commissioned by the Division of Biological Sciences and underwritten by a $50,000 gift. The sculpture is both an artistic as well as educational piece -- scientifically accurate and made with expressive materials. "The structure of DNA can be deceptively simple, yet it is intensely complex," Berry says. "You have to break it down to this kind of silhouette to make any sense of it." The inspiration for the sculpture came one day in 1996 when Mark McNamee was visiting the unfinished Life Sciences Addition building, which is next to Briggs Hall. The central stairway had just been installed and its spiral design reminded him of the double-helix shape of DNA. "The double helix is at the heart of modern molecular biology and symbolizes one of the themes that links research programs in the building," says McNamee. Berry, known for his signature use of glass and water, has done other site-specific sculptures for the UC Davis Medical Center, the Crocker Art Museum and the California Department of Justice headquarters, all in Sacramento. Before he could start designing the new piece, Berry had to bone up on DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, the chemical material in the cells of plants and animals that carries hereditary information from one generation to the next. Like many undergraduate biology students, he began by reading "The Cartoon Guide to Genetics," an unconventional textbook co-authored by UC Davis microbiologist Mark Wheelis and San Francisco cartoonist Larry Gonick. Then he met with researchers who described the particular segment of DNA that he would be depicting -- a segment that was first deciphered at UC Davis. It is 201 bases, or chemical letters, long. In life, the segment is the blueprint for a type of protein that transports materials around inside the cells of humans and most other organisms. As the design progressed, Berry began asking questions that stumped even the scientists. For instance, he learned that the "backbones" of DNA -- two long, parallel chains of sugar and phosphate molecules -- spiral off-center. But how much? Davis structural biologists had to work out the answer. In the finished work, the stainless-steel backbones give the sculpture its shape and sense of energy, but the colored-glass bases are its focal point. Bases are chemical components of DNA. In a DNA segment, single bases are chemically linked in pairs. The pairs lie between the two backbone chains, connecting the chains like rungs connect the sides of a ladder. For the sculpture, Berry assigned one color -- or, more accurately, since he uses dichroic glass, one pair of colors -- to each type of base. Dichroic glass both transmits and reflects light. A round wafer of the glass can appear to be either of two colors, depending on the viewer's vantage point. The resulting sculpture is a marvelously complex lattice of silver steel and shimmering color. The backbones contain 400 feet of stainless steel; the base pairs contain 603 wafers of glass that variously appear as magenta, green, yellow, red and blue-green. Thus, a person viewing a base pair at eye level, from a landing on the surrounding stairs, might see the pair as magenta and yellow. Then, with a slight shift of the head, the colors would switch to green and blue. Gazing up or down through multiple layers of bases turns the pattern into a confusion of other hues -- deep blue, forest green and scarlet -- "a sort of visual noise," Berry says, much like the jumble of information within DNA that scientists are striving to understand.