A Life Connecting Art and Science: The Connectivity of Lives, Makepeace Tsao (1918-2000)

My father, Makepeace Uho Tsao, who helped Leonardo through the transition after Frank Malina's death, died 6 August 2000 of heart failure. His life contained both the sciences and the arts, driven by his interests, his energy and his values. What I learned from him about these qualities led to both of us becoming involved with Leonardo.

On the science side, the facts feed easily into the standard obituary, the recitation of someone's life.

Makepeace was born at the end of August 1918 in Shanghai, China, into a science-oriented family. The way the date in the lunar calendar was recorded left some uncertainty about which of three days to convert to in the Julian calendar. My father used the middle one, 28 August, as closest to the right date; it also coincided with Confucius's birthday. His English name is a translation of his Chinese one, given to him because he was born at the end of a war. His father was president of a technical university, a modern development in China in the first decades of the twentieth century. Of five siblings who came to the United States, four pursued careers in chemistry, physics or engineering.

He graduated from college at seventeen and taught high school physics before coming to the United States in 1938. Like many Chinese students of the time, he came in through Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle (avoiding Angel Island), going immediately on to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he pursued graduate studies in organic chemistry at the University of Michigan. His interest turned to the chemistry of biological systems. However, the field of biochemistry had not yet been established, so he earned his Ph.D. in Pharmacological Chemistry in 1944. His parents urged him and his siblings to remain in the United States as the Chinese Communist Revolution offered bleak prospects in Shanghai. He married Annette Robertson Lambie in 1947, and they had four children.

His work at the University of Michigan Pediatric Research Lab included developing the first tests for phenyl ketone urea (PKU), which allowed diagnosis of this deadly childhood disorder early enough for effective treatment. He also remade other diagnostic tests to use smaller samples, so that the testing would be less taxing on the small bodies of infants. As assistant and associate professor of biochemistry in the School of Medicine, he taught clinically at the university hospital and conducted research as well.

From 1967 to 1983, he served as professor on the medical school faculty of the University of California at Davis, doing research and clinical teaching. He was made Professor Emeritus when he retired from academia.

Makepeace was then able to be more fully active in the arts, which had always figured in his life. Here the obituary becomes less of a chronicle and not solely about Makepeace.

In China, he had learned to paint with ink and brush and to play the organ; in the U.S. he continued to play the piano, though he often remarked on the difference in technique. He dug out an additional basement room to create a painting studio in our first house. He worked first in oils, then in acrylics and painted until his last few years (see Color Plate A No. 2). His avid interest in photography centered on recording events and sights around him. His photography was a visual journal, although it sometimes ranged to exploring how vision and the camera express concepts. In both of these media, he took classes and experimented on his own. He also ventured into sculpture using glass panels. He applied his sense of visual surprise and fascination with structure in his work, exploring how vision functions and how to expand the representation of what we cannot see directly. For example, his paintings from microphotographs of crystals reflect his interpretation of the enlarged structural order.

In addition to his own creative pursuits, he fostered and promoted...