Rishi Nag: Genomics! The Musical
Rishi Nag, Image Courtesy of Stephanie Li
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Rishi: I've always played in bands since I was a teenager, but I've calmed down from the early days in metal bands to being more of a singer songwriter type. And then about 2008, 2009, I moved into the department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. One of the plants they have there is this thing called the Arabidopsis thaliana, which is a sort of thale cress.
Rishi: They like it, it was one of the first plants to be sequenced. It has a nice manageable five chromosomes and number of megabases. And I had never heard of this before and this was really juxtaposed to me when I went into the market square for lunch one day and saw all the roses and usual suspects on the florist stall there. And that kind of inspired me to write a song using roses as a metaphor for sort of popular culture artists and sort of Instagram influencers and the thaliana for the scientists who, you know, they're doing lots of hard work and things, but they're not getting any public recognition for that. So that was the starting point.
Rishi: I made a video for that song with me singing into some broccoli as a microphone, and I ended up thinking, okay, let's make an album of this type of thing, and I was able to get an initial show at the Norwich Arts Center. This initial thing was disparate ideas like the song about Mendel, but it was next to songs about dark matter, the beginning of the universe, and graphene. It was just really a sort of mishmash of things that I found really interesting.
Rishi: In that time, I'd started working at the Wellcome Genome Campus on the Ensembl Genome browser and the public engagement team there put me together with the funds for making some videos. And I put this show together, Genomics! The Musical, partly I wanted it to be a light entertainment science comedy show with music in it.
Rishi: And partly, I was thinking about an audience of people like myself who studied biology at GCSE (I got an A!) but there was no genetics involved at that stage. So I thought there might be people like myself who are parents who are going to have to try and understand what their kids are doing, but who haven't had that background of what they teach currently in school in biology.
Rishi: So I thought, let's do a show that I can put on in pubs and things to make that happen. And so that kind of had its unveiling a couple of years ago. And this academic year, I've been taking it to schools a lot more.
Rishi: The nice thing about the show is I can chop and change it for different age groups. The younger kids get sort of the basic introduction to Mendel and a bit of introduction to evolution, and then a fuller show for slightly older children.
Kat: So does the musical have a narrative and an arc? Do we go through from one place to another, or is it a bit of a mishmash?
Rishi: I'm trying to tell a story, starting with where did we get the idea of genes from. So we do start at the inheritance ideas that Mendel produced, and then talk a bit about DNA going to RNA and protein, that basic thing, and having fun with it as well. So, you know, making the ribosome a sort of robotic character kind of thing.
Rishi: Then there's a sort of going into variants and why are we the same and why are we different? And then spreading that onto species. And in particular, one of the things I like is the fact that if we look at genes that make us human compared to our common ancestor with a chimpanzee, there's one called the FOXP2, which gives us the ability to sing.
Rishi: And if you look at the precursor to the FOXP2 gene, going further back, you get how it's affecting bird song and things like that. So it's a lovely gene to bring up as a solid example of what goes on in evolution.
Kat: A lovely musical gene. What was the hardest thing to write a song about? Was there something where it's like, "Oh God, nothing rhymes with ribosome!"
Rishi: I think the main problem I have really is things might be out of date. So for instance, when I wrote this musical, I wrote a song about Green Fluorescent Protein, and it's a really catchy number, but now it's being superseded by a lot of sequencing. So I've got to update that and maybe move this out of the set list.
Kat: So have you got anything in there about CRISPR or some of the new genome editing technologies?
Rishi: That's something I want to bring in. It's interesting, I actually managed to annoy my daughter by performing this at her school. And they've started studying CRISPR at 9 and 10 and it's lovely to see that. So it's certainly something to bring in.
Kat: As with biological species, it sounds like your show has evolved over time and changed and mutated, maybe. Do you think you're going to carry on with this genetics biology life sciences theme, or are you starting to think about, you know, another "Dark Matter! The Musical" maybe?
Rishi: I definitely want to continue with this genetic theme, and particularly one of the nicest things it was to do was to perform at a rare disease festival in November last year, RAREFest 2022. And that was nice because it gives the parents and children a chance to see the basis of what the scientists are gonna be talking about with them later on. So I certainly see it's a valuable piece of work.
Rishi: Artistically I'd like to do my next grand scheme idea that will hopefully come through next year is an idea called "ever increasing circles". Starting from the very tiny things and going onto the size of the universe and trying to build up a nice menagerie of that.
Kat: Was there a song that was particularly difficult to write?
Rishi: Yes. So one of the things I worked as was as a bioinformatician, and that's the computers processing the data, the huge amounts of genetic data that we have now. And there was a song I wrote called The Fourth Paradigm, which was about the different ways in which science has evolved, moving on from the simple like observation to test experiment, to modelling, to now what we've got with AI, where we're sifting through vast quantities of data.
Rishi: So that was a difficult one to kind of encapsulate those ideas into a song format, but one, I'm very proud of.
Kat: How do you check that the things that you are writing and singing about are actually scientifically accurate?
Rishi: This probably means I do have to do the most research of any songwriter type. It is a case of reading papers, finding out about what's interesting. Sometimes you do have to submit to the rhyme, like with the Green Fluorescent Protein I used the word glow instead of fluorescent. When I started performing that I'd always use a disclaimer at the end of it. So they're two different things, but I think it's easier to let it go.
Kat: I mean, that's the thing, gene names aren't really words that rhyme very much often, are they?
Rishi: No, luckily I haven't done anything about specific genes so far.
Rishi: One area I want to investigate, particularly inspired by the RAREFest, is to try and do some about genes related to the rare disease community. But there's also issues there, you've got to be doing it in a very sensitive manner. You know, often what works in a lighthearted comedy show may not work as a sort of meaningful song.
Kat: Where can people go if they want to find out more about Genomics! The Musical, or even listen or watch bits of
Kat: it?
Rishi: So singingscience.org is the website and that has links to the Singing Science YouTube channel, and then the Singing Science on Bandcamp and Spotify for Genomics! The Musical.
Kat: My thanks to Rishi Nag, and there are links to his website, Singing Science, as well as everything else below. And here’s a taste of his song Variations on a Gene of DNA.
