Artist
She was a promising artist, working in a beautiful setting, yet she committed suicide, and as you can well imagine it was the biggest tragedy of my life. I wanted to do something out of her death. Suicide is very different from other forms of death. It's a message to survivors. It's a deliberate act. And I wanted to create something living out of this, not just build her a monument. And I established a Resident Artists' Program on land that belonged to her and to me. I kept just 40 acres around my house while about 600 acres now belong to that program and the rest to my son. The barn I built there, a 12-sided barn of some 13,000 square feet Is now an area for artists that includes a music studio, painting and sculpting studios, a choreography studio and so on. The main house has bedrooms and bathrooms, writer's studios. And there are 10 or 11 artists there at any one time, who are in residence. They apply (usually on the web by clicking on www.djerassi.org) and the successful applicants get free room and board and studio space to pursue their own work in undisturbed privacy for 4 - 6 weeks. The program is over 20 years old and over 1,000 artists have now passed through there. And the art you see here, right in front of you [large colourful works, above the fireplace in Djerassi's London flat] everything they do of course belongs to them. I acquired these later.
It's very interdisciplinary. Literature, visual arts, music and the performing arts.
Shebang: You have a selection process.
Djerassi: Yes, and the committees change every year, so you don't perpetuate the taste of the committees. Very important. And the Program has become completely independent. It still bears my name but I'm not on the Board any more. My son is, actually. There are 14 or 15 Board members, and it gets support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and many individual donors. It has an annual budget of half a million dollars.
Art support
So I got involved in what I think is a much more important form of art support. Collecting is a form of art support. But often you are supporting dead artists, meaning that you do it to satisfy yourself. Your avarice, your taste. Yes, you eventually give it to a museum. Even if you collect the work of a living artist, that is supporting the artist, but that already gives the work the imprimatur of your taste.
Time
But when you support the artist from the start, before the work is done, you are saying I give you money, or more importantly, undivided time. That is of course the most generous and the most important gift, it is not prejudiced, not coloured by the donor's taste. You simply say, I have confidence in your aesthetic sense, and your creativity, create what you want. I think that is ultimately the most important form of art support you can give. And I must say I am proud of the artists' programme. Over 1000 artists have passed through there. 1000 artists, that is a critical mass. They come from all over the world.
Shebang:You are right to be proud. About your own artistic work. It seems to us that now you spend most of your time writing.
Djerassi: I have now become a true professional polygamist. For complex reasons I decided to become a writer to write fiction in a form that I call 'science-in-fiction to distinguish it from science fiction. I really write in a fictional context but very accurately about important science or, more importantly about the behaviour of people who work in science, and also about scientific concepts. These are things to which the general public would probably not pay much attention at all.
Stories
People who are interested in science are normally scientists. But I would like to touch a broader public. When people hear that I'm a chemist they usually say, 'Oh well I don't understand chemistry. The curtain goes down. So I say, let me tell you a story. Now everyone likes to hear stories.
Smuggling
In this case what I am smuggling in are important scientific concepts, and cultural aspects of science into an unprepared mind. And if the story is good enough they in fact are interested in reading it and they might learn something. My first novel, 'Cantor's Dilemma' came out in Penguin paperback in 1991 and it is now in its 13 reprinting. And the others are being reprinted too. They are even used as textbooks in American colleges. I didn't expect that. There are students now who take courses on "science in literature," or "ethics in research" or very frequently in the USA, "science, technology and society." And you see it has affected my own teaching. I am a professor of chemistry, but in fact I don't teach chemistry now. I teach in Stanford's human biology program, in the feminist program and in the medical ethics program
Didactic
In my own writing I am doing one of the most dangerous things you can do as a fiction writer: to write didactic novels. And now that I have moved into playwriting, you know better than anyone else [Shebang sent a playwright and actor to interview Djerassi] that if you put on a didactic play you are not going to sell many tickets. Yet in spite of that open admission, BBC World Service broadcast my first play, 'An Immaculate Misconception,' last month as Play of the Week.
But the people who object to any didactic motivation in fiction or plays have never looked at the definition of 'didactic'. In the dictionary against 'two' it says 'to convey instruction and information as well as pleasure and entertainment'. This is the definition that I use.
Dialogue
Also, the reason I write plays and novels has to do with dialogue. We scientists do not use dialogue in our papers. True Galileo did it in a certain context, but in modern scientific discourse you are not permitted to publish in dialogic form. If Einstein had put dialogue into his relativity paper, the Annalen der Physik would not have published it.
Human expression
And yet, most human expression involves discussion and exchange. When we scientists present papers or give lecture, we pontificate. What's more, when it comes to the actual depiction of scientists, we usually appear in drama or in fiction or even in people's imagination either as Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove on the one hand or as nerds on the other.
Listening
Now there are writers who are taken to come from the scientific world. Primo Levi was a great writer, and he was a chemist, but he didn't write plays Schnitzler, or Chekhov did, brilliant plays, but they are physicians really. Some may consider them to be scientists. I do not. Being a physician is a form of art. It is about human contact. A physician is accustomed to listening, a quality that many scientists lack. So this was to me a challenge. I did have the transition period; I had done 5 novels and short stories. So I had had the experience of writing dialogue. I had used the first person. That was crucial. Scientists are not permitted to use the first person. One has to use 'they' or 'we' even when there is just one writer. So the dam of repression of 40 years of not being able to use 'I' overran, and now there is an avalanche of 'I,I,I,I,.'

For more information, go to Carl Djerassi's web site at www.djerassi.com