David Edwards’s new experimental space, Le Laboratoire, brings artscience to the center of Paris.

Until recently, 46-year old David Edwards couldn’t escape a nagging feeling of misdirection. Decades of self-reflection, countless trips across the world, several books, and millions of dollars (earnt and spent) later, he has the answer: Artscience.

The merging of two words—art and science. It sounds simple. But only a few nimble geniuses, like Leonardo, have made the leap between the two spheres. Frustrated by this discipline apartheid, Edwards came up with his hybrid concept. And for aspiring “artscientists,” there is only one place to be: Le Laboratoire.

This art and design centre—not a gallery, nor a museum, nor even a lab—opened last October in the 1st arrondissement. “We do hypothesis-driven experiments in the arts and design,” explains Edwards, the founder. Here scientists and artists from around the world have an entire 1,3000 square meters in which to think big. “All our experiments aim at some kind of impact: It could be cultural, educational, humanitarian, or industrial. But we are not interested in the result, we are interested in the process.”

Born to a chemist near Detroit, Michigan, Edwards studied “mathematic things” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in part because he “didn’t know what to do with [his] life,” and because nobody was at the air force recruitment center when he showed up. But his primary interest was the arts, in particular theatre and literature—he wrote his still unpublished “first novel” at 8.

This apparent contradiction in ambitions probably didn’t help Edwards’ chronic melancholy. He moved to Israel on a scholarship and wrote two applied math textbooks while polishing in private his autobiographical prose. He then got involved in the writing program at MIT (where he met his French wife). But all along, he continued to wonder what he was meant to be.

In 1997, an article he published in the distinguished journal Science made lots of news and showed him the way. With another MIT scientist, Edwards invented a way to create an insulin particle that could be inhale, instead of injected, in the treatment of diabetes. His discovery, he realized, did not come from deduction, but from “a combination of [his] background and ability to dream,” from “an aesthetic method,” from “intuition”: He had remembered a childhood perforated plastic sphere designed for indoor baseball. Artscience was around the corner.

Edwards took a leave from MIT to start a company that would develop the patent. It sold only a year later to the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly for over 100 million dollars, not including promising stock options. Eager to share what he had learnt in the process, he created the Idea Translation Lab (ITL) at Harvard where students form all disciplines can develop ideas, from a new application of micro fluids in architecture to music as medicine. He also developed Pulmatrix a start-up pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts and a not-for-profit infectious disease organization called Medicine in Need (MEND) based in the United States, France, and South Africa.

At the time, Harvard was increasingly interested in breaking down the barriers between disciplines, an approach that pleased Edward’s instinctive interdisciplinary approach. Yet, he found that the institution, like all institutions, “discouraged the simultaneous development of aesthetic and scientific methods.” He also noticed that artists were underrepresented at most interdisciplinary meetings.

So Edwards started “an international dialogue with a bunch of people like [him]self”—internationally recognized artists and scientists, mostly gravitating around Harvard, and mostly from what he calls, with an evident affection for phrase-coining, “the post-Google generation.” Plastic artist Fabrice Hyber, designer Matthieu Lehanneur, electrical engineering and music professor Diana Dabby, and materials scientist Robert Langer are all on the roll call.

From their conversations, the idea of Le Laboratoire was born. Two recently published, and somewhat self-important books by Edwards, Niche and Artscience, Creativity in the Post-Google Generation, recall that beginning. (The former, apparently, constitutes “a new fiction genre—the novel catalogue.”)

The center is branching out into various international partners like universities, companies, art centers, and foundations. It hopes to produce three to four exhibitions a year. The current show—surprisingly conventional in its concept—displays excruciating photographs of AIDS patients in developing countries by the exceptional war photographer James Nachtwey.

It also hosts the LaboClub, a networking private society for innovation-thirsty “catalysts of cultural creation attracted to the Artscience universe.” David Edwards at last has a place that fulfills his exigent expectations. At least for now, he has found his raison d’être.