Amy and Robert Pollack have collaborated on many projects over their 53-year marriage. Amy, an artist, has often provided the frontispieces for her husbands books. Robert, a professor of biological sciences who leads the Center for the Study of Science and Religion and was dean of Columbia College from 1982-89, has often used his wifes drawings for his Frontiers of Science course in the Core Curriculum.

Amy and Robert Pollack liken their book, The Course of Nature, to a graphic novel.

So it was natural that when Robert was asked to provide a companion text for a required course on Darwin for freshmen at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., he selected his wife to provide the sketches. Titled The Course of Nature: A Book of Drawings on Natural Selection and Its Consequences, the joint project tackles big questions in a slim, 113-page volume.

How many atoms are there in one of the hundred thousand billion cells that make up one person? How probable is it that one persons genome would ever arise again by random processes? (The first answer is 1 million billion. The next is to the 3 billionth power.) These are but a few of the questions raised in the book, which the Pollacks describe as something akin to a graphic novel.

Graphic novels are a very powerful way to convey feeling as well as meaning, Robert said, noting that Roz Chasts book about her parents final years, Cant We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir, is closer in its approach to their book than any science textbook. You bring your imagination to graphic novels, adds Amy. There isnt just one interpretation.

The chapters in The Course of Nature explain everything from Lucretius view of atoms to Einsteins space-time continuum, Mendels peapods, the scandal of eugenics, global warming, and Watson and Cricks DNA double helix. Regarding the discovery of the structure of DNA, Robert said, There has never been in our lifetime an idea of equal magnitude. E=mc2 [Einsteins statement that matter and energy are manifestations of the same underlying reality] comes close, but not in terms of how we understand life.

Visual metaphors abound. Apple peels, vines and Russian nested dolls help explain the biosphere, the structure of DNA and the common origin of all life on Earth. The authors show that if the age of the universe13.7 billion yearswere a set of 30 books, the period at the end of the last sentence of the last volume would mark the era of modern science, which is just the past few hundred years.

Robert says he came up with the idea for the book when the dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Stevens asked him to prepare a text that could reach first-year students who dont intend to pursue a scientific career, and for whom traditional lectures and data-filled PowerPoints dont work.

Chapters are short: An explanation of how DNA works is two pages long, starting with the succinct sentence, DNA is a text. It then goes on to explain that DNA encodes genetic information much as a sentence encodes meaning using letters and typographical symbols. On the facing page, Amy expresses the scientific principle in a series of drawings of cats that illustrate how different sequences of the four-letter alphabet of DNA base-pairs produce different results.

Amy, who earned a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union and a B.A. from Brandeis, has worked over her long artistic career in a variety of media, including drawings, woodcuts, quilts, posters, soft sculpture, papier-mch and paintings. In addition to a one-person show at Columbia University Medical Center, she has contributed to group shows in galleries in New York City, in Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor on Long Island, and at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge, England, among others.

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Couple Illustrates the Marvels of Science