Skip Huckaby, Scientific Glassblower

It's been said that beauty can show up where you least expect it, and you may encounter an artist in a most unlikely place. That's exactly who we found on the campus at UC Davis; not at the new performing arts center but in all places, inside the chemistry building!

Most surprising of all this man's art
is helping scientific researchers make
key discoveries that may someday
save lives. Skip Huckaby's
creations are forged in fire, the white-hot flame of the acetylene torch. With hands both skilled — and scarred — he patiently melts and molds, stretches and shapes glass into creations that are as useful as they
are unique.

Skip found his calling while
studying for his biology degree.
He took a glassblowing class almost as a lark at a junior college, and to his surprise, discovered an artistic skill and a career. Thirty years later, skip's one of only three or four hundred scientific glassblowers in the world.

Today, at UC Davis, skip works with chemistry and biology students and professors. Together they design elaborate, one of a kind glass beakers and other complex apparatus for testing all kinds of chemicals and compounds. He's also mister fix-it. Grad student Son Lam remembers breaking a critical piece of equipment right in the middle of an experiment. Used to be, he'd lose days, even weeks, of valuable research time waiting for a replacement from the manufacturer. Not any more! Skip claims for about fifty dollars, he can fix a glass apparatus that could cost up to a thousand dollars to replace. It's precise work; in a fragile, breakable medium, his hands mere inches away from a flame burning at twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. At first glance, these creations might seem less impressive than artwork created by the great glassblowers of Venice - until you realize that 'scientific art' serves a higher purpose - enabling researchers to make progress towards saving lives.

Glassblowing as an art's been around for five thousand years but the scientific stuff, only about fifty. Skip says in 1972, the American Scientific Glassblowers Society claimed about 13-hundred fulltime members. Today there's only about four hundred - probably due to the many years of rigorous practice needed for these artists to perfect their unique skills.