The adage “all attention is good attention” may be true for marketers — not so for the Sonoran Desert toad. Last fall, the U.S. National Park Service sent out a message on Facebook asking visitors to “refrain from licking” the toad (technically Incilius alvarius but commonly called Bufo alvarius). That message came months after a New York Times article covered the booming interest in the psychedelic compound that the toad excretes from its skin — along with the “poaching, over-harvesting and illegal trafficking” that have accompanied that interest.

People don’t typically lick the toads to get high, says Robert Villa, a community outreach specialist at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill. The secretions the toads produce are toxic when ingested. They “work orally, through the mucous membranes, and cause really dangerous side effects, like cardiac arrest,” Villa says.

Instead, for decades, people have been collecting the secretions, then drying and smoking them. When inhaled, a compound within, 5-MeO-DMT, can cause auditory and visual hallucinations. “It’s a very powerful psychedelic sometimes called the ‘God molecule,’ ” says pharmacologist and chemist David Nichols of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

The drug’s growing popularity could be bad news for toad populations. “If you relocate it outside of its home territory,” Villa says, which often happens when people collect a toad for its secretions, “it gets lost and its chances for survival go way down.” What’s more, collecting large numbers of toads increases the risk of disease transmission, like chytrid fungus, between toads.

We at Science News heard the PSA loud and clear: Just leave this toad alone. But we couldn’t help but wonder: What other amazing animals may have psychedelic potential? Join us on a tour, by land and sea, of some of the world’s mind-altering fauna.

Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius)

Habitat: The Sonoran Desert, in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico

All toads secrete toxins from their skin. These secretions, whose specific compounds vary from species to species, probably evolved as a way to keep a toad’s body moist. Over time, the compounds, which can also act on the brain and affect heart muscle when ingested, came to aid in self-defense.

But the Sonoran Desert toad, also known as the Colorado River toad, appears to have taken evolution one step further.

The toad, one of the largest in North America, secretes an enzyme that converts bufotenine, a compound also made by other toads, into 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful hallucinogen related to the psychedelic drug DMT.

A frightened Sonoran Desert toad gushes its toxic mix, which includes 5-MeO-DMT, from its parotoid glands — located behind each eye — and from glands on its legs. It’s a way to say, “Please don’t eat me! I don’t taste good!” When swallowed in large quantities by a potential predator, the toxins can cause coma, cardiac arrest and even death.

Scientists aren’t yet sure why the Sonoran Desert toad produces 5-MeO-DMT, and why it is the only toad known to make it. “There’s a lot of mystery,” Villa says.

Giant monkey frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor)

Habitat: The Amazon Basin in South America

There’s no scientific consensus on whether kambô, the name for the toxic secretion produced by the giant monkey frog, should be considered a psychedelic. The term psychedelic comes from Greek meaning “mind manifesting,” Nichols says. “You can imagine, it’s enhancing the properties of your mind, rather than just intoxicating you.” Other compounds such as stimulants and depressants modify the activity of the brain, but they don’t leave users with the kind of new insights and memorable experiences that come with psychedelics.

Wuelton Monteiro, a tropical medicine researcher at the Universidade do Estado do Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil, points to a 2020 study in Scientific Reports as an example of why the classification has been unclear. In the small study, nearly half of participants who reported using kambô said they had a spiritual experience, and some experiences came with what resembled the afterglow often associated with hallucinogens. But kambô doesn’t activate the 5-HT2A receptor, a protein that senses the chemical messenger serotonin, while classic psychedelics do.

Among Indigenous populations in the southwestern Amazon, the frog’s skin secretions have been used for centuries as a stimulant in shamanistic rituals. According to Villa, the secretions are usually applied on small, superficial burns on the body to increase the stamina of hunters.

In predators attempting to gobble the frog, kambô might cause regurgitation, seizures and a change in heart function. Researchers are still trying to decipher the specific compounds that explain these effects, but they do know that species of Phyllomedusa collectively produce over 200 short protein fragments that can influence body function. Some might be promising for future medicines.

California harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex californicus)

Habitat: Southwestern United States and northern Mexico

The venom of the California harvester ant is made up of enzymes that aren’t known to cause hallucinations on their own, but the Indigenous peoples of central California once ate them during rituals including vision quests. Ethnographic reports suggest people would swallow hundreds of live ants in balls of eagle down feathers. No doubt the people were stung, likely on the insides.

Justin Schmidt, an entomologist at the Southwestern Biological Institute and University of Arizona in Tucson who died in February, said the pain of being stung by so many ants, along with extreme cold, fasting and in some cases sleep deprivation, triggered hallucinations that connected the people with spiritual guides.

A harvester ant’s sting is “nothing like a bee sting,” Schmidt wrote in The Sting of the Wild (SN: 8/6/16, p. 26). “The pain is intense, comes in waves, and is deeply visceral.” Lasting from four to eight hours, the pain is accompanied by a numb sensation at the site of the sting. The ants deliver stings to defend their colonies from large predators, including lizards, birds and people. (Smaller enemies such as other insects and spiders are bitten.)

A person who eats 1,000 ants would probably die; according to Schmidt’s book, one ant is enough to kill a mouse. But some predators have defenses: The regal horned lizard (Phrynosoma solare) has a mucus lining its mouth and digestive system that allows it to eat hundreds of ants and a substance in its blood that neutralizes the venom. Some birds somehow avoid getting stung too.

It’s hard to get more information on how the ants were used in rituals and the nature of the experience. Disease and violence that came with Westerners during California’s gold rush destroyed the Indigenous communities in the Central Valley and their way of life.

Salema (Sarpa salpa)

Habitat: Temperate and tropical ocean waters, from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Mediterranean Sea

Fishes including this species of sea bream, as well as some sea chubs and clownfish, can cause auditory and visual hallucinations when eaten, though reports are rare. Sarpa salpa was known as the “dream fish” in ancient Rome, according to a 2018 review of psychedelic fauna published in Frontiers in Psychiatry. Two cases of hallucinatory fish poisoning were documented in 2006 in the journal Clinical Toxicology. In one case, a 40-year-old man ate baked S. salpa and later experienced hallucinations of screaming animals and giant arthropods surrounding his car. The symptoms went away, with medical attention, 36 hours after he ate the fish.

Researchers don’t know what compounds cause this ichthyoallyeinotoxism, or fish poisoning, which can include nightmares. Evolutionary biologist Leo Smith of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who studies fish history and diversification, says he and other scientists suspect that the compounds are a by-product of the fishes’ diets.

But ichthyoallyeinotoxism is distinct from two other forms of fish poisoning. Symbiotic bacteria within puffer fish produce a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, or TTX, that can cause paralysis and death. And ciguatera fish poisoning comes from eating fish contaminated with a neurotoxin produced by some dinoflagellates. It can cause diarrhea, vomiting and weakness, as well as a reverse sensory disruption, where hot things seem cold and vice versa. But it does not cause hallucinations, says Sandric Leong, a biological oceanographer at the National University of Singapore.

How and why many of these neurotoxins are produced is still being worked out. “There are so many relationships with the marine environment which we are not very sure of,” Leong says.

Pitted sponge (Verongula rigida)

Habitat: The Caribbean

The pitted sponge and some other sponges including Smenospongia aura and S. echina contain 5-bromo-DMT and 5,6-dibromo-DMT. Because of their relationship with the psychedelic drug DMT, these compounds are plausible psychedelics. American chemist Alexander Shulgin, famous for his research into psychedelic compounds and for introducing the world to the synthetic hallucinogen MDMA, or ecstasy, and his wife Ann Shulgin wrote in TIHKAL: The Continuation that they don’t know whether the sponge compounds are activated by smoking or not. They are, however, “quantitatively reduced to DMT by stirring under hydrogen in methanol, in the presence of palladium on charcoal.”

The pitted sponge is known to concentrate in its tissue chemicals called monoamines that can modify the behavior of nerve cells. Not only can these compounds make the sponge taste bitter, but they can also alter the behavior of predatory fish that dine on the sponge.

“They wouldn’t prevent the fish from ever trying to take a bite, but it would prevent it from persisting or consuming the sponge any beyond an initial several bites,” says Mark Hamann, a pharmacologist from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

V. rigida’s ability to alter animal behavior intrigued Hamann, who reported in a 2008 study in the Journal of Natural Products that 5,6-dibromo-DMT acted like an antidepressant in rats, while 5-bromo-DMT acted like a sedative. Hamann says that related compounds may one day be isolated and might make for promising antidepressants, anxiety-reducing drugs or pain relievers in people.

Millions of years ago, giant volcanic eruptions in what’s now Turkey and Peru each deposited millions of metric tons of nitrate on the surrounding land. That nutrient may have come from volcanic lightning, researchers reported April 24 at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

The discovery adds evidence to the idea that, early in Earth’s history, volcanoes could have provided some of the materials that made it possible for life to emerge, says volcanologist Erwan Martin of Sorbonne University in Paris.

Nitrogen is an essential ingredient in biological molecules, such as proteins and DNA. It makes up about 78 percent of the atmosphere. But nitrogen molecules in the air consist of two tightly bound nitrogen atoms. Only when these atoms are separated will they react with other elements and create forms of nitrogen useful to life, such as nitrate (SN: 4/8/08).

Some microbes can tease apart the nitrogen molecules and provide “fixed nitrogen” to plants and fungi. Human chemists can do it too, creating fertilizer. But before life could start, some nonbiological process must have been at play.

Lightning is the obvious candidate, Martin says. These extremely energetic electric discharges can tear apart nitrogen atoms, which will combine with oxygen to form nitrogen oxides and eventually nitrate.

The lightning in thunderstorms, brought about by ice particles colliding and charging, separates nitrogen molecules every day, but at low rates and spread out over large areas. Volcanic plumes, in which dust particles do the colliding and charging, can provide localized lightning at staggering intensities. During one day of the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Indonesia, for instance, there were about 400,000 discharges (SN: 12/13/22).

Even that large amount of lightning creates a relatively small amount of nitrate. But rare, huge eruptions, of the kind that happen only every 100,000 years or so, could create much more. The idea that such events could produce and deposit a lot of nitrate is not new, Martin says, but until now nobody had actually looked at the nitrogen content of volcanic deposits from these eruptions.

His group sampled outcrops in Turkey and Peru linked to 10 explosive eruptions that happened between 20 million and 1 million years ago. Their locations’ relatively dry climate helps ensure that any nitrate formed long ago, which is soluble in water, would not have all leached out by now.

The nitrate that the researchers found turns out to contain oxygen atoms with different masses, in a proportion similar to that of the three oxygen atoms that make up each molecule of ozone in the air. This shows that the nitrates were formed in the atmosphere and not by some process on the ground, the team says.

Based on their sampling, the researchers estimate that each eruption on average deposited about 60 million tons of nitrate.

Life may have begun roughly 3.7 billion years ago, long before the eruptions that Martin and colleagues studied (SN: 3/1/17). But Earth’s early years were full of such extreme volcanism. Some researchers think that lightning over volcanic islands, in particular, played a role in the emergence of life, before even the continents were fully formed. On the young Earth, Martin says, similar amounts of nitrate as those estimated in the new study could have been produced on such islands, long since submerged.

The study’s concept is interesting, says marine chemist Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. But he thinks the researchers should have addressed the different composition of the atmosphere at the time that life first came on the scene.

“In today’s world, lightning on volcanic islands produces copious amounts of nitrogen oxides,” Bada says. “But in the early Earth, when the atmosphere had little oxygen in it, the product would have been probably ammonia.” Like nitrate, ammonia is a form of nitrogen that’s biologically usable.

But, Martin says, in a volcanic plume, there is a lot of water and other oxygen compounds coming from the magma, which could have supplied some of that oxygen. And in those early days, he says, “maybe it wasn’t nitrate but ammonia — it’s still nitrogen available for life. These are still things that need to be studied.”

Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the structure of DNA may have been different than previously believed. Franklin wasn’t the victim of data theft at the hands of James Watson and Francis Crick, say biographers of the famous duo. Instead, she collaborated and shared data with Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

Seventy years ago, a trio of scientific papers announcing the discovery of DNA’s double helix was published. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for the finding. Franklin, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer, died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded and was not eligible to be included.

Many people have been outraged by accounts that Watson and Crick used Franklin’s unpublished data without her knowledge or consent in making their model of DNA’s molecular structure. What’s more, Franklin supposedly did not understand the significance of an X-ray diffraction image, taken by her graduate student, that came to be known as Photograph 51. Wilkins showed the image to Watson, who is said to have instantly recognized it as proof that DNA forms a double helix. And the rest is history.

Except that history is wrong, say Watson and Crick biographers Nathaniel Comfort and Matthew Cobb. Cobb is a zoologist at the University of Manchester in England, and Comfort, of Johns Hopkins University, is a historian of science and medicine. They uncovered historical documents among Franklin’s papers that they say should change the view of her contribution to the discovery.

Among the documents was an unpublished article from Time magazine depicting Watson and Crick as a team collaborating with Franklin and Wilkins, who were working as a pair. Overlooked letters and a program from a presentation to the United Kingdom’s Royal Society reinforced the idea that Franklin was a willing colleague who understood her data. The researchers laid out their findings in a commentary in the April 27 Nature.

Cobb and Comfort talked with Science News about their new view of Franklin’s contributions. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

SN: Why did you decide to go through these documents?

Comfort: Matthew’s writing this biography of Crick, and I am writing a biography of Watson…. And we decided as a kind of pilgrimage to go and see the Franklin papers in person….

We weren’t expecting really anything other than just sort of a perfunctory visit when we sat down in this archive room together, and they pulled out the folders. We started going over them together, bouncing ideas back and forth saying, “Hey, what’s this?”

The sparks started flying, and that was when we found this magazine article from Time that was never published. It was a very rough draft that the author, named Joan Bruce, had sent to Franklin for fact-checking to make sure she got the science right.

Cobb: So what Nathaniel immediately picked up on in the Bruce article was the way that she presented the discovery. She presents it as being an equal piece of work — that the two groups, at King’s [College with Franklin and Wilkins] and at the Cavendish [Laboratory with Watson and Crick] in Cambridge, are effectively collaborating….

It’s not [the story] we’re used to hearing because the version we have is the dramatic Jim Watson version from his book The Double Helix: “Ha-ha! I stole their data!… Little did they know but I had it in my hands.” This is dramatic reconstruction.

Comfort: If it were this way [as in Bruce’s article], it actually gives the lie to Watson’s sensational account. And we know why — or at least I think I know why — Watson gave that sensational account.

The audience for The Double Helix was intended to be high school and college students who he wanted to get excited about science.… And I have lots of examples from that book where he stretches the truth, where he takes liberties, where he takes literary license. And I can show that as a pattern through the entire book. So it also fits with the style and tone of The Double Helix.

SN: Is there other evidence that Watson and Crick didn’t steal her data?

Cobb:  What we have separately done by looking in real detail at the records — the interviews that Crick did in the ’60s and so on — is we’ve been able to reconstruct the process that [Watson and Crick] went through. Which, if you read their papers really carefully, actually says quite explicitly that they engaged in what they called a process of trial and error. So they knew roughly the size of the crystal of the DNA molecule. They knew the atoms that should be in there from the density. So they tried to fit this stuff into this size using chemical rules.

Then there’s this report [on X-ray diffraction data] that was written by the King’s researchers, Franklin and Wilkins, as part of their funding from the Medical Research Council. It was shared with other laboratories, including the head of the laboratory in Cambridge, Max Perutz [Crick’s boss]. And this is all known, so we haven’t discovered this. Watson and Crick used some of the numbers in there from Franklin and Wilkins as a kind of check on their random walk-through of possible structures….

This still looks like kind of underhand, right? Because they’ve been given this semi-official document. Then two things happened. Firstly, if you read their documents, it’s quite clear that they do explain that they had access to this document, and that they used it as a check on their models. So this fact is acknowledged at the time….

We then stumbled upon a letter from a Ph.D. student who was at King’s College, called Pauline Cowan, who was a friend of Crick’s…. So Cowan writes this letter asking him for help with something completely uninteresting. Then she says in passing, “Franklin and Gosling” — that’s Franklin’s Ph.D. student who took Photograph 51 — “are giving a seminar on their data.” This is in January 1953. “You can come along if you want. Here’s the details. But they say that they’re not really going to go into much detail. It’s for the general lab audience, and Perutz knows all the results anyway. So you might not want to bother coming.”

In other words, Franklin knows that Watson and Crick will have access to this informal report, and she doesn’t care. It’s all, “Hey, if you want it, that’s fine.” So that then shifts the optic away from they got this surreptitious access to this MRC report. So we’re back to this collaborative [picture]. Franklin doesn’t seem to be too bothered.

And then the final element … we found a program of a Royal Society exhibition…. This is two months after the publication of the papers. [In the program] is a brief summary of the structure of DNA signed by everybody, presented by Franklin.

It was like a school science fair. She’s standing there in front of a model explaining it to everybody, and all their names are on it. So this isn’t a race that’s been won by Watson and Crick. I mean, they did get there first, don’t get us wrong. But it wasn’t seen that way at the time. They could not have done it without the data from Franklin. And Wilkins. And everybody — at least at this stage in 1953 — is accepting that and seems okay with it.

Just like the Joan Bruce article said. So this changes the mood, right? We’re moving away from the Hollywood thriller that Watson wrote, where he’s sneaked some data. That version is really exciting. It’s just not true. [We’re moving] to something that’s much more collaborative, modern in some respects, about sharing data.

Today, we focus on Franklin because we’re currently interested in equality, women’s oppression, and so on. We’re also obsessed with DNA. But people weren’t back then. DNA wasn’t then what it is now. [People might think] how could Franklin not have been livid? This was the secret of life and she had had it taken away from her. But it wasn’t and she didn’t.

SN: Did Franklin understand the importance of her data?

Cobb: Franklin was very skilled at being able to move DNA between two forms; what’s called the A form, which is the crystalline form which gives really precise images, and what’s called the B form. That form is what you get if there’s much more water around the molecule kind of pulling it into a different shape. And it was very clear from her notes that she thought that the B form was basically the loss of order, that it was disintegrating….

If you study the double helix story, there’s this this kind of enigma, because there are these two forms, A and B.  Franklin studies the A form … [but] it’s never been clear to anybody why she chose that form. And then we realized it’s because she’s a crystallographer. She’s a chemist. And if you’re a chemist, and you’re trying to find the crystalline structure of something, what are you going to look at? The crystal.

It’s easy in retrospect to get in a time machine and go back and whisper in her ear, “Hey, but what’s the inside of the cell like? It’s not very dry, you know. Maybe think about the other form.” But … you can’t do that. That’s against the rules….

Everybody who wants to favor Rosalind Franklin thinks that Watson and Crick were kind of sexist pigs who stole her data. The first bit of that description is probably accurate. The second bit isn’t. They certainly were pretty rude. But they did not steal the data.

This is the popular version of the story which we wanted to undermine. That this Photograph 51, which is the B form, is so striking that Watson, when he’s given a glimpse of it, can instantly realize its significance. According to the story he tells and people who are in favor of Franklin tell, this is the moment he steals her data.

But if you think about it for a minute, you think, “Well, why didn’t Franklin get it if it’s so obvious? This really smart woman who’s much smarter than Watson is about this aspect of science, but she doesn’t get it?” And the answer is very clear when you read her notes. She did get it and she didn’t care. She knew it was some kind of helix, but that was not the structure that interested her.

What [the popular story] does is it removes any agency from Franklin. People are inadvertently presenting her as a negative version, the version that Watson presents. She’s the heroine, but she hasn’t gotten it yet. Why hasn’t she got it? Well, the only implication is what Wilkins says; that she was stubborn and blinkered, which is just not true. So we’re trying to put her back at the center of the story, make her much more human than this harridan that Watson presents her as.

SN: Do we know if Franklin complained at the time about her data being stolen?

So after the double helix [discovery], Franklin and Wilkins never question Watson and Crick, “How did you do this?” They never fall out with them. They never have a row. They never write anything. Either they were stupid and never asked the question, or they knew [that the data were shared fairly].

Then in [19]54, for example, Franklin’s going to the East Coast to go to this meeting on the West Coast that Watson’s going to as well. And so she writes to Watson, “Dear Jim, I gather you’re getting a car across the states. Can I come with you?” So she tried to hitch a ride on a transcontinental car journey with this man who supposedly had stolen life’s secret from under her nose. That doesn’t make sense.

She was on collegial terms — I don’t think she liked him — but she was on collegial terms with Jim…. They had extensive correspondence because they were in the same area of viral structure.

In the last two or three years of her life, she became very good friends with Crick and with his wife. They went on holiday together in Spain after a conference. After she had her first two operations for ovarian cancer, she went to the Cricks to convalesce. She would send Crick her draft articles and ask his advice. So she clearly didn’t think he was a pig who was going to steal all of that data.

SN: So they were just much more chill about the whole thing?

Cobb: They were all much more chill. We look at this, one, through a feminist optic. We being the world. It’s an inverse version of The Double Helix. And, two, through the optic of what would it be like today to discover this? Clearly, you’d have competing labs, they would not talk to each other, and if one of them had these data, then they would behave exactly like Watson describes it.

But that was not the world of the 1950s. Partly because DNA was not DNA. It wasn’t clear that it was the genetic material [of life]. So it wasn’t a big deal.

On Franklin’s tomb there is no mention of DNA. What there is mention of is viruses.  Because that’s the practical work that she was engaged in when she died. She had worked out the structure of the polio virus. DNA wasn’t a practical thing for another 20 years. Whereas the structure the polio virus, maybe that could save lives.

The way we see her is not how she was seen at the time. She was very famous. She got a page obituary in Nature, obituaries in Britain’s the Times and the New York Times. So many of her American colleagues were utterly distraught when they discovered that she died [in 1958]. So you know, she was a very significant person, not just for DNA.

SN: Dr. Watson is still living. Have you spoken with him or anyone else who’s still around that could offer some insight?

Comfort: I’ve spoken with him many times, and he knows about this project. But he’s not in any [physical] shape right now to be able to comment on something like this. Believe me, I would love to, but it’s just not possible.

Art historians often wish that Renaissance painters could shell out secrets of the craft. Now, scientists may have cracked one using chemistry and physics.

Around the turn of the 15th century in Italy, oil-based paints replaced egg-based tempera paints as the dominant medium. During this transition, artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli also experimented with paints made from oil and egg (SN: 4/30/14). But it has been unclear how adding egg to oil paints may have affected the artwork.  

“Usually, when we think about art, not everybody thinks about the science which is behind it,” says chemical engineer Ophélie Ranquet of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

In the lab, Ranquet and colleagues whipped up two oil-egg recipes to compare with plain oil paint. One mixture contained fresh egg yolk mixed into oil paint, and had a similar consistency to mayonnaise. For the other blend, the scientists ground pigment into the yolk, dried it and mixed it with oil — a process the old masters might have used, according to the scant historical records that exist today. Each medium was subjected to a battery of tests that analyzed its mass, moisture, oxidation, heat capacity, drying time and more.

In both concoctions, the yolk’s proteins, phospholipids and antioxidants helped slow paint oxidation, which can cause paint to turn yellow over time, the team reports March 28 in Nature Communications. 

In the mayolike blend, the yolk created sturdy links between pigment particles, resulting in stiffer paint. Such consistency would have been ideal for techniques like impasto, a raised, thick style that adds texture to art. Egg additions also could have reduced wrinkling by creating a firmer paint consistency. Wrinkling sometimes happens with oil paints when the top layer dries faster than the paint underneath, and the dried film buckles over looser, still-wet paint.

The hybrid mediums have some less than eggs-ellent qualities, though. For instance, the eggy oil paint can take longer to dry. If paints were too yolky, Renaissance artists would have had to wait a long time to add the next layer, Ranquet says.

“The more we understand how artists select and manipulate their materials, the more we can appreciate what they’re doing, the creative process and the final product,” says Ken Sutherland, director of scientific research at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was not involved with the work.

Research on historical art mediums can not only aid art preservation efforts, Sutherland says, but also help people gain a deeper understanding of the artworks themselves.