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The holiday season is always a big time for book sales.  

Scott Wood, Ph.D., director of the Portland Laboratory for Biotechnology and Health Sciences at the 91ֱ����Ƶ, can recommend two children’s books that celebrate the confluence of science and Indigenous wisdom, an important topic in a state rich with Native communities.  

In 2024, using grants from the National Science Foundation, Wood co-authored two children’s books that, together, tell the story of the connection between drumbeats and the cellular "dance" that naturally occurs in our bodies. With co-author Jessie Taken Alive-Rencountre, a Hunkpapa Lakota and educator from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Wood wrote “The Healing Drumbeat” and "Zaniya and the Healing Drum: Where Indigenous Knowledge and Scientific Discovery Meet.”  

The collaboration bridges two ways of understanding healing: one rooted in molecular biology and the other in generations of Indigenous knowledge.  

The books, illustrated by artist Erin Walker Jensen, tell of Thunder Beings, powwows, ancestral connections, arthritis, and biomedical engineers, as the rhyming, rhythmic, whimsical tale explains a young boy’s love for his grandparents, cultural tradition, “and the harmony of old and new.”  

The joyful storyline also offers young readers a window into how different forms of knowledge can illuminate the same fundamental questions about health, movement, and healing.  

“There’s kind of this universally held belief in Indigenous cultures worldwide that there is a connection between drums and dancing and human health. Meanwhile, (in science) we're trying to understand the dance of the cells at the molecular level and find a way to, hopefully, someday be able to teach them to dance again,” Wood said.

Wood noted that cells can lose this ability to “dance” in diseases like osteoarthritis, a type of arthritis that develops with age or injury that Wood studies in detail as an associate professor in UNE’s Department of Biomedical Sciences, housed within UNE’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, Maine’s only medical school.

“These children's books really are tying that cultural concept with our scientific data,” Wood said.

The project represents an unusual extension of Wood's research, which includes developing laboratory platforms for studying arthritis, investigating how cells respond to mechanical stress, and exploring potential therapeutic approaches. Wood holds patents for cell culture technologies and leads federally funded research projects, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on how cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, such as pressure, stretching, or movement. 

As Wood describes it, his research focuses on understanding how cells behave like memory foam, a property scientists call viscoelasticity. When you push on memory foam and hold it, the resistance fades. But if you keep pushing repeatedly, it maintains resistance.  

Cells work exactly the same way, Wood explained. His lab measures the motion of chondrocytes, the cells found in cartilage, comparing healthy cells to those affected by disease. 

"We think that the motion of the cells is maintaining a mechanical environment inside of the cells that regulates their health and whether or not you get arthritis," Wood said. 

When his research team discovered that arthritic cells move less than healthy ones — suggesting that cellular motion plays a critical role in joint health — his team did something unexpected: they turned the data into drumbeats. To make sense of the motion patterns, Wood’s lab wrote Python scripts, a computer programming language, that converted the cellular movement data into audio files that replicated the sound of drums. 

Wood realized that the scientific discovery intersected with a belief held across Indigenous cultures worldwide that drums, dancing, and human health are interconnected. Shortly after, he collaborated with Taken Alive-Rencountre on the books aimed at inspiring young readers to learn more about Indigenous culture and its connections with cutting-edge science, and to consider pursuing a future career in biomedical engineering as one way to bridge the two in their own lives.  

Wood and Taken Alive-Rencountre created two versions of the same story: One designed for young children and a second for older children, who can read on their own. The books were created to inspire children to explore science, but Wood said they’ve also inspired him in his cellular research. 

“If we could teach the cells to dance again, I mean, what kind of healing could we bring with that?” Wood said. 

The books are available through Amazon. Wood also keeps copies in his office on UNE's Portland Campus for the Health Sciences, where his laboratory continues investigating the mechanical biology of cells and developing new approaches to understanding and potentially treating arthritis.