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For this week’s Culture Friday, Jenny Rohn tells us what it was like to rap with Baba Brinkman.

The intersection of science and art is an uncertain landscape, treading a fine line between asthetics, entertainment, education and outreach. Scoring high marks in all four is a rare success – and its failures can make you cringe. Baba Brinkman, a science-inspired rapper from Vancouver, definitely falls into the former category. Despite his Masters degree in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature, and his ten-year stint as a professional tree-planter in the Rocky Mountains, Brinkman has a keen interest in science. His penultimate album The Rap Guide To Evolution is a hip-hop celebration of evolutionary biology, his performance of which received the Scotsman Fringe First award at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival. His most recent project delves further into evolution by examining the science behind human nature.

When I first heard that my band Frank-a-delic – an amateur group of gracefully aging scientists, ex-scientists, journal editors and assorted other geeks – was going to share a stage with Brinkman at our next London gig, and was even planning on doing a few numbers together, I was intrigued and nervous in equal measures. We are a 17-piece funk/cabaret covers band and, with our ecclesiastical cross-dressing theme, about as far from hip-hop as you can get. More worryingly, Brinkman’s busy touring schedule offered no chance to actually rehearse together until the sound check on the night.

So we labored away in uncertainty, listening to his albums and trying to arrange the best possible accompaniment to “She’s Ovulating”. This track attempts to explain why, in an animal kingdom full of frank oestrus, human females conceal their state of fertility to maximize fitness. The song has laugh-out-loud humor, yet still manages to be amazingly comprehensive in its explanation of the phenomenon. Not surprising perhaps, considering that he famously got the entire album peer-reviewed by an expert in America. Clever lyrics such as “She’s ovulating: if she was a stripper/I wouldn’t know why but I’d prob’ly wanna tip her”, or “You’re so deceitful, I don’t believe it/ It’s like you have a biological non-disclosure agreement” set out the arguments and make you think about them in a new, personal light.

What did it feel like to be onstage with the man himself? Brinkman was loaded with charisma, and very patient with our band’s shortcomings. I do confess that it was quite difficult remembering which notes to play on the keyboard when he kept looking me straight in the eye while delivering lines such as: “‘Cause you don’t make it simple like a chimp, no!/ You could have evolved a pink swollen genital symbol”.

I kept wanting to apologize for my entire gender.

Dr Jennifer Rohn is a cell biologist at University College London. Jenny coined the term ‘lab lit’ to describe novels that depict real science and scientists, and is the driving force behind the Science is Vital campaign to save public funding of science in the UK.