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Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and researcher. I first met her while she was finishing her MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art last Summer. The work she was exhibiting at the final show, The Synthetic Kingdom, explored how design could contribute to a field that most of us find a bit intimidating and distant from our daily preoccupations: synthetic biology. Among Daisy's latest activities are a residency she recently completed at SymbioticA, a collaboration with James King and Cambridge University's iGEM 2009 grand-prizewinning team and then there's Synthetic Aesthetics. This project investigates shared territory between design and synthetic biology, invites exchange of existing skills and approaches, and makes possible the development of new forms of craft and collaboration. Synthetic Aesthetics is now offering 12 residencies as 6 exchanges anywhere in the world, exploring what design and art have to offer to synthetic biology, and the other way round... And because Daisy and i agree that the residencies shouldn't be left solely in the hands of the usual suspects (i.e. the RCA alumni), i asked her to give us more details about Synthetic Aesthetics.
Synthetic biology is a bit of a daunting area of research. It seems to be highly technical and almost too abstract. How much background in Synthetic Biology would the designers and artists who apply for the residency need? Synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to biology - living matter has become a new material for engineering, a new technology for design and construction. The promise is that we can simplify the way we engineer life, making it predictable and useful (though biology's complexity still challenges us, for now). The discussions today are creating a framework that could influence biology and nature for generations to come. The deeper I get, the more fascinating and complex it becomes and the faster the field is evolving. For the last two years I have been engaging with the construction of this potential future and the ethical implications it presents. My RCA projects, The Synthetic Kingdom - a proposal for a new branch of the Tree of Life - and Growth Assembly, with Sascha Pohflepp, investigate this (both currently on show in the Wellcome Trust's windows).
The principles behind synthetic biology are straightforward: standardization, abstraction and modularity. Synthetic Aesthetics is not looking for designers or artists necessarily expert in genetics, rather, how might design and art work in dialogue with the evolving science? We're interested in the overlaps between synthetic biology and design, the ways that we can explore and interrogate science, opening up new thought areas and processes. We're asking: how would you design nature? Synthetic biology is multi-disciplinary, from computer scientists to mechanical engineers. As design advisor with James King to the 2009 Cambridge University iGEM competition team (International Genetically Engineered Machines), we joined undergraduates in Maths, Physics, Engineering and other subjects in a two-week synbio crash course last July. After this introduction, the team began designing using synthetic biology. After ten weeks, they had made E.coli that secrete many different colours visible to the naked eye, which we named E.chromi. We experimented with ways design can help science innovate, using design methods of narrative and design workshops to help the team engage with the bigger picture - the social, cultural and ethical consequences of their research. Cambridge went on to win iGEM out of 120 teams and 1500 students! We want to introduce molecular scientists and engineers to creative design processes, while inducting artists, designers and others to the ideas of rapid prototyping of biology, lab craft, and tools for designing living systems. We're used to artists going into labs, but not the other way round. We hope tangible projects come out of the six exchanges; collaborations that extend beyond the four weeks the twelve participants spend in each other's workspaces. The outcome may be an object, writing, an installation, a protocol, a new kind bacteria or something entirely different that we don't have a precedent for yet. We hope to exhibit these.
The work James and I did with the Cambridge iGEM team hints as to where this might go. Questioning what biological computing might actually look like, we designed the Scatalog, a proposal for cheap, personalized disease monitoring based on the team's work. In 2049, E.chromi is drunk like Yakult. Though technologically long possible, it is finally culturally acceptable to ingest engineered bacteria. E.chromi live in the gut, quietly monitoring for disease. When they detect something alarming, they secrete a pigment, easily monitored in poo. We took a suitcase - the Scatalog - filled with stool samples to iGEM, asking the people designing these promised technologies to think about what they might actually look like.
I'm very interested in the Synthetic Biology protocol you designed for SymbioticA. Can you tell us something about the outcome of your residency there? The first resident at SymbioticA to work with synthetic biology, I was faced with a challenge. Synthetic biology hasn't quite hit the University of Western Australia, instead I found myself promoting it to scientists and triggering beginnings. Suddenly, I was a proponent rather than an observer, which was ethically challenging for me. I found a group in Plant Energy Biology doing related research and worked with geneticist Sandra Tanz, learning and assisting with her protocols. While I would describe her work as synbio, she doesn't as yet. Synthetic biology is the current buzzword, once the hype dies down, hopefully the research will continue. At SymbioticA, I tried to learn as much molecular biology as possible. After three months in an institutional lab setting - free of the challenges that face DIYbio-ers - could I progress to work on my own scientific research? Could it ever be useful? Can designing wet systems provide greater insight into the issues that synthetic biology presents us? The Cambridge iGEM team made a significant foundational offering in just ten weeks, no longer novices; they are certainly synthetic biologists. As a non-scientist with limited expertise, at what point in the design process can you describe yourself as such? What is different between this kind of design practice and bio art? Using the term 'designer' rather than 'artist' brings different responsibility. While it should be possible for me to design a simple system at SymbioticA (and I intend to) I want to better understand its repercussions.
Apart from helping scientists communicate their work, what can design and art do for synthetic biology? That's what we want to learn! Synthetic Aesthetics isn't about public engagement or trying to make synthetic biology acceptable, rather to explore what synthetic biology can be. By adding the human-scale expertise of designers and artists to molecular scale science, can collaborations inform and shape a developing field?
Growth Assembly, the project that you developed together with Sascha Pohflepp, seems like a far-fetch idea. yet, it is inspired by scientific research. Can you tell us something about the theory and research behind it? We were thinking about manufacturing post oil crisis and what synthetic biology might offer this future. Jim Haseloff at Cambridge University works with plants, not bacteria, researching morphogenesis - the way plants grow - with the aim of one day controlling it. He suggested that, "one day we may be able to grow products inside plants." We started to think how softness and diversity may change the way we understand manufacturing and industrial standards. We sent a call out for illustrators to draw a plant from the future, and luckily found Sion Ap Tomas, new to botanical illustrations, whose interpretation inspired us. Many interesting discussions ensued, keeping in mind Jim's comments about gravity, cell differentiation and plant morphology! While far future, it is interesting to see synthetic biologists using our fiction of an herbicide sprayer grown and assembled from seven plants (intended to protect this new, engineered nature) to illustrate their hopes for the field. Thanks Daisy! The deadline to submit your application documents for the Synthetic Aesthetic residencies (6 artists/designers, 6 scientists/engineers) is 31st March 2010. |
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Acoustic Botany, by David Benqué, extracts Synthetic Biology and Genetic Engineering from the usual context of health care, food and environment and examines instead the role they could play in the sphere of culture and entertainment.
Acoustic Botany, the project for a "genetically engineered sound garden", seeks to find new ways of imagining the nature of tomorrow (will we still call it 'nature'?), where engineered species of plants, insects and animals interact within a composed ecosystem and create a new form of musical performance. Benqué visited the Plant Sciences department in Cambridge, and researched botany in his own to find existing species from which to extrapolate, and the ideas for this work in progress developed from there. A few examples:
String Nut contains inside a fibrous pulp, which is eaten away by bugs engineered to chew in rhythm. They enter the fruit by the holes in the shell and remain inside until they have eating everything but the few stronger fibers. Left standing inside an empty shell, the fibers are like resonating strings. It should take a couple of days until the remaining strings finally snap and release the nut to the ground, where the seed can sprout.
Giant Speaker Lily is inspired by an actual species. The flower at the center of the 3 meter leaf captures bugs to coat them in pollen for 24 hours before it dies. During that time, the plant amplifies the vibrations of the bug through a membrane tensed over the leaf, becoming a giant monotone speaker.
The Popping Pod Fruit is made from little capsules which fill with air and bacteria as they mature. When ready, the seed is dispersed by the explosion of the capsule. The popping season could be a carefully orchestrated over 2 months with periods of activity more intense than others. I discovered Acoustic Botany at the Design Interactions work in progress show, Royal College of Art, London. I'm looking forward to see how his ideas will grow until the Summer show at the RCA: "This is indeed one of the projects I will be developing for the final show," explains Benqué. "I aim to make it more of an experience, with sound and bigger models, to engage the audience more directly. I would also like to have a small book with diagrams and illustrations, going into more detail about the different species, as well as the ecosystem that ties them together." The designer imagines that the soundtrack would be more composed and harmonic than the nature sounds we know, but it wouldn't be as controlled as 'music' either because of the unknown factors that plant growth almost inevitably brings. All images courtesy David Benqué. Also part of the show were The Gesundheit Radio and Crowbot Jenny. |
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First the usual warning: i don't do announcements and i don't copy/paste PR material but i also like to find exceptions to the rule. Ulla Taipale who runs Capsula, a unique programme about the intersection of art, science and nature, has set up a fantastic series of talks, workshops and field trips called Herbologies/Foraging Networks together with Andrew Gryf Paterson and Signe Pucena. The sessions are kicking out next month during the Pixelache festival (btw, check out their ongoing call for applications.) Now comes the copy-paste party!
The Herbologies/Foraging Networks programme of events, focused in Helsinki (Finland) and Kurzeme region of Latvia, explores the cultural traditions and knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants, within the contemporary context of online networks, open information-sharing, biological and hydroponic technologies. The traditions of finding and knowing about wild food in the local Nordic environment are slipping away from the current generation. How can one attract their attention? With books, online maps, workshops, mobile-guided tours, open-source information or DNA code? Or learn how to grow them yourself, over the dark winter months?
The Pixelache Festival events introduce the different meeting points between the three collaborating partners, including seminar presentations by international artists and Finnish botanical experts; workshops sharing that knowledge with the public; a round-table discussion about foraging in the urban context; and a localised manifestation of the Windowfarms Project (US).
Following, in a pre-midsummer expedition to rural Rucava in Kurzeme, Western Latvia, SERDE Interdisciplinary Art Group will lead fieldwork to learn about the cultural heritage of Balts using wild plants, and create documents for the younger 'digital native' generation. Initiators and organisers: Andrew Paterson (SCO/FI), Ulla Taipale / Capsula (FI/ES) and Signe Pucena / SERDE (LV) PIXELACHE PROGRAMME OF EVENTS As part of Pixelversity. Saturday-Sunday 20-21.2.2010, Kiasma 'taka-ikkuna', 12.00-18.00. Participate in Windowfarms Finland Participatory workshop open for people to attend (as part of Pixelversity). Construction led by Mikko Laajola (FI), Niko Punin (FI), Andrew Gryf Paterson (SCO/FI), Ulla Taipale (FI) + other enthusiasts. As part of Pixelache Helsinki Festival. Friday 26.3.2010, Kerava Art Museum (Camp Pixelache), time to be confirmed. Contribution to DIY/Bio-tech/Open-source Hardware themes with short presentation by Niko Punin (FI) of 'LetsGrowIt' and remote/recorded presentation by Britta Riley (US) about the Windowfarms Project. Saturday 27.3.2010, Kiasma Seminar Room, 13.00-16.45. Herbologies/Foraging Networks Seminar Introduction to full Herbologies/Foraging Networks programme (10mins) *Cultural Heritage* (50mins)
*Urban Space* (1hr 15 mins) *Information & Sharing* (1hr 30 mins) Saturday 27.3.2010, Kiasma Seminar Room, 17.30-18.30.
VivoArts Workshop with Adam Zaretsky (US) American bio-artist Adam Zaretsky will lead a performative workshop inviting to get involved with plant DNA using DIY methods and household implements. Sunday 28.3.2010, Botanical Garden Kaisaniemi (Linkola & Elfving Rooms), 11.00-14.00. Herbologies Workshops Wild plant expert Ossi Kakko (FI) and artist-producer Signe Pucena (LV) will share traditional methods for processing herbs through fermentation (villivihannesten hapatuskurssi) and vodka tincture-making respectively. Sunday 28.3.2010, Kiasma 'taka-ikkuna', 18.00-19.00. Windowfarms Project Closing Dismantling event with music. MIDSUMMER EXPEDITION TO KURZEME, LATVIA In collaboration with Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts SERDE (LV), Expedition to Rucava, June 20-25, 2010. An expedition of fieldwork will take place in Rucava, Kurzeme region, building upon SERDE's experience of engaging cultural heritage subjects as an arts organisation. Here the Herbologies/Foraging Networks project aims to preserve and document traditional cultural values related to herb-gathering in Latvia, promoting and developing a more diverse society than the traditional understanding of the cultural manifestations of the past and today, the identification and assignment needs. Several persons from the assembled network: Kultivator (SE), Klaipeda Cultural Communication Centre (LT), Ossi Kakko (FI) as well as coordinators Andrew Gryf Paterson (SCO/FI) and Ulla Taipale (FI), are invited to Latvia from Sweden, Finland and Lithuania, along with Latvian experts, cultural workers and other documenters. 'Documentation Sprint', SERDE Art Residency Centre, Aizpute, June 26-30 2010. Using a method from extreme software development and project management, 'Sprints' produce collectively-made artefacts (software, manuals, etc.) quickly over a set period of time. In this case, several of the key invited collaborators will be invited to stay longer, to write up the fieldwork in the form of stories, charts, manuals, recipies, reports, diagrams, and process media or data. Several information and media experts will be invited from Riga to help with the process, as well as nomination of persons who would translate as much textual content as possible into the different regional languages (Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Finnish, Swedish, English). The ambition of the sprint will be to make a proof layout of a new 'Traditional Booklet', published by SERDE, and online documentation, to be ready in September 2010. Expressions of interest to join the expedition should be sent to herbologies [-at-] pixelache.ac by 30th April 2010.
The programme is supported by an Art and Culture Production grant from Kultur Kontakt Nord, AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture) and the Austrian Embassy in Helsinki. Previously: Interview with Ulla Taipale from Capsula, Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop. Photo on the homepage: Big Window Farm at Eyebeam. |
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One of the rules of this blog is never to make announcements of events. Every rule comes with its exceptions... The November programme of the VASTAL workshops and lectures is out! The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. is Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society's temporary research and education institute on Art and Life Sciences. It's free, open to the public and i hope you'll allow me to remind you how much we enjoy them: Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop Wednesday 11 November Body Art Lecture with performance artists: Kira O'Reilly, WARBEAR, Jeanette Groenendaal and Boryana Rossa. Thursday 12 November and Saturday 14 November Body Art Lab which, i'm told, will involve blood and sex performances in the Glove Box. "Various performance artists will be ritually cleansed and enter the glove box one or two at a time. Various performance artists take turns in the box interacting with the public or other actors reaching into them with the gloves. This is experimental Body Art with a biological theme that references experiments, lab animals, the pure and the impure as well as the distance (or presumed distance) that objectivity implies. " The Vivoarts Performance in the Glove Box, is a Mason Juday and Adam Zaretsky Production and will feature Boryana Rossa, Oleg Mavromatti, Zoot Derks, Jeanette Groenendaal and WarBear. Tuesday 17 November Animal Personality Art and Science Lecture and Lab with Dr. Kees van Oers or one of his colleagues and Koen Van Mechelen. Dr. Kees van Oers studies the genetic background, physiology and fitness consequences of variation in avian personality. In 2005 he obtained a personal VENI-grant to study the evolutionary genetics of personality using a linkage study in a natural population. This work is currently extended in collaboration with the Animal Breeding and Genomics Center in an NGI-grant on songbird genomics. Koen Vanmechelen is a Belgian conceptual artist whose work engages with issues of genetic manipulation, cloning, globalisation and multiculturalness. The artist is currently working on The Cosmopolitan Chicken project, an experiment to develop a super-hybrid chicken.
Koen Vanmechelen's The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project chickens will be installed from Nov 5 to Dec 6 at the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ in Amsterdam. Vanmechelen is also having his first solo exhibition in a U.S. gallery at Conner Contemporary Art in Washington. Featuring live chickens, the exhibition also includes taxidermy and blown-glass sculptures, video, and photography, as well as drawings and paintings in tempera made from eggs laid by chickens bred by the artist. |
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Tissue Culture Lab at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics (part 1) As promised yesterday here's a report on the Tissue Culture lab that took place on September 15 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd., the temporary research and education institute set up by Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society in Amsterdam.
The Tissue Culture Lab was headed by Oron Catts of the SymbioticA and Tissue Culture & Art Project fame. In this hands-on wet lab for public practical and experiential tissue culture technique, we isolated primary tissues (mostly bone marrow, muscle and HeLa cells) in a custom-made sterile hood and then incubated them separately from their original corporeal context. but more interestingly we got to face and discuss some of the ethical issues that accompany tissue culture and the process of working with life in general.
Ours was a very basic and rough approach to tissue culture. We performed some very mundane tasks: we learnt the art of "pipetting", we mixed antibiotics, trypsin and other ingredients to create a solution that would provide cells with a body similar to the one they come from. We got to don huge green gloves and manipulate knives and tweezers. The aim of the wet lab was not to have us run our own lab. The objective of the workshop was to present the general public with the technology and the dilemmas that accompanies it. A hands-on approach takes the technology beyond a strictly scientific approach and informs the debate on the ethical, cultural and social implication of tissue culture. What does it mean to work with living, semi-living or formely living beings? What does it mean to grow disembodied cells from a former organism? What's the meaning of tissue culture for artistic purposes versus health application? Or the development of a new weapon?
Amusingly, the whole operation took place under a reproduction of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson which graces the walls of Waag's Theatrum Anatomicum room. First we worked with a recently slaughtered goat then with the HeLa cells that Adam went to fetch in Leyden and brought back in a box filled with ice. As mentioned in my previous post, Henrietta Lacks' doctor removed cells from her cervix and provided Johns Hopkins University with a sample of these cancer cells. It happened in 1951 and the patient was never asked if she'd agree to that. The HeLa cell cultures survived and multiplied so well in culture, that they were soon being shipped to research labs around the world. In 1975, the family of Henrietta Lacks learned that her cells still lived, spread all over the world. The cells are controversial. Some people gained recognition for the papers they wrote and the research they made using the cells of this young black woman, other made money with her cells, they became mere commodities but her family was never consulted and they didn't received a cent. Because we were working with the cells taken from a woman who died of cervical cancer, some participants to the lab asked whether they were safe to use. Apparently they are ok. These cells have been used throughout the world for decades without anyone being infected by them.
The only known case of a continual line of cancer cells that had outlived its original host by year is the one affecting the Devil of Tasmania. The malignant cells are transmitted from one animal to another through bites, while feeding or mating. The disease apparently began with a single sick devil, probably in the mid-1990s, that directly spread the cancer cells by biting rivals in the face and around the mouth, which is natural devil behavior. Bits of tumor break off one devil and stick in the wounds of another.
During the workshop we also learned that very few cells seem to be able to grow very well without the blood plasma of a calf. The Tissue Culture and Art Project's famous Victimless Leather jacket was fed with that blood. The irony is thus that the project was not victimless at all. The same goes for the barely edible frog steaks that required the serum from two calves in order to grow. Technology is getting better at hiding cruelty. Catts gave the example of a trip that he and Ionat Zurr made to Spain where they observed that opposition to bullfighting had intensified, but Spanish people are eating more and more at McDonald's. Taxonomical crisis. What we see now in labs is life but not life we were used to. Linné's system is still used but it had to be modified. If life isn't the same anymore, neither is the notion of death. TC&AP performs killing rituals after they've exhibited a piece in a show. They would grow a living or rather 'semi-living' piece using parts of a dead animals, then they grow it, giving the public the feeling that the new entity is living. As a result, some people complain about the 'slaughter' of an entity that used to belong to a dead body. Wonder if anyone is still following me here? There are various ways to incubate the cells. You can either use an incubator:
Or your own body. No one was up for the fleshy option. Except Adam who got Oron Catts to tape the flask containing the cells on his thorax:
One might believe at first sight that making things out of living stuff would be more environmentally-friendly but it's not. Mostly because of the colossal amount of waste required by scientific practice. Take glass pipettes for example: they have to be washed several times, sterilized and individually packaged in plastic before they can be used again. Plastic used to replace glass is always wasteful because it has to be wrapped in plastic too and can only be used once before it is binned. Each day bags and bags of laboratory waste have to be incinerated. At the end of the workshop, Adam generously invited us to join a barbecue were we would eat the remains of the goat we had scavenged in search for living cells. I wonder if anyone had the appetite for it.
Next sessions of VASTAL labs and talks: November. We'll keep you posted on that one too! Previously: Image of the day, September programme of the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics and Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop. |
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A couple of week ago, i was back at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd., Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society's temporary research and education institute in Amsterdam.
On the menu that day was a Tissue Culture Lab headed by tissue engineering artist Oron Catts. Catts is the co-founder and Artistic Director of SymbioticA, the Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, UWA. He is also the founder, together with Ionat Zurr, of the Tissue Culture & Art Project. Wikipedia defines tissue culture as follows: the growth of tissues and/or cells separate from the organism. This is typically facilitated via use of a liquid, semi-solid, or solid growth medium, such as broth or agar. Tissue culture commonly refers to the culture of animal cells and tissues, while the more specific term plant tissue culture is used for plants. I'll come back to the hands-on wet lab in an upcoming post. For now, here are some notes i wrote down during a talk that Oron Catts gave to kick off the workshop. His presentation, which put our workshop into a historical narrative, was titled An alternative timeline for regenerative medicine - A biased history. As HG Wells wrote back in 1895, life is becoming something for us to engineer: 'We overlook only too often the fact that a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered.' HG Wells, 1895
In 1885, Wilhelm Roux removed a portion of the medullary plate of an embryonic chicken and maintained it in a warm saline solution for several days, establishing the principle of tissue culture. The first successful human transplant was a corneal transplant performed in 1905 by Eduard Zirm in Olomouc, Czech Republic. In 1907 zoologist Ross Harrison successfully perform the first partial life entity. He demonstrated the growth of frog nerve cell processes in a medium of clotted lymph. In 1913, surgeon, biologist and eugenicist Alexis Carrel grows cells in culture for long periods -fed regularly under aseptic conditions. In 1912, Carrel took tissue from the heart of a chicken embryo to demonstrate that warm-blooded cells could be kept alive in the lab. This tissue was kept alive for thirty-four years -- outliving Carrel himself -- before it was deliberately terminated. His experiments horrified his contemporaries. It has sometimes been said that his lab in Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research inspired Hollywood's Frankenstein. Interestingly, this practice of fragmenting the body and keeping the cells alive was called "Artificial Life" at the time. In 1913, Ross Harrison noted the epistemological contradictions regarding tissue culture: Eduard Uhlenhuth wrote in 1916 "Through the discovery of tissue culture we have so to speak created a new type of body on which to grow the cell."
The first premature baby wards in the US were part of a freak show called "Oddities of Life." From the 1910 till the 1930, tissue culture starts to be regarded as science by scientists. They start to see an utilitarian end to it, it's not just a curiosity anymore. 1948 saw the first animal cell line established (mouse). Those cells tcan be considered the oldest living parts of a mouse.
The cells were propagated by George Otto Gey without Lacks' knowledge or permission and later commercialized. There was no requirement to inform a patient, or their relatives, because discarded material, or material obtained during surgery, diagnosis or therapy was the property of the physician and/or medical institution. This issue and Ms. Lacks' situation was brought up in the Supreme Court of California in 1990 but the court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized. HeLa cells are termed "immortal" because they can divide an unlimited number of times in a laboratory cell culture plate. It has been estimated that the total number of HeLa cells that have been propagated in cell culture far exceeds the total number of cells that were actually in Henrietta Lacks' body. The cells traveled around the globe- even into space, on a satellite to determine whether human tissues could survive zero gravity- and have been used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa cells have been used to test human sensitivity to tape glue, cosmetics, and many other products (source.) Cell lines are usually dehumanized but the story goes that one night, a surgeon working with HeLa cells realized that he was working with a person's cell while he was having dinner with a relative of Henrietta. Neither Henrietta nor her family had given permission for the cell line. They wanted her contribution to science to be respected and her cells to be sort of 'rehumanised.'
1954, the field of tissue culture becomes more standardized. "I have sought to strip from the study of this subject its former atmosphere of mystery and complications. The grey walls, black gowns, masks and hoods; the shining twisted glass and pulsating coloured fluids; the gleaming stainless steel, hidden steam jets, enclosed microscopes and huge witches' cauldrons of the 'great' laboratories of 'tissue culture' have led far too many persons to consider cell culture too abstruse, recondite and sacrosanct a field to be invaded by mere hoi polio." P.R White, The cultivation of animal and plant cells, New York, Ronalds Press 1954. Joseph Murray performed the first successful transplant, a kidney transplant between identical twins, in 1954.
1978, Louise Brown, the world's first baby to be conceived by in vitro fertilisation. Publication of Langer, R & Vacanti JP, Tissue engineering. Science 260, 920-6; 1993.
We are becoming salamanders: our bodies can repair themselves and regrow lost parts using their own resources. In the '80s, repairing the body was more mechanical, people would picture prosthetic limbs, heart pumps and mechanical organs. 10 years later, the image is the one of a body that relies on cells that have been engineered into 3D objects. Previously: Image of the day, September programme of the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics and Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop. |
