Unit 6 - BioTech and Art

This week, we learned about artists entering the laboratory, and experimenting with live beings to create incredible and controversial works of art. The issue of life is a complicated one, bleeding other issues like morals, ethics, religion, and sociology. Even though this topic has made the news many times, before engaging in this material I hadn't really formed a lot of opinions about biotechnology and its future for our society.

Alba, the "GFP" Bunny

One of the most fascinating and ground-breaking experiments that I learned about was the genetically modified albino rabbit, Alba. She was implanted with genomes from a fluorescent jellyfish using zygote micro-injection by Eduardo Kac, the artist who is also her owner. One of his hopes for the GFP Bunny project is to engage in the "examination of the notions of normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, hybridity, and otherness." I found it incredible that life multiplies itself and that we can depend on it to spread throughout the organism, like the GFP-injected cells did in Alba, and this project actually made me question these issues. One interesting thing about Alba is that she does appear to be a "normal" albino rabbit, but under the right light she turns a fluorescent green. So, she masquerades as a generally accepted rabbit in regular light, but is of the "other" in reality. 

One of the most obvious concerns with genetically modifying live beings is their right to a healthy life, which is what I'm principally concerned with. In the case of Alba, Kac explains, "contrary to popular notions of the alleged monstrosity of genetically engineered organisms, her body shape and coloration are exactly of the same kind we ordinarily find in albino rabbits. Unaware that Alba is a glowing bunny, it is impossible for anyone to notice anything unusual about her. Therefore Alba undermines any ascription of alterity predicated on morphology and behavioral traits." It seems that Alba lived an average life for an albino rabbit, and only experienced differences when she was under special lighting, and I feel that this is how these experiments should be done.

Marta de Menezes' controversial work on butterflies is pictured above

In a similar artistic experiment, we can look at Marta de Menezes' work with butterflies. She was a resident of SymbioticA, an artistic laboratory at the University of Western Australia, and she created butterflies with different wing patterns than you would find in nature. The problem arose when it was discovered that they had holes in their wings, and this is where my issues with biotech arise. When people frivolously alter an animal, with real consequences to its health and well-being, that is cruel and problematic. Animals are not to be toyed with, and unless the artist can be sure that there won't be serious negative effects on the animals health, I believe they should not experiment with the animal.

I was also interested in Natalie Jeremijenko's TED Talk on her lab at NYU and her explanation of her clinic for environmental concerns. Her experiment with beurocrat-assigned tadpoles was comical and socially-engaging, and I thought it was a good way to see what the water quality is and to engage people in conversations as they "walk" their tadpoles. There was also and experiment where mice self-administered drugs like Zoloft and Prozac, and drank alcohol because of the social factors that led people to do the same. I'm not quite sure what that means because the mice don't really know what they're doing, but people do. In any case, I felt that her projects expertly spanned the gap between engaging society with artistic projects and caused people to talk about these meaningful issues.

I believe that artists should be able to express themselves in any way that doesn't infringe upon the freedoms of others, and that is the concern with the future of biotechnology and art. In an article from the NCBI, they state "This issue [of human safety] has generated considerable debate since 1999, when 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died while participating in a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. The institution was widely criticized for failing to disclose crucial information on informed consent documents, relaxing criteria for accepting volunteers, and enrolling volunteers who were ineligible." Obviously, when humans are involved in any sort of genetic testing, we need to be extremely careful and I feel that there needs to be a lot of oversight and many opinions being voiced in the experiment  In Kelty's article about the future of BioTech, he posits, "Safe biology is implicitly one regulated by the state and the legitimate organizations of science, and so an unregulated biology is an outlaw biology. This makes DIY Chemistry, or "clandestine chemistry" (where individuals synthesize illegal and legal drugs using federally regulated chemical pre-cursors) simply criminal biology, not outlaw biology." Overall, since biotechnology has an impactful future both in its scientific and artistic pursuits, it needs to have a lot of oversight, in order to protect both the people and animals involved.

Citations

De Menezes, Marta. "Nature?" Projects: Nature? Marta De Menezes, 2002. Web. 08 May 2015.

Jeremijenko, Natalie. "The Art of the Eco-Mindshift." Natalie Jeremijenko: The Art of the Eco-mindshift. TED Talks, Oct. 2009. Web. 08 May 2015.

Kac, Eduardo. "GFP BUNNY." GFP BUNNY. N.p., 2000. Web. 08 May 2015.

Kelty, Christopher M. "Outlaw, Hackers, Victorian Amateurs: Diagnosing Public Participation in the Life Sciences Today." Journal of Science Communication (2010): 1-8. Desminopathy. Desminopathy, Mar. 2010. Web. 8 May 2015.

Philipkoski, Kristen. "RIP: Alba, the Glowing Bunny." WIRED. WIRED Magazine, 12 Aug. 2002. Web. 8 May 2015.

Silverman, Ed. "The 5 Most Pressing Ethical Issues in Biotech Medicine." Biotechnology Healthcare. BioCommunications LLC, Dec. 2004. Web. 08 May 2015.

"SymbioticA: Marta De Menezes." SymbioticA. University of Western Australia, n.d. Web. 8 May 2015.

Vesna, Victoria. "5 Bioart Pt1 1280x720." YouTube. UC Online, 8 Sept. 2013. Web. 08 May 2015.

Vesna, Victoria. "5 Bioart Pt2 1280x720." YouTube. UC Online, 17 May 2012. Web. 08 May 2015.