Earlier this week we mentioned the MoMA exhibition ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘. One of the art works on show is (sorry: was) Oron Catt’s and Ionat Zurr’s ‘Victimless Leather’ a small ‘leather’ jacket made of stem cells on a polymer matrix. Was, because last week an exhibition curator pulled the plug on its life-support system, thus killing the project. ‘Victimless Leather’ was originally created to last at least until the exhibition close next Sunday. But it grew too fast, and since the artists were back in Australia the curator felt she had to kill it off. More details in The Art Newspaper and The Scientist).

Three reflections on the synthetic life conference in Roskilde in August.

First, it would be great to bring the science/art perspective into the discussion. Art works inspired by the idea of synthetic/artificial life forms (like Reiner Matysik‘s) will probably contribute to the production and circulation of popular doxa in the field, which will in turn speed up funding of the research effort.

Second, the Roskilde University based organising committe (Vincent F. Hendricks, Poul Holm, Frederik Stjernfelt, Anette Warring, Jeppe Dyre, Jacob Torfing, and John Gallagher) have backgrounds in philosophy, history, literary theory, physics, political science, and computer science—but nobody from the life sciences is taking part. Which raises the interesting question whether current research on synthetic life in general is actually advancing outside the framework of the life sciences?

Third reflection: if the synthetic life theme is pursued by computer scientists, nanoengineers and physical chemists, and is considered too ‘far out’ for mainstream life sciences, are we then actually witnessing a situation analogous to the rise of molecular biology 60-80 years ago? Historians of molecular biology have convincingly demonstrated that most biologists were oblivious to the questions raised by emergent molecular biology in the 1940s and 1950s, and that the coming of molecular biology (later molecular genetics, biotechnology etc) was to a large extent nurtured by people trained in physics. Is the synthetic life movement a kind of redux phage group?

Speaking of artificial organisms: the Roskilde Science Sunrise Conference 2008 (‘Surviving Ourselves: The Human Condition’) to be held at Roskilde University, Denmark, 13-15 August, will deal with the possible impact of the laboratory creation of primitive life and the possibility of genetic recreation of dead DNA (the Jurassic Park theme).

The organising committee is bringing in a group of specialists with profound knowledge about synthetic life and its social, ethical etc. consequences. Speakers include Mark Bedau (Reed University, currently at ProtoLife), David Deamer (who works on molecular self-assembly at UC Santa Cruz), Drew Endy (MIT pioneer in synthetic biology; see interview with him in Edge here), Gerald L. Epstein (who studies the consequences of bioterrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC), expert on synthetic life, P. Luigi Luisi (University of Rome), neuroscientist Donald W. Pfaff (Rockefeller University), Steen Rasmussen at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (SDU, Denmark), and Robert M. Friedman (Vice President for Public Policy, J. Craig Venter Institute).

On top of this stellar crew, the organising committee is expecting a number of additional 35 min. presentations on the theme. Send 150-250 abstracts before 1 June (online submission here). More info on http://sunrise.ruc.dk/. Great initiative!

Today, Reiner Matysik’s exhibition ‘Biofakte–Organismen der Zukunft’ [Biofacts-Organisms of the Future] opens in Bonn. When I wrote about the project in an earlier post in February, I thought the Bionten were small creatures, the size of a walnut or something:

And then Reiner sent me this photo from the installation work — they are huge!

(couldn’t get through the doors to our exhibition space). This could be a great show at the National Natural History Museum here in Copenhagen (maybe they’ve already arranged to show it?).

I must admit I’ve never paid much attention to chemical compound packages. But, of course, when you think about it — there they are, lots of variegatedly coloured bottles and plastic containers stacked on the shelves behind more fancy and eye-catching instruments and displays. A pedestrian, infrastructural backdrop to the more sophisticated scenery on the bench.

I thought about them, because one of my favourite science blogs — Derek Lowe’s well-written, professional, insightful (and almost daily updated) In the Pipeline (see earlier enthusiastic review here) — describes the different kinds of packages that arrive in his pharma lab. For example, the Japanese company TCI

sends a lot of its compounds in normal-looking glass bottles, but these are first put inside capped plastic containers, like larger translucent versions of the ones that 35mm film probably still comes in.

Maybridge, on the other hand, sends their compounds in

these weird little squat brown-glass bottles with small black caps on them. They must have the world supply of that particular bottle shape tied up, since I’ve never seen one anywhere else.

And so on and so forth. Collecting lab artefacts will never be the same again.

It looks like microarray patterns are gradually replacing the DNA double helix as the central icon for biomedicine and the life sciences. For example, the new Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen—funded for a ten-year period with 600 mill. DKK (~120 mill. USD) by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and fully operative some time in 2009—has just presented their logo:

thereby adding to the growing iconicity of microarrays, the new wonder tool of life science research. Martha de Menezes famously turned it into art a couple of years ago, we put it as a wall-paper on our blog about a year ago, and many others are beginning to employ the dotted pattern as an icon of the power of bioinformatics and systems biology in the life-sciences.

This particular logo has been worked out in co-operation between Søren Brunak, Michael Sundström and L. N. Jørgensen at the Center together with a graphical design company (‘daugbjerg + lassen’, which I cannot find on Google). Read more in the Center’s last newsletter.

Actually it’s more readable when it’s downsized!

Last year, Phillip Warnell (who made the pill camera installation which Jan Eric has reported about in an earlier post) went to Moscow to meet Natasha Demkina, one of the most famous contemporary medical clairvoyants and media darlings (aka The Girl with X-ray Eyes).

Now Phillips’ film of her scrutinising his body with her purported extra-ordinary ability will be premiered at Warwick Arts Centre on Thursday at 6pm.

After the film, lit crit theoretician Steven Connor will talk on the popular fantasy of acquiring x-ray vision, followed in turn by a showing of Werner Herzog‘s documentary on mystical and shamanic traditions in Russia, Glocken aus der Tiefe: Glaube und Aberglaube in Russland [Bells from the Deep, 2005]. Plenty of vodka will of course be available during the event.

For another critical report on Demkina’s abilities, see here.

For more than a century, buttons (and badges and pins) have been carried to signal political or ideological allegiance. The appearance of a button tells us (to use Hegelian jargon) that a group of people an sich is becoming a movement or subculture für sich. If you have a political case to make, then produce a button.

Here’s the first example I’ve found of biomedical buttons. The folks behind easternblot are selling these buttons with the blog’s erlenmeyer flask logo. They are made in two colours — not simply red and blue, of course, but ‘Ponceau S Red’ and ‘Bromophenol Blue’:

Easternblot say they have received “a great response from scientists and non-scientists, from children and adults, from button-fanatics and button-novices”.

A must in any exhibition about the culture of contemporary biomedicine. Can be ordered here (wonder if they give a bulk discount if we would like to fill a whole wall?)

I’ve promised to write a chapter with the provisional title ‘Biomedical curating and the participatory web’ for our planned joint project anthology with the (also provisional) title Curating Biomedicine: Collecting, writing and displaying contemporary medicine. Here’s the abstract of the chapter (to be included in the book proposal; we haven’t found a publisher yet):

For more than a decade, museums in general have been exploiting the Internet for making their collections and exhibition available online. In the last 4-5 years museums have also begun to explore the potentials of the participatory web (web 2.0) for drawing users more actively into the production of the heritage. In this chapter I will explore, one the one hand, how museums actively promote the use of the participatory web for curating purposes, and, on the other hand how the increasing online availablility of iconographic and textual information about artefacts (both physical artefacts, images and documents) on user-driven websites (blogs, flickr, etc) provides an extra-mural source of curated objects. In addition, the chapter will also explore the vast resources of curated artefacts that are avaliable through traditional websites, including product catalogues of medicotechnical companies. The chapter will 1) give a state-of-the art overview over the variety of ways in which biomedical objects are represented on the web, 2) discuss the potentials of the participatory web for turning the curation of biomedicine into a more dialogical process between professional curators and amateurs (scientists, engineers, medical doctors), and 3) discuss the prospects for a synergy between museums and the web with respect to curating contemporary medical objects vs. a possible conflict between web-based curating and traditional curating procedures in medical museums.

Science and medical blogs will of course loom large in this chapter. So, in the next of couple of weeks I will post some examples of blogs and other kinds of user-driven websites that display biomedical objects. Ideally, the accumulated posts will then add up to the final chapter — don’t hesitate to engage in a critical discussion of my rambling thoughts. 

If you are interested in seeing examples of how design and art orient themselves towards science (incl. biomedical science and bioinformatics) you can visit Museum of Modern Art’s supersmart on-line exhibition ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’. The exhibition is currently on show at MoMA in New York City (closes next Wed), but the online version will probaly be up for a while. Among other things it has a central piece by Ben Fry who visited us here in Copenhagen last August.