Bio‐art

Abstract

Art can challenge scientists and laypersons about controversial issues in research and bring reality and thoughtfulness from outside the lab into the lab.

I love our giant Escherichia coli, said Judy Armitage, a microbiologist at the University of Oxford, UK. “It is the size of a small whale hanging from the roof and it really gets people talking”, she added. The giant 28 meter long model of the bacterium is part of Bacterial World, an exhibition at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in the UK, and it gives people a concept of scale, in a way numbers cannot. Armitage tells visitors that “if you were to blow me up to the equivalent magnification with my head in the museum, then my feet would be in Tokyo”. Bacterial World zooms in on E. coli and other microbes through art, film and digital interactives to lift the lid on their secret lives and hidden stories; one of the displays features the “top 10 bacteria” that changed the world, such as the microbes that fix nitrogen for crops. “It is about getting people to see bacteria as not just something you throw [bleach] on”, Armitage said. The artistic installations at Bacterial World and other museums help engage people with scientific issues who might otherwise assume the topic is not of interest to them. Visitors in Oxford learn how antibiotics are weapons microbes deploy against each another, fighting for their own patch. It illustrates that antibiotic resistance is natural and so is not surprising.

Many artists seek to challenge scientists and society about controversial issues…

Yet, art does not just play a support role in communicating and visualising science. Many artists seek to challenge scientists and society about controversial issues including human gene editing, climate change or synthetic biology. While scientists are best equipped to explore scientific and technical challenges, art can muster others to join in the debates on the societal consequences of cutting‐edge research.

Pathogens and disease

Anna Dumitriu is a visual artist in the UK who learned CRISPR/Cas gene editing as part of creating her artwork. She made a dress based on a 1665 design, the year of the Great Plague of London, and imbibed it with walnut and lavender, which were then thought to ward off plague (Fig 1). Then, she impregnated the dress with the DNA of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacteria. “I want to create artwork that intrigues people, that brings them into a story and makes them think about it”, Dumitriu explained. “You get a cultural, societal and emotional impact from these stories and get an insight into scientific research too”. Art can be playful and serious, teasing out multiple meanings, Dumitriu said: “The scientists I work with like that I paint a broader picture of their work, rather than have it presented as a soundbite”. In her The Romantic Disease exhibition, Dumitriu explored the history of tuberculosis (TB), using a combination of textile art and biological matter, including strains of Mycobacterium vaccae, M. bovis and M. tuberculosis, to help increase awareness of the disease.

Figure 1.

Plague Dress by Anna Dumitriu. With permission by the artist.

Dumitriu is also critical of poor explanations of science fed to the public, with assumptions that they cannot understand all the details. The famed image of the DNA helix for instance is simple, but leaves a false impression of reality. “Half the time it isn't even a double‐helix, and usually there are bits hanging off it, so it turns out that it doesn't look like this beautiful super‐coiled double‐helix”, she said. Clean imagery can mislead people into thinking biologists know more than they do, while art can address these issues in an engaging way. Similarly, the cut and paste imagery around CRISPR can lead non‐experts to logical, yet mistaken conclusions about gene editing. “Very few edits on human and animal cells work”, Dumitriu pointed out, with only one of her 60 bacterial colonies taking up a CRISPR edit, for example.

Overlooking the messiness of biology can leave the public puzzled when a drug, or a gene edit or any other procedure does not work.

Overlooking the messiness of biology can leave the public puzzled when a drug, or a gene edit or any other procedure does not work. “The public have a perception that if they go to a hospital and a bacteria isn't identified, there has been a mistake. There is a lot more to it than that”, Dumitriu noted. She believes that bio‐art can draw public attention to issues such as antibiotic resistance, allowing them to explore and discover details in a less didactic and more relaxed setting. “I find it interesting to burrow deeply into these things and address assumptions with reality. Uncover the real story”, she said.

Bringing reality to the lab

It is not just artists who believe that art has a role in probing research and its societal questions. Drew Endy is a synthetic biologist at Stanford University, USA, who has engaged with artists about ethical and moral quandaries in his field. He helped bring together biologists, social scientists and artists in a project that resulted in a book Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature. Often mischaracterised as an outreach project, Endy stressed that this is exactly what the project was not about. “It brings reality and thoughtfulness from outside the lab to inside the lab, so that scientists or engineers might consider anew what it is they are working on in the first place”, he explained. “Natural scientists have gained power sufficient to change what it means to be human, quite directly”, Endy said, referencing the infamous case of gene‐edited children in China at the end of 2018. “But scientists and engineers have zero capacity to ask and answer the question of what does it mean to be human”. He added that basic researchers often fail to see positive uses their research can be put to, but can be blindsided by negative repercussions too.

Synthetic biology has adopted an engineering approach to biology, driven by hopes of sustainable fuel, new manufacturing techniques, novel drugs and materials, and medical technologies. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, an artist and lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics, was drawn to its halcyon promises of a brighter future. “Everyone used this catchphrase, to make the world a better place”, Ginsberg recalled. “But what is better and who gets to decide?” Art can stretch out betterment notions to absurd, but perhaps prescient lengths. Ginsberg's artwork Designing for the Sixth Extinction imagined novel companion species designed by synthetic biologists to support endangered ecosystems and to fill the void left by extinctions. These artificial creatures populate a forest scene, Rewilding with Synthetic Biology (Fig 2). “There is a very human‐centric and modernist idea in synthetic biology of improving nature, or protecting nature from us that enforces an artificial separation of us from nature”, Ginsberg said. Recently, geneticists in the USA genetically modified American chestnut trees, with the aim of releasing them into the wild and saving them from extinction. This could be just the first step in modifying wild species for conservation sake, yet there has been little public discussion about it.

Figure 2.

Rewilding with Synthetic Biology from Designing for the Sixth Extinction by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. With permission by the artist.

One outcome which especially pleased Ginsberg was the Sixth Extinction project appearing on the cover of Fungal Genetics and Biology, accompanied by an editorial. The editorial noted that synthetic biologists do not even agree as to, what synthetic biology is, and praised Ginsburg's Self‐Inflating Antipathogenic Membrane Pump, which was a fungal‐inspired synthetic biological device designed to treat sudden oak death disease (Fig 3). With this fictitious patent, Daisy hits the nail on the Janus‐faced head, the editorial noted. “Fungi can be friends or foes; how we decode and reprogram them to suit global needs, is limited simply by our intelligence, ingenuity, and imagination. What seems like today's science fiction, could become tomorrow's reality”.

Figure 3.

Self‐Inflating Antipathogenic Membrane Pump from Designing for the Sixth Extinction by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. With permission by the artist.

What is life?

“Unintentionally, scientists are assaulting our understanding of life”, said artist Oron Catts, Director of SymbioticA, an artistic lab dedicated to hands‐on engagement with the life sciences at the University of Western Australia. A watershed moment for Catts whose works are immersed in life, especially tissue culture, was the 1995 appearance of the mouse with a human ear on its back. “It really brought home the idea that human fantasies about sculping and creating new mythological creatures that are alive is actually happening”, he said. Catts argues that there has not been enough cultural discussion around what is life and what is acceptable regards its manipulation. “We are suffering from an acute poverty of language to describe the things that we are doing to life, especially in the cultural language where we only have one word to describe life and its many manifestations”, he explained. “What scientists are doing is challenging how we think about life in ways that they are not even aware of. We don't have a way to make sense of it culturally”.

But scientists and engineers have zero capacity to ask and answer the question of what does it mean to be human.

His Victimless Leather project saw a leather jacket grown from cultured cells on a polymer, with the almost alive garment raising questions about wearing clothes from dead animals (Fig 4). The Pig Wings project in 2001 utilised pig stem cells to grow tissues in the shape of wings, seeking to stimulate conversations around the use of pigs to create artificial organs for humans (Fig 5). Catts views his work as purifying the ethical concerns around how research is treating life. “To an extent that life becomes a raw material to exploit and profit from, we might find ourselves in unpleasant situations”, he warned. “If we think we can do whatever we want with life, because we treat it as yet another material of manipulation, we could end up doing it to ourselves. A similar conversation happened in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, and there were some really uncomfortable outcomes”. Indeed, the recent gene editing of babies rarely resurrected references to the eugenics of the last century.

Figure 4.

Victimless Leather ‐ A Prototype of Stitch‐less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific Body (2004) by the Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr). Biodegradable polymer skin and bone cells from human and mouse. With permission by Oron Catts.

Figure 5.

Pig Wings ‐ The Chiropteran Version (2000–2001) by Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr & Guy Ben‐Ary). Pig mesenchymal cells (bone marrow stem cells) and biodegradable/bioabsorbable polymers ( PGA , P4 HB ).

Catts likes also to poke and prod hyperbole and over‐zealous claims that sometimes come out from science, especially from university press departments. He said he was the first to grow and eat lab‐grown meat, in 2003, and is fascinated by the conversation around this topic. “So many of these conversations [about in vitro meat] are based on fantasies and unrealistic expectations regards what can be delivered”, he said. There will be products with lab‐grown meat and other ingredients, but a lab‐grown fillet steak is not close to reality. Ditto with 3‐D organ printing, which Catts says the public has sci‐fi level expectations of.

The disappearance of species

Another emotive topic that art grapples with is the extinction of species. Pontificating about conservation of biodiversity is a turn off for many people, so there is a need to engage a wider audience with subtlety. Ginsburg is creating an installation called Substitute, to “resurrect” the extinct northern white rhino using a hologram and tape recordings of the last male specimen from a Czech zoo. “This is about de‐extincting the rhino and asking what is a rhino without context”, she explained. Some geneticists are discussing the possibility of resurrecting extinct animals, such as the mammoth, at a time when living animals are being driven towards extinction. A synthetic biology company, Gingko Bioworks, has developed fragrances from extinct plants by putting the plant DNA into yeast and growing them up to generate the fragrant molecules.

A simple but thought‐provoking piece of art reflecting on extinction was displayed in the Science Gallery, Dublin, in October 2017, as part of its exhibition In Case of Emergency. The artist Brandon Ballengée cut images of missing animals from historic publications. The image minus the birds and butterfly species is dubbed a Framework of Absence. The visually arresting frames succeed in imprinting species loss on a personal level and aim to invoke a conservation mindset to counter future extinctions.

We are suffering from an acute poverty of language to describe the things that we are doing to life, especially in the cultural language where we only have one word to describe life…

The direct engagement with a material object, such as in this case, through art, can do more than reams of text. “Art can offer people direct experience of phenomena, which can be more effective than just reading an explanation of something or looking at charts, graphs or data”, said Icelandic‐Danish artist Olafur Elliasson. His Ice Watch project brought blocks of Greenlandic glacial ice to a public space, giving people the opportunity to see, feel and experience the effects of climate change first hand. We were able to “reach people in a way that reports, graphs and data cannot”, he explained, “to feel the urgency of it and to take action”.

In another project, Elliasson dumped non‐toxic dye into rivers, without letting anyone know about it to make people aware of their everyday surroundings in a new way. “Not just the river, which suddenly appeared different”, he added, “but the town or landscape it is flowing through. We tend to see cities and spaces as static images, but in fact they are changing all the time”.

Confronting perceptions and convenience

Art and visuals shake people to look anew at issues they are jaded hearing about. Perhaps the best example is climate change. Stephan Lewandowsky, psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK, is interested in how scientific evidence is accepted or rejected, and how to correct misconceptions and communicate scientific issues. In a recent perspective on climate communication for biologists, he noted how the evidence for climate change is based on statistical analyses and observations that are dispersed across time and space. Meanwhile, people are hardwired to be swayed by anecdotes and personal experience. “People can't help but to immediately jump to some conclusion when they see or experience something”, Lewandowsky said. This is called the experiential system by psychologists and is assumed to be fast, emotional and intuitive in contrast to the slower and more deliberative analytical system.

Art can offer people direct experience of phenomena, which can be more effective than just reading an explanation of something or looking at charts, graphs or data.

It is probably why, in February 2015, Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma brought a snowball into the US Senate to apparently question the fact that 2014 had been the hottest year on record at the time. The stunt, according to Lewandowsky, may have resonated, given how people are readily influenced by anecdotes and images. Art can press these levers to attract people to environmental issues. “It can feed into people's natural tendency to see the world in terms of stories. I totally expect art to have an impact on people's attitude to climate change”, Lewandowsky commented. There is a second more deliberative system. “This is when people are confronted, when they have to engage more carefully and think things through, that they engage this analytical system”. He believes art can prod people to engage this system, such as when an object's meaning is unclear and they must figure out what it means—this happens when art is abstract, for example.

This is a far cry from artists working for scientists to generate marketing material to promote their research. Catts is adamant that his role as an artist is not simply to embellish. “I am not going to decorate science or illustrate it, or communicate it a way scientists might like. I am not a science communicator. I am not there to make the research beautiful”, he explained. Instead, he is there to make sense of what they are doing, to make sense of what the outcome of research actually means for society and to raise questions. “Not all scientists are happy about it”, said Catts. “It can sometimes bring out issues that can be seen as a disservice or problematic, but those are exactly the reasons why we need to explore them further”.

EMBO Reports (2019) 20: e48563