BioMorph
Vague Terrain 14: BioMorph
Can an art project be synthetic biology? What “counts” as science vs. art?
There is a lot of discussion about transgenic ethics, but what about transgenic aesthetics? Are genes beautiful? How is the notion of beauty different in science and in “real life”?
“The [Havard Medical School] Department of Cell Biology invites submissions of scientific and/or artistic value. The BioArt, generated by academic members and staff in the department, can be anything from images captured on a confocal microscope to a watercolor painting on canvas.”
Amazing visualization of the “evolution” of the text of “On the Origin of Species” by Ben Fry.
I like to think of this kind of thing as synthetic macro-biology, something that we can use to explore and alter how biology works using tools and ideas from how we study non-living things like computer science and electronics. It’s also a cool way to think about and experience our senses and the world around us. Will changing how we physically observe the world change how we interpret natural phenomena?
Scientists have a strange relationship with creativity. Scientists are supposed to just “uncover Nature’s secrets”, but will still recognize when an experiment did so in a “creative” way. Anyone who has tried to build a story out of their experiments for presentation or publication knows that the transition from test tubes to data to fact involves a lot of creativity and work. In the 1970s Bruno Latour did an anthropological study of a lab as they went through this process. His book about it, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts is a fascinating look at the interplay between “uncovering” and “creating” facts about biology.
With synthetic biology, creativity and discovery are linked. We must physically construct biology in order to uncover and construct new facts. Synthetic biology has been around for a long time (more on that later), and I think the current version is enabled by a lot of the technology that has been developed over the past 50 years to really do it. But ”ideas are cheap” and right now, synthetic biology is still mostly an idea.
