That Was Then. This Is Now. | The History of Science Society

Vol. 42, No. 1, January 2013
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That Was Then. This Is Now 2

by Jonathan Minard

On Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Penn Avenue, a storefront labeled "Center for PostNatural History" (CPNH) goes quietly unnoticed. Inside, one may find the answer to such questions as "What is the difference between a green fluorescent bunny and a GloFish®? One is furry: the invention of an American bio-artist. The other is a trademarked product from Singapore, outlawed in every country but the United States. They share a single gene responsible for their bioluminescence originating in the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria.

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In the dimly lit exhibit hall of the CPNH, glass vitrines house familiar-looking specimens: an array of fruit flies impaled on mounting pins; a flask of live, fluttering Sea Monkeys; a cabinet marked Specimen Vault bearing corn kernels and slides of bacteria. Each specimen has a story encoded in its DNA. Every microbe and vertebrate in the collection was designed to serve a human need.

Typically, it is biodiversity loss that makes the news. Less talked about is the fact that humans are creating the greatest boom in new species since the Cambrian Explosion. The Center has staked its claim as the only institution in the world dedicated to cataloging postnature, i.e. life forms that result from humans tampering with DNA. The man behind the Center is Richard Pell.

"We're interested in what people do to living things on purpose. We're not a biology museum, not a science museum," explains Pell. The collection is "anthropocentric," he says, "looking at human culture through the lens of biology."

The 21st century has been heralded as "The Century of Biotech." And yet, genetic engineering is hardly new. Since well before recorded history, humans have been pruning the tree of life. Our interventions began with the advent of agriculture, roughly ten thousand years ago, when foragers transitioned to animal husbandry and crop domestication: wild boar became pigs, and teosinte became corn.

In the 1920s, food producers discovered new methods of accelerating mutagenesis in fruits and vegetables to yield a wider array of traits. Irradiating crops with isotopes, such as cobalt-60, led to larger, sweeter, more attractive varieties. The practice, known as mutation breeding continues to this day at facilities called gamma farms.

Modern genetics has developed to such an extent in the past 35 years that scientists are able to make precise alterations. By deftly cutting and pasting genes from one species to another, bioengineers approach genomics as a form of computer programming—using base pairs rather than bytes.

Recombinant DNA inserted into a species' genome continues to function normally, providing the instructions for synthesizing proteins. That is why the cells of a rabbit, with the addition of a single jellyfish gene, produce Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). Transgenic species are considered technologies. When artist Eduardo Kac worked with Dr. Louis-Marie Houdebine to invent Alba the Glowing Bunny, the two patented their creation. The patent behind Alba, number 5,792,902 describes "A transgenic rabbit expressing a protein capable of interfering with dyslipoproteinaemia-related liver diseases."

Since the founding of CPNH in 2008, Pell has scoured science journals and patent records for the latest additions to the transgenic tree. Many of these experimental life forms are ephemeral, one-offs. Most go extinct before coming to term.

"Maybe their germ plasm, their DNA survives on in some long term freezer," says Pell, "but virtually nobody is preserving the body, the morphology, the physical forms of these organisms. So they just kind of fall in this blind spot."

Pell did not always take the role of objective documentarian when it came to biotechnology. At first he approached biotech as an activist-artist, with the intention of engineering "a provocative bacteria."

"I realized that what was already being done [in biology labs] was far more provocative than anything I had to contribute. The politics I was interested in bringing to the table were already present and very loud." Pell began envisioning a place to investigate genetic technologies and encourage public dialogue on biology and culture. In 2008, the idea for a PostNatural History Museum was born.

Pell visited the labs of scientists doing research and development on transgenic species, and began building his collection. His first acquisition was a jar of malaria-resistant mosquitoes from the University of California, Irvine.

In 2011, the CPNH won Pell a summer fellowship to poke around "America's attic" at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. Ignoring the more exotic species at his disposal, he chose to focus his efforts exclusively on documenting the origins of countless common white lab mice and lab rats—two of the most thoroughly domesticated and genetically homogenous species on Earth.

Arrayed row upon row in stacks of drawers in the Smithsonian, each identical rodent bears a little tag on its hind foot, specifying the date and location of its death. Cross-referencing the tags with sites in the Pacific and Nevada desert, Pell began to notice a pattern. Large numbers of mice had come to the museum during periods of frequent nuclear testing. He describes the collection as "an inadvertent record of American warfare." How these rodents were used to understand the effects of radiation is the subject of the current exhibit at the Center, "Atomic Age Rodents."

"I find again and again that any living thing that I look at long enough will yield an extraordinary story," says Pell. In recent years, he has tracked goats with spider genes to a remote military installation, visited the world's only public grove of transgenic American elms, and delved deep into the story of Amazing Sea Monkeys™. Pell declined to give a full account of what he had discovered through research on the creation of Amazing Sea Monkeys™—the story was too complex, he said—but he mentioned that it involved an adult film star from the 60's; a researcher trying to coax rare blue lobsters into mating; and a Jewish man who went on to become one of the primary funders of the Aryan Nation. "I think it will become a screenplay one day," said Pell.

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Pell is not the only artist of his generation exploring the social and cultural dimensions of genetic engineering. Curator Andrea Grover recently assembled a half dozen artists and researchers for a touring exhibit titled, "Intimate Science," currently on display in Hartford, Connecticutt's Real Art Ways gallery until 31 March 2013.

CPNH's exhibit in the show presents the story of the blight resistant American Chestnut, engineered at the SUNY College of Environmental Studies and Forestry in an attempt to resurrect the decimated tree.

None of the artist-researchers in Grover's exhibit have advanced degrees in science, yet they have cultivated expertise in peculiar niches, in some cases inventing their own biotechnologies. While the artists spend "ninety percent of their time outside of the lab," says Grover, mastering the language of science gives them special access to domains off limits to most artists. According to Grover, "Scientists are very interested in what they're doing, and they have become valuable contributors" to their chosen fields of inquiry.

In conversation, Pell will casually drop the full Latin names of obscure bacteria. In describing one procedure, he makes synthetic biology sound frighteningly easy: "There are a number of companies that do gene synthesis. And you simply send them an e-mail message full of the A's, T's, G's, and C's and in a few weeks turnaround time you'll get a styrofoam cooler full of dry ice, with an eppendorf tube in the middle of it—that's that gene suspended in some kind of fluid."

Every successful genetically modified organism is preceded by a series of miscarriages. The process can get messy. And yet, most of the transgenic specimens in the collection look no different from their wild counterparts. None of them exhibit the extreme physical aberrations one might expect, such as extra eyes and appendages.

Seeing these modern chimeras in the flesh and learning their stories immediately defuses the expectation of monstrosity. It also removes the subject of biotechnology from the realm of abstraction and what-if scenarios. As the science of transgenics becomes a viable option for addressing heritable diseases, our very own genes will become the subject of debate, further complicating these slippery bioethical questions.

While the collection currently has fewer than 100 unique species—a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of transgenic organisms in the world—the examples presented are as captivating as they are complex. Some species like the GloFish®, manufactured for aesthetic novelty, invite scrutiny; other organisms, designed to solve a problem, deflect criticism. It is not easy to wage an argument against a malaria-resistant mosquito with the potential to save millions of lives. At the same time, the public will and should be wary of genetic innovations claiming to offer a panacea—in the delicate balance of ecology there are often hidden consequences.

Rather than providing easy answers, CPNH presents visitors with compelling stories, allowing them to contemplate the issues and slowly come to their own nuanced conclusions.

Contact information for the Center for PostNatural History: http://www.postnatural.org
4913 Penn Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15224
contact@postnatural.org

2: A longer version of this article was published in Sage magazine on 2 March 2012.

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