Genetologic Research

Jeroen Kuster
Symbos dorcas, 2005

Already from a young age Jeroen Kuster (1971) has developed a craze for everything what is part of the animal world. He is especially curious to how an animal has been build and what structures are to be seen. Kuster collected skulls since he was 12 and analysed about five hundred animals already. A remarkable hobby which resulted in valuable knowledge of the inner spirit of every separate animal. He plays God and recreates new species as he sees fit. Everything originates from his fantasy combined directly with his anatomical knowledge. He frequently uses everyday materials, like plastic spoons and other inorganic construction materials to build his own fictitious taxonomy. Within the universe of Kuster the animals carry biological names which find were their origin in the Systema Naturae of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the founder of the modern taxonomy.

Symbos ovibos lervia, 2005


Taurulus Surmuletus, 2004


Nematocera Hystrix, 2005

http://jeroenkuster.nl/

NASA/JPL

Humanity Gets an Upgrade at the MIT Media Lab

Two years ago, IFTF’s Technology Horizons program explored the implications of what we called “the extended self”. The core hypothesis was that the body is becoming a platform for a whole range of technological augmentations. These deliberate enhancements run the gamut from mobile phones and social network software, to cochlear implants to restore lost hearing.

One of the really interesting implications of that research was the insight that we are increasingly seeing people leveraging therapeutic technologies to create super-human abilities. This is clearly the case in athletics, but you can also this at work with college students abusing drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to maintain focus during long study sessions. Michael Chorost, who wrote so eloquently about his relationship with his cochlear implant, forecasts that people will almost certainly exploit the potential of that technology to provide super-human hearing for healthy people. Even though only six people have had therapeutic retinal implants to date, it probably won’t be long before someone develops a retinal implant that gives its symbiant the ability to see X-rays or infrared…. if they haven’t already.

source: Institute for the Future

still form Metalosis Maligna, a fictitious documentary, by Floris Kaayk , about a spectacular yet viciously disabling disease which affects patients who have been fitted with medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions.

“Western philosophy has betrayed the body; it has actively participated in the great process of metaphorization that has abandoned the body; and it has denied the body. The living body, being at once ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ cannot tolerate such conceptual division, and consequentely philosophical concepts fall into the category of the ‘signs of non-body’.” -Henri Lefebvre-

Rem Koolhaas

Victor Hugo imagined a peaceful ‘United States of Europe’ inspired by humanistic ideals. The dream was shattered by the terrible wars that ravaged the continent during the first half of the 20th century.

However, a new kind of hope emerged from the rubble of World War Two. People who had resisted totalitarianism during the war were determined to put an end to international hatred and rivalry in Europe and create the conditions for lasting peace. Between 1945 and 1950, a handful of courageous statesmen including Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi and Winston Churchill set about persuading their peoples to enter a new era. New structures would be created in western Europe, based on shared interests and founded upon treaties guaranteeing the rule of law and equality between all countries.

Robert Schuman (French foreign minister) took up an idea originally conceived by Jean Monnet and, on 9 May 1950, proposed establishing a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). In countries which had once fought each other, the production of coal and steel would be pooled under a common High Authority. In a practical but also richly symbolic way, the raw materials of war were being turned into instruments of reconciliation and peace.

Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info

Maarten Vanden Eynde

Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info

Maarten Vanden Eynde

The present project Europe2008: In Varietate Concordia aims to stimulate international discussion about the future policy of the EU and ultimately to press for a fundamental change of course. Gradually even the stars on the flag should vanish, leaving us eventually with a universal clear blue flag, the flag of Planet Earth. Is a conceptual ideology desirable and more importantly: is it a realistic possibility?

Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info

Maarten Vanden Eynde

Since January 1st, 2007, the Union consists of 27 member states! Is further expansion desirable when the old 25 member states cannot successfully bring about an unequivocal policy? Does Europe need borders and if so, where do you draw the line? Croatia? Bosnia Herzegovina? Albania? Or Turkey? Georgia? Azerbeidzjan? And what about Russia? Or Canada? Israel?

Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info

Maarten Vanden Eynde

We have drifted too far away from the Utopian ideas that were essential to the foundation of Europe. Equality concerning basic resources and means should create freedom and stability that will make war in the future unnecessary. ‘To unify Europe is to make peace’, said the spiritual father of the European idea, Jean Monnet, in 1950.This is an ideology similar to that of the League of Nations and the United Nations and which should apply to the entire world population. And it is precisely this deviation, this betrayal of the ideology, which causes the present suspicion and ultimate rejection of the European Union. Is Europe a new country with new borders, or is it a concept for freedom and equality?

Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info

Maarten Vanden Eynde

In 2006 there were still only 15 countries represented on the flag. The ten new member states of the European Union, which joined in 2004, have not been treated equally due to fear of a tidal wave of economic refugees. A special backdoor provision was created to allow each member state to implement its own restrictions (until 2011) against one or more countries at will. This inequality and discrimination is at odds with the founding spirit of the European Union. Should free movement of people, goods, services and capital be implemented universally and immediately upon accession to membership of the EU or is an adjustment period a better strategy?

Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info

Bill Gasperini

The idea of cloning a mammoth is just a fantasy,” says biologist Ross MacPhee, an expert on the giant fauna of the last ice age and chairman of the American Museum of Natural History’s mammalogy department. Alex Greenwood, a molecular biologist who studies ice age extinctions (and a colleague of MacPhee’s in New York), agrees: “I am really stunned,” he says, “that there are scientists still pushing this idea.” MacPhee, who has worked extensively with the Jarkov mammoth in Siberia, and Greenwood say that making an exact copy of a species that died off 10,000 years ago is possible only in science fiction movies.

The main reason is simple: To have any chance at a successful cloning, scientists must start with pristine, complete DNA. But even in cold environments, cells quickly break down after an organism dies; entropy occurs, and bacteria and certain enzymes latch onto or destroy cellular material. All the DNA found from long-extinct animals (even those remains found in the Siberian permafrost) has been incomplete and fragmented.

“If freezing is done under special conditions, such as in a modern laboratory, cells with their genetic material can be preserved indefinitely,” explains Russian scientist Alexei Tikhonov. “But conditions out in the permafrost are far from perfect.” Tikhonov has worked with the best-preserved mammoth ever found, a baby mammoth carcass pulled from a construction site in 1977. Nicknamed “Dima,” the small calf still had its skin and looked like it could have died just days earlier. But it probably fell into a mud pit and died quickly 44,000 years ago. Dima now rests in Tikhonov’s institute in St. Petersburg. Studies have shown that proteins in Dima’s cells were seriously modified after death, and that other substances common in living tissues (such as phosphorous) disappeared entirely.

Cloning is only possible when the nucleus taken from a living cell (such as with Dolly the sheep) is placed into an egg from which the original nucleus has been removed. This substitute nucleus, with its DNA, proteins and other crucial material completely intact, was what controlled the development of Dolly. Injecting fragments of DNA into a cell without a nuclear transfer would not result in a clone. Greenwood explains it this way: “If I throw all the parts needed to make a car down the stairs of a building, I will not have a Porsche 911 in the stairwell when they land.”

Ryuzo Yanagimachi, a scientist in Hawaii who has successfully cloned mice and other small mammals, says he would like to clone a mammoth. But he agrees that this could happen only if intact DNA is ever recovered from a long-dead mammoth. In recent years, a Japanese team has mounted several expeditions into Russia’s far north with the expressed aim of trying to bring a mammoth back to life. The team’s main intent is to recover frozen sperm from a mammoth and then use it to impregnate a female elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative. But Greenwood and MacPhee say this is equally problematic, even on the off-chance that intact sperm DNA from a mammoth could ever be found. “Mammoths and elephants have been separated by about 4 (million) to 6 million years of evolution,” says Greenwood. “This would be like crossbreeding a human and a chimp and expecting to have a successful generation of a hybrid.”

Is it possible that in the march of time and scientific advance, technologies may be developed that will allow extinct creatures to be cloned? Or, someday, may a perfectly intact chain of mammoth DNA be found? According to MacPhee, such questions remain too tough to answer. “There isn’t even a direction we can point to,” he says, “which would indicate whether cloning extinct animals will ever be possible.”

© 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Baby Mammoth discovered in Siberia in 2007

Eric Adler
Cloning a Better Tomorrow

The longest and final chapter in the Book of Life, the human genetic code, has been published.
Scientists have completed a detailed blueprint of Chromosome 1, which contains 8% of all human genetic information and 3,141 genes. It marks the last part of the vast jigsaw pieced together by the Human Genome Project (HGP), the mapping out of the entire human genome, described as a “monumental achievement”.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was one of the great feats of exploration in history – an inward voyage of discovery rather than an outward exploration of the planet or the cosmos; an international research effort to sequence and map all of the genes – together known as the genome – of members of our species, Homo sapiens. Completed in April 2003, the HGP gave us the ability to, for the first time, to read nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being.

Chromosomes are the bundles of DNA that exist at the heart of every cell. Humans have 22 pairs of chromosomes plus the X and Y sex chromosomes. The largest of all is Chromosome 1, which is associated with more than 350 human diseases linked to altered DNA. Among them are conditions as varied as cancers, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, high cholesterol and porphyria – the nervous system disorder thought to have afflicted King George III.
The completed sequence published in the journal Nature has already been used to identify more than 1,000 new genes. It is expected to help researchers find novel treatments and ways of diagnosing many diseases.

In the past year alone, genes involved in a dozen diseases, including cancer and neurological disorders, have been identified using the Chromosome 1 sequence. Dr Simon Gregory, from Duke University, who was in charge of the project while at the Sanger Institute, said: “The sequence we have generated, like that produced by our collaborators throughout the Human Genome Project, has driven biomedical discovery. “This moment, the publication of the sequence from the last and largest human chromosome, completes the story of the HGP and marks the growing wave of biological and medical research founded on the human genome sequence. Chromosome 1 contains fascinating stories of chromosome biology, of our evolution, and our health, and it’s inspiring to have played a part in a programme that will have so much power to understand the essence of human biology.”

Create your own DNA artwork!

Jeff Koons
Michael Jackson and _________, 1988

Koons: “I’m interested in the morality of what it means to be an artist. As an artist I’m most concerned with what art means to me, how it defines my life, etc. And then after that, my next concern is my actions, the responsibility of my own actions in art in regard to other artists, and then to a wider range of the art audience, such as critics, museum people, collectors, etc. Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the world a better place.”
The sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey Bubbles has fetched $5.6m (£3.8m) at a contemporary art auction at Sotheby’s in New York.

Gareth Cook
Humans, chimps may have bred after split, 2006

Boston scientists released a provocative report that challenges the timeline of human evolution and suggests that human ancestors bred with chimpanzee ancestors long after they had initially separated into two species.

The researchers, working at the Cambridge-based Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, used a wealth of newly available genetic data to estimate the time when the first human ancestors split from the chimpanzees. The team arrived at an answer that is at least 1 million years later than paleontologists had believed, based on fossils of early, humanlike creatures.

The lead scientist said that this jarring conflict with the fossil record, combined with a number of other strange genetic patterns the team uncovered, led him to a startling explanation: that human ancestors evolved apart from the chimpanzees for hundreds of thousands of years, and then started breeding with them again before a final break.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ira Bartell
Delft Anthrax, 2005

Ceramic tile, Delft blue transfer (15 x 15cm)

‘This began as an email at the time of the anthrax scare in the United States, I decided not to send it to various U.S. government agencies as an antidote to mass hysteria. It is a 300x magnification of an anthrax bacteria arabesque.’

Maggie Fox
Bacteria in Dirt May be “Born” Resistant to Drugs, 2006

Bacteria in dirt may be “born” with a resistance to antibiotics, which could help shed light on the problem of drug-defying “superbugs,” Canadian researchers said. They tested 480 different bacteria found in soil and discovered that every single one had some resistance to antibiotics — meaning they had evolved a mechanism for evading the effects of the drugs. The findings, published in the journal Science, could help explain why bacteria so quickly develop resistance to antibiotics, and why drug companies must constantly develop new ones.

“It explains where these things come from in the first place,” Gerry Wright, chair of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at Ontario’s McMaster University, said in a telephone interview. “This work could prove to be extremely valuable to the drug development process.”
Wright’s team dug up 480 strains of Streptomyces bacteria and tested them for resistance to various antibiotics. “Without exception, every strain … was found to be multi-drug resistant to seven or eight antibiotics on average, with two strains being resistant to 15 of 21 drugs,” they wrote in their report.

‘A LOGICAL PLACE TO START’

These particular bacteria do not infect people, but Wright believes the findings almost certainly apply to other species of microbes. “It turns out that Streptomyces make lots of antibiotics,” Wright said. “Anything that ends in ‘mycin’ comes from streptomycin — vancomycin, streptomycin.” That was why they chose this group of bacteria.

“We were curious to see where these things might come from in the first place, so it seemed that was a logical place to start. I expect lots of these (drug-resistant) genes are peppered all over the microbial community,” Wright said.
They exposed the bacteria to known antibiotics and then searched for genes that were activated when the microbes survived. “We found old mechanisms and new mechanisms. We found a brand-new resistance mechanism to an antibiotic called telithromycin,” he said, referring to Aventis’ drug Ketek, only approved in 2004. Ketek was designed to overcome resistance to antibiotics, but one of the bacteria Wright tested evolved a way to prevent it from working.

Almost as soon as penicillin was introduced in the 1940s, bacteria began to develop resistance to its effects, prompting researchers to develop many new generations of antibiotics. But their overuse and misuse have helped fuel the rise of drug-resistant “superbugs.” The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 70 percent of infections that people get while in the hospital are resistant to at least one antibiotic. Wright said his findings do not get doctors off the hook. He said they still must prescribe antibiotics only when they are needed, and stress to patients the need to use them properly.

Soil bacteria live in a constant kind of arms race, making antibiotics to protect themselves against other bacteria, and then evolving antibiotic resistance to evade the antibiotics made by other bacteria. “Their coping tactics may be able to give us a glimpse into the future of clinical resistance to antibiotics,” Wright said.

Damien Hirst
Mother and Child, Devided, 1993

The impulses driving Damien Hirst’s work stem from dilemmas inherent in human life: ‘I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live for ever. I can’t escape the fact and I can’t let go of the desire’. The materials he uses often shock, but he says he ‘uses shock almost as a formal element . not so much to thrust his work in the public eye . but rather to make aspects of life and death visible’.

Fritjof Capra
The Systems View of Life, 1982
Chapter 8 of the “Turning Point”

As the notion of an independent physical entity has become problematic in subatomic physics, so has the notion of an independent organism in biology. Living organisms, being open systems, keep themselves alive and functioning through intense transactions with their environment, which itself consists partially of organisms. Thus the whole biosphere – our planetary ecosystem – is a dynamic and highly integrated web of living and nonliving forms. Although this web is multilevel, transactions and interdependencies exist among all its levels.

Most organisms are not only embedded in ecosystems but are complex ecosystems themselves, containing a host of smaller organisms that have considerable autonomy and yet integrate themselves harmoniously into the functioning of the whole. The smallest of these living components show an astonishing uniformity, resembling one another quite closely throughout the living world, as vividly described by Lewis Thomas.

Damien Hirst I Want You Because I Can’t Have You, 1992

There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm…..They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hill. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of seagulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window. Through them, I am connected: I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place.

Although all living organisms exhibit conspicuous individuality and are relatively autonomous in their functioning, the boundaries between organism and environment are often difficult to ascertain. Some organisms can be considered alive only when they are in a certain environment; others belong to larger systems that behave more like an autonomous organism than its individual members; still other collaborate to build large structures which become ecosystems supporting hundreds of species.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ira Bartell
Flowerpot, 2005

In a town of Roman antiquity like Cologne, a pottery shard is not simply a piece of ceramic. A shard speaks – to archeologists most completely – but to us all. To a professional, a shard tells of its origins: the period, place, likely use, possibly the former contents. To the rest of us, a shard means that what once was held together as a functioning vessel is now no more than pieces; to paraphrase the Buddha, “Whatever is put together, comes apart.” Perhaps the shard tells of violence. Certainly it speaks of destruction, and most ineluctably, the passage of time – a point Bartell underscores by dating this object. On a emotional, human level, a shard points to broken structures, broken relations, broken plans, broken dreams. Here is a broken thing.

Acknowledging all this – having broken the pot himself – Bartell takes several triumphant steps past depression or nihilism. He has re-assembled the pot – not back into a seamlessly, cleverly, glued camouflage job – but loosely, so that the pieces remain pieces, and the destruction remains present and visible. This airy reconstruction of shards into the shape – the former shape – of a flowerpot, becomes an act of bravery and pluck. Bartell says, “yes, things break, my things too. But you can do with the pieces. Pick them up, put them together. Make something.”

The pot Bartell has wrought is indeed a beautiful thing – much more lovely than the original, unbroken, garden variety. It attracts all who see it, simply because it looks so good. This pot is a three-dimensional mosaic (a nod perhaps towards Cologne’s oldest and most beautiful resident artwork – the million-piece mosaic dining-room floor from an Roman villa in the middle of the old town.) The attraction of this object comes in the first instance from the artistic integrity and the craft in it. Bartell knows the importance of doing things well, and that it is not enough simply to make jokes or create objects of the absurd. The pot is empty; it holds nothing but beauty and bravery, and this is magnetic.

David Schieider, 2005

Ira Bartell
The History of Egypt

©Mike Mosedale

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (publ. 1859) is a pivotal work in scientific literature and arguably the pivotal work in evolutionary biology. The book’s full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It introduced the theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It was controversial because it contradicted religious beliefs which underlay the then current theories of biology. Darwin’s book was the culmination of evidence he had accumulated on the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s and added to through continuing investigations and experiments since his return.

Theory in a nutshell

Darwin’s theory is based on key observations and inferences drawn from them:

1. Species have great fertility. They make more offspring than can grow to adulthood.
2. Populations remain roughly the same size, with modest fluctuations.
3. Food resources are limited, but are relatively stable over time.
4. An implicit struggle for survival ensues.
5. In sexually reproducing species, generally no two individuals are identical.
6. Some of these variations directly impact the ability of an individual to survive in a given environment.
7. Much of this variation is inheritable.
8. Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce, while individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce.
9. The individuals that survive are most likely to leave their inheritable traits to future generations.
10. This slowly effected process results in populations that adapt to the environment over time, and ultimately, after interminable generations, the creations of new varieties, and ultimately, new species.

Koen Vanmechelen
The Cosmopolitan Chicken, 2000

The Cosmopolitan Chicken is the world-wide breeding project by Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen (1965) to which the cross-breeding of different national chicken races is central and crucial. The cross-breeding as the quintessence of the dynamic, fertile and creative life and of the peaceful living together of different races.

The story officially starts in 2000, in the Flemish village of Watou, at the boarder between Belgium and France. As his participation at the exhibition ‘Storm Centers’, curated by Jan Hoet, Koen Vanmechelen has cross-bred the Belgian chicken “Mechelse Koekoek” (cuckoo of Malines) with the French pride “Poulet de Bresse”.
The descendants of this crossing, named “Mechelse Bresse’s” were consecutively and at their turn cross-bred with the typical English chicken ‘English Redcap’; this happened in 2000 too at the group show ‘A Shot in the Head’ at Lisson Gallery, London.
In 2001, at Deweer Art Gallery in Otegem (B) a one-man show entitled “Between natural breeding and genetic enginering” was presented with the descendants of the cross-breeding between the “Malinese Bresse’s” and the “English Redcap”, thus called “Mechelse Redcap”.
After that, the “Malinese Redcap” was cross-bred with the American chicken “Jersey Giant”: in real at the artist’s studio in Meeuwen (B) and ‘artificially’ (i.e. in the form of a transparent glass chicken) at the Miami Art Fair, USA. The “Mechelse Giant’ was the subject of an installation presented at the exhibition “3 FEB 2002”, curated by Edith Doove, at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle (B).
The “Malinese Giant” was at his turn cross-bred with the German “Dresdner Huhn”, a fully German hen (the race was made to remember the bombing of Dresden). This cross-breeding too happened at the studio of the artist. Most stunning is the fact that the cross-breeding of the Dresdner cock with the Malinese Giant hen procreated only male chicks!
In the spring of 2003 the cross-breeding of the “Mechelse Dresdner” with the Dutch hen “Uilebaard” (Owlbeard) effected two exhibitions in Amsterdam. First there was the exhibition “Koen Vanmechelen – “Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Mechelse Dresdner – The Desire” at the De Brakke Grond, which was meant as an appeal to Dutch institutions to patron the cross-breeding of the Malinese Dresdner with the Dutch Owlbeard. The exhibition resulted in the acceptance of the GEM – the museum for contemporary art of The Hague to patron the cross-breeding with the Dutch hen and in the presentation of the “Mechelse Owlbeard”, the sixth generation of the Cosmopolitan Chicken at the KunstRAI in Amsterdam. Due to the influenza aviaria disease that at that time struck both Holland and Belgium the 2 exhibitions in Amsterdam were set up without living animals.
In September 2003 Koen did a second one-man show at Deweer Art Gallery, entitled “Koen Vanmechelen – Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Second Generation: Mechelse Bresse – Sex & Mortality”. It was an exhibition about the now naturally dying out first and second generations of the “Cosmopolitan Chicken Project”, and about the off-spring of life in general.
In November 2003 Koen Vanmechelen undertook a second expedition to Nepal to study the Bankiva hen, the so-called ‘primal chicken’, from which all domesticated chickens descend.
In the mean time the cross-breeding of the Malinese Owlbeard with the Mexican “Louisiana” was organised in Meeuwen to originate the “Mechelse Louisiana”.
In his current installation for “ECLiPS / 25 Years Deweer Art Gallery “ at Transfo Zwevegem Koen Vanmechelen brings forward a Malinese Owlbeard cock in surveillance of thousands of fresh eggs.

Obviously, “The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project ” is a project with a high metaphorical value that touches a lot of contemporary social issues such as genetic manipulation, cloning, globalisation, multiraciality, multicultural society etc.
Although the artist has a lot of inspiring contacts with the medical and scientific world, “The Cosmopolitan Chicken” has found its ideal setting in the art world.
From the project spring an endless series of works, such as great chicken portraits, drawings, installations, stuffed chickens, story boards, videos etc.

Together with Dr Ombelet, a gynaecologist, the artist publishes “The Walking Egg”, an English magazine in which ethicists, philosophers and scientists debate about all sorts of procreation items. Koen Vanmechelen joins in with artistic reflecNons. The Cosmopolitan Chicken has nothing to do with cloning, but it goes without saying that the artist follows with great interest and attention those congresses. “The chicken wants to be in the middle of natural breeding and genetic manipulation” he says. “We should never forget the natural breeding. It is full of surprises”.

www.koen-vanmechelen.be