SCIENCE AND CULTURE

Science and Culture: The art of designing lifeAmber DanceScience Writer

Artist Howard Boland arrived for his 2012exhibit at the headquarters of London’s news-paper The Guardian toting Erlenmeyer flasks,

plastic tubing, and glowing bacteria. Bolandwas eager to set up his exhibit “Stress-o-stat.”He hit a snag. Although Boland had followed

safety protocols, security staff took one lookat the biohazard symbols on his project ma-terials and ejected him from the premises. It’sa common problem for Boland, one of anemerging breed of artists who use or addresssynthetic biology in their work.Most biologists are keen to understand

the natural world. Synthetic biologists arekeen to find ways to alter it, whethermodifying organisms to produce ingredientsfor medicines, machines, or makeup. Thecommon element of design makes artistsnatural collaborators for synthetic biologists;it also makes artists natural commentatorson the field. The result: In recent years,multiple artists and exhibitions have madeforays into science, seeking to apply thetools of synthetic biology to their creations,to illuminate the inner workings of livingorganisms for viewers, or to probe questionsabout what the synthetic biologists should orshouldn’t create in a world where scientistscan seemingly modify nature at will.

Experimental ArtBoland, who has a background in mathematicsand computer art, was intrigued by the emer-gence of the “Bio-Art” movement, in whichpractitioners work with living material, such asselectively bred plants, genetically engineeredbacteria, or their own bodies. Boland wanted tocontrol the living materials directly himself, sohe proposed a doctoral project to the Univer-sity of Westminster in London and worked inthe molecular biology laboratory of MarkClements, where he learned how to manipulateliving organisms. Eager to do more than useartistic metaphors to explore scientific con-cepts, Boland sought ways to directly illustratebiological processes for viewers.Among the end products of his studies and

laboratory work was “Stress-o-stat.” Bolandwas interested in how bacteria growing in anutritious broth will eventually polish off allof the nutrients, starve, and stop dividing. Hisexhibit made the starvation process visible.He attached the promoter for a gene involvedin stress response, catalase, to a gene encod-ing fluorescent proteins in bacteria. Andhe rigged a feeder system so he could driprich or impoverished broth onto the cul-tures, which would cycle between dull andglowing states.In another piece, “Transient Images,”

Boland wanted to exhibit how certain bacteria

In “Rewilding with Synthetic Biology,” artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg imagines a forest landscape re-plete with manmade creations that help sustain and remediate the ecosystem. In a separate artworkcalled “Mobile Bioremediation Unit” (Inset), Ginsberg conjures up one such creation, a synthetic slug-likeorganism that would bioremediate the forest soil by changing the soil pH with an alkali hygroscopicfluid, until a genetic kill-switch ends its service at 28 days. Images courtesy of Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

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can depolarize dye molecules, turning themcolorless. His “paintbrushes,” in this case, werebacteria from London’s sewer system thatdegrade dyes. He arranged several dye-filledbottles in an array and varied the startingamount of bacteria so the dyes would disap-pear at differing rates. As the bottles turnedclear, his self-portrait appeared in the array,only to disappear once all of the dye was gone.These and other pieces culminated in a one-

man show in April 2013 at the Royal Instituteof Great Britain in London. It was the firstexhibition in the United Kingdom to includegenetically modified organisms. “There is a fearfactor in the general population around syn-thetic biology,” Boland says. After seeing thesekinds of exhibits, viewers should “come backwith a different experience of these organisms.”

Probing the PossibilitiesOther artists aim to raise questions aboutwhat biological tinkerers are up to. Syntheticbiologists throw around the term “design”frequently, but often fail to address crucialquandaries, says Pablo Schyfter, a social sci-entist at the University of Edinburgh in theUnited Kingdom: Why are we choosing thisparticular material? What is it about livingthings that makes them useful? To exploresuch issues, Schyfter and collaborators set upthe Synthetic Aesthetics project, funded by theNational Science Foundation and the UnitedKingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences

Research Council. The initiative’s mission: ex-amine the relationship between art, design, andsynthetic biology, providing a starting point fordiscussion and debate. Six artist–scientist pairswere asked to explore that relationship overtwo weeks together in the laboratory and twoweeks in the studio in 2010 (1).One pair, a synthetic biologist and an artist

with an interest in the sense of smell, ad-dressed mankind’s dual relationship withbacteria, in which some kinds are appreciated,others abhorred. The pair cultured cheeses,normally an enjoyable microbial byproduct,from the typically undesirable bacteria onpeople’s bodies. Although some humanbacteria are the same as found in cheese, itwouldn’t be safe to taste cheeses made fromunknown microbes. But a good whiff is risk-free; they displayed cheeses cultured frommicrobe donors such as Michael Pollan, anauthor known for writing about humans’relationship with food, at the Dublin ScienceGallery in 2013 and 2014.Another pairing, between an architect and

a scientist, used computer modeling and thestructure of xylem cells, which make up aplant’s vasculature, as a tool to design novelarchitectural structures. The residents soughtnot to replicate nature exactly, but to followthe structure molded by evolution to deviseforms that would have otherwise been dif-ficult to conceive of (none have been builtyet).

Other projects outside of Synthetic Aes-thetics have received high-profile attention;for example, designers at SymbioticA, a self-described “artistic laboratory” at the Univer-sity of Western Australia in Perth, engineereda tiny jacket out of living mouse cells. In2008, the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork exhibited the piece, called “VictimlessLeather,” as part of a show called Design andthe Elastic Mind.Projects like these “open up all these dif-

ferent ways of thinking about the [scientific]subject matter from a cultural perspective,”says Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, a designerand artist who co-organized Synthetic Aes-thetics. Schyfter claims that participant pre-sentations from Synthetic Aesthetics havehelped synthetic biologists think more criti-cally about the meaning of the word “design.”

Natural EnhancementsSome designers are so bold as to envision thefuture. In a separate work of fanciful, science-inspired illustrations, called Designing for theSixth Extinction, Ginsberg, who is pursuing adoctorate in design interactions at the RoyalCollege of Art in London, addressed thewide-reaching implications of synthetic bi-ology in the context of the human-triggeredmass extinction that some believe is un-derway. She was inspired during a 2013Wildlife Conservation Society meeting inCambridge, United Kingdom. Ginsbergwatched as conservationists and syntheticbiologists engaged in an intriguing discus-sion about how engineered organisms mightsupport natural ones. Ginsberg started towonder: How would such novel organismsbe classified in the kingdom of life? Wouldthey be considered living or machines? Whatwould a walk in the woods look like withthese new, manmade critters, and is thatindeed a desirable scenario?Based on conversations with scientists and

conservationists, Ginsberg imagined takingsuch manipulations to the extreme: a slug-like “Mobile Bioremediation Unit” that neu-tralizes polluted acidic soils, for example, orthe porcupine-shaped “Autonomous SeedDisperser” that collects seeds in its hairyspines and drops them elsewhere. She workedwith computer artists to add her creations toa photograph of a real-life forest, and com-plemented the large picture with excerptsfrom faux patent applications and 3D-printed,plastic models of the slugs.Ginsberg sought to generate debate with

her designs. “I’m not saying this is a goodsolution,” she says. “It’s saying, ‘Howwould we feel about this?’” Multiple edi-tions of Designing for the Sixth Extinctionare on exhibit at London’s Design Museum

In “Stress-o-stat,” artist Howard Boland sought to illuminate the processes inside living cells.Engineered bacteria, containing a promoter for a gene involved in a stress response that’sattached to a gene encoding fluorescent proteins, glow as they run out of nutrients. Imagecourtesy of Howard Boland.

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until March 31, 2016 and Karlsruhe’sCenter for Art and Media until February28, 2016, and will be on display at theCooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Mu-seum in New York City from February 12to August 21, 2016.Synthetic biologists need people like

Ginsberg to conceive of the broad conse-quences of their cutting-edge creations,says Drew Endy, a bioengineer at StanfordUniversity in Palo Alto, California, whocowrote the Synthetic Aesthetics grantand helped select the residents. After all,these are not idle musings. Scientists atthe Oxford, United Kingdom biotechcompany Oxitec are releasing into thewild genetically engineered mosquitoes that

produce sterile offspring, part of controversialefforts to mitigate mosquito-transmitted dis-eases, such as dengue fever and malaria (2, 3).Other researchers are designing customizedbacteria to clean soils (4). And designingorganisms has gotten easier recently withthe advent of gene-editing technology,which has proven both promising andcontroversial (5).

Scientists, policy experts, and bioethicistsraise questions surrounding such work, butEndy believes designers can often offer aricher, more evocative vision of the conse-quences. Those consequences entail severalfundamental questions, say Ginsberg, Endy,and others: What might scientists design?What should they design? And who getsto decide?

1 Ginsberg AD, Calvert J, Shyfter P, Elfick A, Endy D (2014)Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs onNature (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).2 Carvalho DO, et al. (2015) Suppression of a fieldpopulation of Aedes aegypti in Brazil by sustained release oftransgenic male mosquitoes. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 9(7):e0003864.3 Gantz VM, et al. (2015) Highly efficient Cas9-mediatedgene drive for population modification of the malaria vector

mosquito Anopheles stephensi. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA112:E6736–E6743.4 Singh JS, Abhilash PC, Singh HB, Singh RP, Singh DP (2011)Genetically engineered bacterial: An emerging tool forenvironmental remediation and future research perspectives.Gene 480(1-2):1–9.5 Dance A (2015) Core Concept: CRISPR gene editing. Proc NatlAcad Sci USA 112(20):6245–6246.

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