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Golden boy. The New York artist and visual art theorist Suzanne Anker uses scientific concepts and raw laboratory output to create pieces that comment on human embryological and evolutionary origins, the language of the genetic code and fluid corporeality. Reading about the formative abilities of stem cells and then watching them under a microscope at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden inspired Anker to make tiny sculptures from polyurethane foam. Varying the amount of pressurized air acting on the material generated diverse shapes that vaguely resemble organs or feti. A series of digital prints of the sculptures named ‘Golden boy’, was exhibited in 2004 at Universal Concepts Unlimited in New York and, in 2005, at Galeria António Prates in Lisbon, Portugal and the Deborah Colton Gallery in Houston, Texas.
Suzanne Anker, ‘Golden boy’ (‘Stem cells’), 2004–5, digital prints on watercolour paper.
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Stem cells. Perhaps no other biomedical promise has inspired as much hope and caused as much controversy as pluripotent ‘stem’ cells. They have been feted as a cure to all diseases, if diseased could be replaced with genetically identical healthy cells. Human embryonic stem cells, first isolated in 1998, were shown to be in much better condition and easier to identify than adult ones; yet producing them from ‘spare’ or deliberately created new embryos immediately clashed with anti-abortion politics. In the U.S. since 2001 federal funding has been allowed for research on 64 existing human embryonic stem cell lines only. These restrictions pushed embryo research into an unregulated private sector.
Molecular futures in embryo
Sophisticated manipulations of human embryos, real and imagined, are today at the centre of debate about our biomedical future.
These practices and visions draw on a powerful combination of embryology and molecular genetics. In the 1980s ‘developmental biology’, embryology’s main successor science, was transformed by molecular cloning techniques. Developmental biologists learned to visualize the expression patterns of mRNA and proteins, and then to intervene in the germ-line to produce ‘transgenic’ mutants to order. These innovations revealed developmental mechanisms that are shared across the animal kingdom, and so made it possible to go beyond the handful of ‘model systems’—mice for mammals—on which almost all work had been done.
New techniques for culturing human embryos allowed embryologists to manipulate and investigate these as never before. The most important are technologies of assisted conception, the retrieval of human embryonic stem cells as potential sources of lines that could develop into any desired cell type, and the unexpected cloning of a sheep called Dolly. But were the new images beautiful and intellectually engaging tokens of a wonderful new power to improve human life, or harbingers of a not-so-brave new world that suddenly seemed scarily close?
| Transgenic and normal mouse. Pictures usually pair ‘transgenic’ animals, whose genetic material has been changed by precise molecular techniques, with their ‘normal controls’ for visual contrast. This X-ray of a transgenic and normal mouse positioned side-by-side draws our gaze to the activity of c-fos, a gene that, when deregulated, participates in the development of cancer. In the normal mouse (right) it is active but tightly controlled and so without effect; in its transgenic pair it is turned on, so bone tumours proliferate, especially in the pelvis and limbs.
Wellcome Images, London
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Transgenic and normal mouse, 1997
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| A human embryo on the cover. The rapprochement between animal and human studies is evident in the choice of a human embryo, instead of the turtle, garter snake, zebrafish or mouse that had been used in previous editions, for a recent cover of the leading textbook of developmental biology. ‘The human embryo has dominated the biological news during the past three years’, the author explained. The image had to be carefully selected to ensure it both fit the book’s focus and was not hijacked by anti-abortionists. The anatomical artist Alexander Tsiaras used magnetic resonance, the technology of choice for imaging soft, high-water-content tissues. We see internal anatomy rather than the surface of a 44-day embryo, complete with the ‘appendage’ of placenta, amnion and umbilical cord that was previously often airbrushed out. The specimen is young not just because of the book’s focus on early development but also to make it less obviously human.
Magnetic resonance photomicrograph from Scott Gilbert, Developmental biology, 7th edition, Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates, 2003. 28.5 x 22.5 x 4 cm.
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A human embryo on the cover of the leading textbook of developmental biology, 2003
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