Genesis Kac translated Genesis 1:26, “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over everything living that lives upon the Earth,” into Morse code. Since both DNA and the Morse code are made up of four different characters, Kac was able to convert the dots, dashes, and spaces between letters and words in the Morse coded version of this passage into the DNA nucleic bases C, T, G, and A, respectively. He then hired a biotech company to synthesize the “Genesis gene,” which was injected into fluorescent bacteria. The gene was artificial and was probably not expressed in the bacteria. Visitors to the exhibit saw a projected view of the bacteria if, and only if, they switched on a UV lamp that briefly irradiated the bacteria and mutated them, thereby rewriting Genesis 1:26. The exhibit was shown at galleries in Linz, São Paulo, Chicago, New York, Yokohama, Athens, Madrid, and Pittsburgh. For each show, a new “Genesis gene” was created. In some cases a web link to the exhibit was established, and web surfers were given the opportunity to view and thereby mutate the bacteria. The Genesis exhibit premiered at Ars Electronica in 1999, and after the show Kac took the mutated bacteria back to the lab and had the modified “Genesis gene” sequenced, converted to Morse code, and translated back into English. Most of the mutations were nonsense mutations, but some made sense and were interesting; for example, “fowl” was mutated to “foul.” In Genesis, Kac tried to break the barriers between art and life. It is important to note that this was done in the 1990s, when sequencing was expensive, and molecular biology was in its infancy. Today the project would be fairly trivial.
Alba is a cuddly albino rabbit that hops around, snuffles its nose, and munches carrots just like any other rabbit. Turn off the lights, switch on blue lamps, and it becomes GFP Bunny, a transgenic artwork. Alba, Spanish for “dawn,” is both alien and cuddly. She changes from lovable family pet to a disconcerting vision of the future, a science fiction pet with an eerie green glow emanating from every cell, from her paws and especially her eyes.
Alba was created in 2000 by Louis-Marie Houdebine of the French National Institute for Argonomic Research.[12] The GFP bunny is part of the second work in the Creation Trilogy, but there was supposed to be more to the GFP bunny piece than just Alba. The dialogue created by the pet/alien dichotomy and the social integration of Alba were important parts of the exhibit. Alba’s public debut was scheduled for an exhibition of digital art in Avignon, France. Kac and Alba were going to live in a faux living room created in the gallery, signifying how biotechnologies are entering our lives, even the privacy of our living rooms. However, on the eve of the show the director of the institute that had created Alba refused to release her to Kac. This fueled the dialogue portion of the exhibit, and soon Alba was competing with the Olympics for headlines in the Boston Globe, Le Monde, the BBC, and ABC News. GFP Bunny was meant to be a political project that would break down the barriers between art, science, and politics, and in this it succeeded. For many people, fears of genetically modified organisms, the human genome project, and cloning were realized when they saw photos of Alba’s strangely fluorescent eyes. Kac used Alba as a symbol for all transgenically modified organisms and of what is possible with biotechnology; she was meant to be provocative. Despite many detractors, Kac’s project also had many supporters. The science fiction writer Robert Silverberg was one person of note who entered the GFP bunny debate. He wanted to know why scientists can create transgenic organisms while artists can’t and whether breeding a phosphorescent (his word) rabbit is any sillier than breeding a dachshund.[13]
For The Eighth Day, the last part of the Creation Trilogy, Kac modified some amoebae, fish, mice, and plants by adding the GFP gene to their genomes, then placed them in a clear, four-foot-diameter plexiglass dome, a transgenic biosphere. While most transgenic organisms have been developed in isolation, the dome in The Eighth Day is meant to symbolize a new ecology that is forming between genetically modified crops in the United States. It is the eighth day in the creation of man and Earth (a foreshadowing of CRISPR?). The centerpiece of the display is a robot that is driven by green fluorescent amoebae called Dyctiostelium discoideum. When they are active the robot goes up; when they are quiet it goes down. The robot also has a camera attached to it that can be controlled by web participants.
It took Kac and plant biologist Neil Olszewski six years to create Edunia, a petunia that has a part of Kac’s immunoglobin gene expressed in its veins. According to Kac, “There’s a duality here—on the one hand, it’s a living thing like any other flower, it needs light and good soil, attentive watering to grow. On the other hand, the red veins in the flower carry my own DNA; I decided to give the Edunia the very same gene that in my body seeks out and rejects foreign matter.”[14]
Eduardo Kac is a pioneer in the field of transgenic art, which enabled him to collaborate with interested scientists and labs. Today there are many more artists hoping to combine their art with science and scientists hoping to combine their science with art. A lot of this collaboration occurs in community labs, the scientific equivalent of maker spaces.
Community Lab Spaces
Genspace is the first nonprofit community biotech lab established in the United States. It was started in 2009 in Brooklyn, New York. The idea for the project came from Ellen Jorgensen, who wanted a lab space that was open to everyone and would foster innovation, diversify biotechnology, and establish a space in which people could “take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open friendly atmosphere.”[15] The time was right. There was a pool of disenfranchised graduate students, artists with an interest in using science as their new canvas, and highly skilled professionals with ideas and projects they couldn’t pursue in their day jobs, all interested in the concept of a community lab. The 2008 recession had led to the downsizing and collapse of small biotech start-ups, which forced them to sell their equipment on eBay. Jorgensen, a molecular biologist with a PhD from New York University who has had various positions in the biotech industry, put out a call for like-minded people. They met in science journalist David Grushkin’s apartment to talk about biotechnology, the need for lab space, and “to learn more about bioengineering by inserting a gene into bacteria that caused it to glow green.”[16]
From that group Genspace slowly grew. In the core group that founded Genspace was Nurit Bar-Shai, an artist. She was interested in GFP and contacted me to talk about fluorescent proteins. We emailed back and forth, and I gave a few talks at the Genspace labs, which are located on an upper floor in the Metropolitan Exchange Building, a block away from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The first time I went I got off on the wrong floor. One of the people in the building gave me a brief tour on the way to the Genspace labs. The owner of the Metropolitan Exchange, Al Attara, has attracted a variety of entrepreneurs to the building with cheap rent, communal kitchens, and a symbiotic workplace. This was the perfect location for a community biotech lab. The open-plan floors of this old bank building were packed with walls of old equipment separating groups of desks occupied by young architects, artists, and biotechnologists all bustling with energy and ideas. Al, the building’s owner, is not happy with the building’s name. “I want to rename it the Brooklyn Arts and Design Arena—or BADA. Since we’re in the BAM District, it’ll be BADA-BAM,” he said in a New York Times article.[17] BADA-BAM would certainly capture the spirit of Genspace’s energy. Most of the community lab’s members are not scientists, and a lot of the energy is devoted to teaching and training members and students from local underfunded high schools. The lab only qualifies as a biosafety I lab, which means it is suitable for handling life forms that present no risk to humans.
From its very inception, Genspace and its founders have suffered from negative public misperceptions. Ellen Jorgensen recalls her first interactions with the press after forming Genspace: “The more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy, the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next Frankenstein.”[18] These fears that DIY biologists (DIYbio) or biohackers will be able to able to cause themselves or even others harm have grown, particularly since the advent and commercial distribution of CRISPR kits. In 2013, David Grushkin and Piers Millet, deputy head of the Biological Weapons Convention
