Wired's Top 10 New Organisms

Genetic engineering and manipulating living organisms is officially a part of pop culture, albeit still a very incipient trend. That this happened so fast is very interesting, and that pop culture is so fascinated with these new possibilities is also noteworthy. Below is Wired's list of top 10 organisms that didn't exist last year, something that, had I read it 2 years ago, might have seemed completely impossible. As such techniques become more and more part of a broader audience's lexicon of possible forms of expression, it is interesting to follow what will become of them. Not only in terms of what new organisms we choose to develop, or what manipulations become more or less popular and why, but how the total landscape of life will be inexorably changed by this.


[See the original piece at http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/YE_10_organisms#]

1. Ashera GD hypoallergenic cat

Lifestyle Pets has created a cat it calls the Ashera GD, which has been genetically engineered to be hypoallergenic. The high-tech blend of exotic cat varieties doesn't come cheap: This kitty in the window retails for $27,000 -- nothing to sneeze at. The ultra-rich around the world, however, don't mind the price tag. Six of the cats sold in December, three of them in the company's best market: Russia. Next year, expect a transgenic cat, which will remain kitten-size throughout its life.

2. Butanol-producing E. coli

Genetic engineering is getting so easy, even a kid can do it. A team of students from the University of Alberta, "the Butanerds," competed in the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, creating an E. coli strain that produces butanol fuel (albeit rather inefficiently). The Butanerds have competition from a host of well-funded startups, like Synthetic Genomics and LS9, which are trying to genetically modify single-celled organisms to create the fuels of the future.

3. Artful fluorescent tadpoles

At an Ohio State art show earlier this year, Russian artist Dmitry Bulatov presented his genetically engineered tadpoles, which glow red and green. Bulatov, the curator of the Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Russia, is one of a handful of artists around the world using biotechnology to create art. The field is controversial, because it involves experimenting with living things without a medical or therapeutic purpose. Bulatov edited a collection of essays on these issues called Biomediale: Contemporary Society and Genomic Culture.

4. Insulin-producing lettuce

In July, a University of Central Florida researcher announced he had genetically modified lettuce heads that produce insulin. They could be transformed into time-release capsules for people with diabetes, to help them maintain blood-sugar levels without regular injections.

5. Super CO2-absorbing trees

With global warming all over the news in 2007, many schemes have been proposed for taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Trees already do the world an admirable service sequestering carbon dioxide, but scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are also genetically modifying poplar trees to increase the amount of carbon that the trees can store.

6. Rapid vaccine-making button mushrooms

In November, Darpa-funded Pennsylvania State University researchers unveiled a new method for rapidly producing vaccines: genetically engineered button mushrooms. Pharming, using plants as chemical factories, is beginning to catch on as a cheap way to synthesize drugs. Within a few years, the Penn State scientists say their 'shrooms will be able to make 3 million doses of vaccine in 12 weeks. Rapid-response vaccine-making could come in handy in case of a bioterror attack or bird-flu outbreak.

7. Glow-in-the-dark cats

Photographs of cats genetically engineered by South Korean scientists to glow red when exposed to UV light made headlines around the world. What most news stories didn't mention was the scientific potential for fluorescent creatures: The animals' glow acts as a "green light" that lets scientists know that their genetic transformations of other, non-glowing genes have worked.

8. Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria

Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

9. Schizophrenic mice

July's news that Johns Hopkins researchers had created schizophrenic mice was a surprise, even to scientists who regularly create genetically altered mice to model human diseases. In recent years, we've seen very big mice, fearless mice, Rain Man mice and a host of others. But the schizophrenic experience of hallucinations, delusions of grandeur and paranoia seemed somehow distinctly human. However, scientists recently identified a single gene called DISC1 as a major schizophrenia risk factor, leading to the creation of these mice, which lack the gene. Anatomical examinations revealed similarities between the mice's brains and those of human patients. The mice also revealed behaviors -- trouble finding food, agitation in open fields -- that researchers say parallel human schizophrenic activities.

10. Yeast with poison-sensing rat genes

Temple University doctors announced in May that they'd genetically modified a strain of yeast to glow green in the presence of DNT, an ingredient in dynamite. The scientists used rat olfactory genes to sense the chemical and switch on fluorescent-protein producing genes. Biosensors might be better than man-made sensors for applications like detecting nerve gas, because they are cheap to produce.

Reflections on Videodrome

Videodrome deals with reality and its layers, and how to manage reality in a world of constant mediation. Our perception of the world is constantly mediated by our senses (that is the only way we know anything about reality). Technologies of mediation, such as television (computers, internet, etc) alter our views of reality in ways that are still to be fully understood, with social, philosophical and anthropological consequences that are far reaching and dramatic. The case of the first Iraq war was paradigmatic: the war was brought closer to everyone’s home because it was constantly on television. The war helped to change the mediascape by building the reputation of CNN and its model of 24 hour journalism. The way the public consumed the war changed: If during the Vietnam war the pictures published in magazines were a major force behind social and cultural movements, during the 1st Iraq war the images coming from the TV screen made it the first real time war in history. The images were used extensively by groups pro and anti war, and the idea of a precision drive strategy gained force by being “illustrated” by the cameras placed in bombs and airplanes, and by the reports coming from the field. This is all before the emergence of the Internet as we know it, which made possible a constant connection between every node on the web. Distance was made irrelevant, and the amount of information available was multiplied manifold. The possibilities of connection and mediation were also multiplied, and the way we experience what is real is more and more medium dependent.
The genre of reality TV is also symptomatic of our current cultural context of total and ubiquitous mediation. In the 1960’s and 1970’s artists like Andy Warhol proposed filmic experiments by shooting people as they slept, commenting on the real vs the image, and his comment that in the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame anticipated in many decades blogs, vlogs, Myspace/Facebook/etc, reality TV and other such developments that are part of our daily activities.

A world where we are constantly mediated also begs the question of the body: what is the place of the tactile, of the flesh, of the material experiences we were once used to? Are tactile, materialized experience more real than mediated ones? Does reality depend on materiality, or can mediation put us in touch with multiple layers of reality, making “the real” more and more obsolete? Do technologies augment and enhance our experience of reality, or are they alienating us from that same reality? Is Prof. O’blivion “real”, is he alive through his videotapes? Although VHS technology looks vintage 20 or 30 years later, the questions posed by the film are even more relevant today than they were at the time of its making. The framing of the question through outdated technologies also helps us to demystify the apparent universal truth of high technology: the permanent idea that more advanced technologies will deliver us from our condition as limited biological beings, that technologies can heal all evils of the world, that old technologies can be fixed by new ones become more “made up”, or “un-real” when we see them being played out with videocassettes. It seems that every new technology renews the possibility of overcoming reality.
The myth of technological deliverance is questioned in the film by the political project of O’blivion. Technology is not a neutral tool: it can serve political means, it has potentials that are constantly harnessed by different actors, for different purposes. Whether its an ideology of total inclusion, of easy profit through gratuitous porn and violence, of personal unlimited pleasures enabled by images on the screen (even if they depend on the torturing of others), or any other, every technological infrastructure is inhabited by and made functional by people, and people relating to other people. From that we get all the complexities of desires, power relationships, politics, ethics, philosophies, etc etc.
Perception begs the question of the body. How does the flesh enter into this economy of mediation? Flesh begs the question of desires, be they violent, sexual, etc. Cronenberg constantly investigates, as an artist, the imagery of technologies and bodies, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of that intersection in many different variations. Sex is always present, and usually in relationship to technologies that invade bodies, have pleasure with the body, make the body pleasurable in new ways, expand the body’s tactile capabilities. His take on technology is interesting because of the way he makes technologies fleshy and sexual. Technical objects breathe and heave, they have veins, fluids, intentions, agendas.

Questioning Eugenics in the Classroom

In my class Anthropology of the Body and Technology I wanted to raise issues that in my understanding were central to a critical debate on the body and technology. Most of those issues were related to how our contemporary society engages in bodily manipulations through different kinds of technology, and what kind of cultural meanings they had. In class we debated “post-human” or cyborg embodiments enabled by new technologies; biotechnology and how it changed cultural understandings of the body; the politics of stem cells; art and other cultural representations of the body as it becomes confused with technical artifacts. One important aspect, in my view, was to also discuss the history of bodily manipulations in the West, giving the students the idea that industrial societies have engaged biology and human enhancement since at least the 19th Century, namely through a discussion of Eugenics and how it manifested itself in the past, present and potentially in the future.
The first difficulty I encountered was to lead the students to question the very fundamental premises of how they understand the relationship between technology, body and society. To most of them, there is a direct causal relationship between these terms: technologies somehow “create” societal forms at each specific historical moment. Technologies were thus totally transparent in their functions, expressing fundamental truths about Nature through scientific inquiry. The increasing control over natural processes enabled by technology caused society to advance, being one of the principal causal factors of cultural change. It seems that many of them expected from the class a rather superficial debate on the myriad novel technologies available today, ranging from cloning, teledildonics, new medications, human-animal chimeras, and other such mind boggling achievements of science which are a constant presence in the media and cultural products. The fascination with new technology thus obfuscates the possibility of questioning them in any critical fashion, which very soon presented itself as the most important challenge of teaching such a class.
How to inspire them to look at these technical developments in a manner that differed from their common perceptions? How to see new technologies of the body not simply as an expression of scientific prowess but as embodiments and crystallizations of social and cultural perceptions? How to view them as expressing also specific relationships of power, social inequalities and political struggles? How to try to “deconstruct”, to use an outdated 20th Century term, the premises present in developments such as pre-implantation screening of embryos created in vitro? How to take a pervasive term such as “cyborg” and use it not just as a descriptive term of a very commonplace cultural icon of contemporary science fiction, but as an analytical tool that enables us to better grasp the reach of contemporary phenomena that are at the same time social and scientific, natural and artificial?
The discussions we had of race were by far the most polemic. The idea of race is a very strong cultural marker for North American students. As has become very clear in recent episodes of public expression of prejudice and the concurrent public outcry against these expressions, issues of race are still an exposed nerve in American society. When some scientists try to argue that the idea of human sub-races, for example, don’t exist, it is almost impossible for the students to even consider the possibility, or to suppress their beliefs for any moment whatsoever, enough to only grasp what the author means by “race”. I consider those debates an ethnographical moment for me: as a Brazilian citizen, I grew up in a society where race is deemed non-existent, at least in our fundamental philosophical understanding or the specificity of Brazilian society[1].
The most shocking debate, to me, was on Eugenics and new technologies. I showed the class the documentary The Lynchburg Story[2], a sadly little known episode in American history. The documentary shows survivors of the Virginia colony for the “unfit”, where poor and uneducated boys and girls, usually social outcasts, were forcibly sterilized under state law in order to ensure that their bad inheritance would not further pollute the collective health. The sterilization of American citizens on eugenic grounds, as the documentary shows, went on until the 1970s, and still to this day apologies from authorities over this period are a very rare occasion, and legal battles still rage on.
The shocking aspect to me was to see how unmoved most of my students were by the documentary. Some commented on the music or hairstyles, others stated that the sterilizations were done based on bad science or sloppy enforcement of legislation 9a danger we don’t run into nowadays), and most seemed apathetic to the issue. Indeed, eugenic sterilizations seem so alien to American reality as Soviet 5 year plans, and yet most Western countries adopted wide reaching eugenic legislation. The state of California, so identified today by cultural and political liberalism, was in the beginning of the 20th Century the champion of eugenic sterilizations, and crafted laws that would later inspire the Nazi regime.
When debating how new genetic technologies were being used to give new legitimacy to Eugenic practices of eliminating the unfit, this time through the alteration or elimination of bad genes, none of my students seemed at all impressed by this. After all, what’s wrong with eliminating disease, they asked me. Why should this be even questioned? The difficulty of connecting the horrors of early eugenics with the contemporary practice of it was, to me, a sad reminder of how far we still are from a critical understanding and informed public debate on science and technology.
The idea that early eugenics was based on “bad science” and that was the only flaw that it had, seemed to be a common one among my students. That means that eugenics itself, or the will to enhance and improve the human stock, either by eliminating certain traits, or prohibiting some traits to be passed on, was not flawed. With “good science” the mistakes of early days would be fixed and genetics would allow us to improve and enhance the human species biologically. What seemed for them harder to question was the idea that science can be used in manipulating the human biological condition, or that the better science was always the key to solving every social problem (conflated with biological pathologies). To question the place science has in our worldviews, or at least to become aware of it, seemed the most daunting task.
What is troubling is not that students find it appealing to use technology to solve human problems, or to improve human health. Those goals are very much something that society should invest energy and resources into. The problem is our collective inability to look at those goals and question the best way to achieve them, and to have well-informed opinions about what lays behind the choices we make in terms of how to manipulate our genetic make-up. What counts as healthy, and why? Who has the legitimacy to define that? Are these categories beyond critique? What means are legitimate to achieve such goals? What are the political issues behind our practices of bodily intervention and manipulation? To give up debate and just trust “good science” is, in my view, to ignore the place science has within our social structures, and is a choice not exercise the democratic imperative of making well informed choices and evaluating them openly and critically.

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NOTES:

[1] This strand of thought has its most fundamental expression in the work of Gilberto Freyre (especially Casa Grande & Senzala), a classic of Brazilian literature, Social Science and cultural commentary. His vision of a civilization borne out of the relationships established in the slave economy of sugarcane, at the origin of Brazilian colonization by the Portuguese, still mark the way Brazilians think of themselves intellectually.
[2] The Lynchburg Story. New York: Filmmakers Library, 1993, 55 min.

The Body and Social Constructionism (excerpt)

I refer you again to the story of Frankenstein, which has the subtitle “The Modern Prometheus”. According to Wikipedia:

"Modern Prometheus"
The Modern Prometheus is the novel's subtitle (though some modern publishings of the work now drop the subtitle, mentioning it only in an introduction). Prometheus, in some versions of Greek mythology, was the Titan who created mankind, and Victor's work by creating man by new means obviously reflects that creative work. Prometheus was also the bringer of fire who took fire from heaven and gave it to man. Zeus then punished Prometheus by fixing him to a rock where each day a predatory bird came to devour his liver.
Prometheus was also a myth told in Latin but was a very different story. In this version Prometheus makes man from clay and water, again a very relevant theme to Frankenstein as Victor rebels against the laws of nature and as a result is punished by his creation.
Prometheus' relation to the novel can be interpreted in a number of ways. For Mary Shelley on a personal level, Prometheus was not a hero but a devil, whom she blamed for bringing fire to man and thereby seducing the human race to the vice of eating meat (fire brought cooking which brought hunting and killing)[8] For Romance era artists in general, Prometheus' gift to man compared with the two great utopian promises of the 18th century: the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, containing both great promise and potentially unknown horrors.
Byron was particularly attached to the play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and Percy Shelley would soon write Prometheus Unbound.

The myth of Prometheus can be related back to technology, metaphorically represented as the fire that he gave as a gift to humanity, and for which he paid the price of punishment by Zeus. The cautionary tale of the monster that is created through the work of a scientist who dares to meddle with Nature’s laws is the warning against wanting to equal oneself to God through use of technology to imitate creation. In this sense, we can begin to see the importance of questioning, like Csordas’ suggests, the dualities between subject and object. Technologies that affect fundamental biological functions, for example, confuse these categories by crossing the boundary between the creator and his creation, and by breaking the cultural taboo of human self-determination of our own nature, materiality and biology. This taboo helps us to understand why there is so much resistance to human cloning, harvesting stem-cells from embryos, germ-line engineering, transgenic plants and animals and other such existing technological hybrids. These same technologies break the boundary between nature and culture, by allowing science to alter, through technology, basic biological entities such as genes and their expression.
Many analyses of issues related to the body coming from the Social Sciences and Anthropology also make use of the term “culturally constructed”. Again, this would entail a biological base that is re-signified through specific cultures. While this idea has been productive in allowing for the understanding of many issues, it has not shown to be adequate in understanding instances where the body itself is being modified through culture and science. So called “social-constructionism” still understands the body as a fixed biological entity that can only be re-signified by thought and culture. It does not allow for a broader understanding of how biology itself is intertwined with culture and history.
Social construction can also mean that the body is completely fluid and changing, and such ideas have been associated with “postmodern” thinking in general. Without debating the pertinence of calling this approach post modern, it becomes clear that erasing biology in favor of a total predominance of culture is also to miss the target, and fail to explain how the body exists in society. Biological and material realities cannot be simply explained away culturally, and the infinite examples of body alterations and even genetic manipulation cannot be reduced to mere culture. Reifying culture, thus, is as unproductive as giving nature the sole heuristic ability to give answers to questions such as gender, sexuality, race, body modification, plastic surgery, reproduction, family, medicine, and the numerous other spheres of society where we see an interplay between bodies and cultures.
Again, ideas such as embodiment help us to avoid the pitfalls of reifying either end of the nature/culture duality, effectively suggesting alternatives to this debate. Whether it is the best alternative or not, this has to be tested out and debated, preferably as you research your specific topics. Again, the exercise here is to try to think beyond usual dualities and categories, and not to convert or offer a ready-made solution to the problem of the body in Anthropology.

Comment on the movie Gattaca

To start properly this blog, I would like to publish a little text I wrote inspired by the movie Gattaca (Andrew Niccol), which I discussed in class with my students. This text was written in February 21, 2007, and was meant to be an introduction to class discussion on the topic of the politics of bodily control after biotechnologies.

Comment on Gattaca

The movie begins with a quote from the Bible. Creation as a divine prerogative is immediately invoked, as the movie tells a story of genetic engineering or the usurpation of that prerogative by “Man”, and the risks and taboos involved. One theme is present throughout the sequence we saw: self determination vs. genetic determinism. This can also be understood as individual freedom vs. natural “destiny”, or the powers of self-fashioning as a power of the “spirit” and of the “will” vs. the power of scientific self-fashioning as eugenic and hierarchical, totalitarian even as it pretends to be “democratic” or based on the “choice” for health. This theme, or the contrast between those two principles, is related to, but much more than a Nature vs. Culture debate, as it ties in all aspects of the societal management of science and scientific or societal control over the individual’s body. As we see in the movie’s introduction, that particular society has taken the path of unlimited access to the body through genetic engineering and scientific progress in the name of enhancement.
The sequence also tells a story within a story: little by little, the adoption of “backdoor eugenics”, as some authors have called the market regulated adoption of technologies that enhance the body and health through genetic and other technologies, has transformed the face of all society. The assumed unrivaled truth of genetics, or the perceived unlimited power of genes to tell the truth about one’s body and one’s self, leads to its adoption as a sort of universal measure of everything, from simple identifying schemes to the determination of one’s future life and death. Everything from personality traits, diseases, physical appearance and other bodily characteristics come to be derived from genetic make-up. This empirical or mechanistic truth is then adopted as a social golden rule: through genetic technologies society has divided individuals into categories of social prestige: from the best engineered individuals to the genetic unfit, all individuals are given a fixed place in society according to their genetic make-up. It is thought that these “truths”, because they are beyond question, can be a safe basis for regulating all of society. Its truth makes the social divisions fair, even to those that become outcasts.
Yet the story poses a question to this system: through those individuals that refuse their genetic fate, as society regulates it, it makes us think about the possibility that those genetic truths aren’t really final and beyond question. It poses the question: what place does free will, desire and freedom have in a time when all questions about health and the body have been (supposedly) answered?

Anton vs. Vincent
Healthy vs. unhealthy
Genetically engineered vs. child of love

Questions we can pose ourselves, based on the film:
What is the idea of a “person” after genetics? What sense do categories such as race, which attempt to describe and make sense of differences based in the body, have after genetics? What is a person’s will, and how is it different than instinct or biology, if at all? What is the soul?
Since the 19th Century, those individuals most controlled and regulated by the state, such as criminals and other moral “deviants”, become the first to be objects of new technologies as they are adopted as a means of social control and management. Michel Foucault analyzes how the 19th Century saw an important transition in the way the state regulates different categories of individuals. Morally deviant individuals such as prostitutes, pederasts and others gradually are understood as medical categories. The homosexual and the insane are some of the most visible and iconic of those characters. Morality loses explanatory power in the face of the inevitability of biological truths, and medicalization becomes the way to deal with these deviants. Thus the prison, the clinic and other social institutions arise to replace other forms of regulating power in society. This is happening again today: the search for gay genes, or the mandate to collect the DNA of criminals emerges as a sign of the shifting technologies of control in contemporary society. Through control of the genes, society can then regulate its individuals in different ways. Gattaca is a brief exploration of a society where that transition has happened in a particular way.
Last scene: the regulating of society through biological technologies can take several different forms. Genetic totalitarianism is but one option, and it is up to society to construct the ways people and differences will be regulated and represented. Art gives us different views of our differences, suggesting that the possibilities are endless.

Inauguration

This blog was one way I found to make public some of the ideas that have emerged from my experience at the University of Texas at Austin. Working for the Science, Technology and Society Program has given me a unique oportunity to expand my thinking on topics dear to me, related to the meanings and politics of the contemporary body. The texts published here are thoughts, lectures, and other texts I have been working with during my experience at UT Austin. This blog is a direct descendent from my earlier Brazilian blog O Komentarista, where I began my personal journey through some of these topics (among other fun things, such as fiction, thoughts on gender, etc.). The common thread that ties in the texts in this particular blog are their relatedness to my experience at Austin, Texas. I hope you enjoy reading them!