Week 6: Biotech + Art

“You are what you eat” – or at least that’s the old adage that seems to be reinforced in Gary Wenk’s article This is Your Brain on Food. It’s quite thought provoking to read how the chemicals in the food you eat mentally affect you only if they actually resemble some neurotransmitters in your brain. It’s also a sobering thought that food is itself not fundamentally different from drugs—in fact, food is just a type of drug. It affects our brains and who we are more than we realize, as is apparent from the “morphine-like chemicals” produced in your intestines after consuming things like milk and eggs. This raises the question of just how do we classify the human body and life, and I find artists’ point of view on this matter very intriguing.

Diagram showing the sheer complexity of the tiny mechanisms of the brain. Here we see neurotransmitters being released.
http://www.scienceofeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Synaptic-Transmission-CSNforum.png

As Ellen Levy describes in her paper, classifying life is much more challenging than a simple biology book may lead you to believe. Entities like chimeras and cyborgs already seem difficult to classify as they take their defining characteristics from various groups. One may even ask: is it fair to classy life in groups at all? After all, we have seen the definition of life and humanity challenged decade after decade throughout history. The artist Stelarc, for example, had an “Extra Ear” constructed on his arm, making life itself a canvas. Does its traditionally unnatural growth alter its classification?

Stelarc with the "Extra Ear"
http://www.fluxnetwork.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Ear_On_Arm_Stelarc1.jpg

Even more interesting to me is having Darwinian principles forcefully applied to machines. By random mutations to the machine code, the technology is allowed to “evolve” and improve over time. Previously it seemed common sense to think evolution was exclusively a “life” phenomenon, but with this creative application of Darwinism to machines, the question of biotechnology’s effect on what life is becomes much more difficult to answer.

Chris Kelty goes a bit further with the topic of pushing the limits of what’s allowed of human creativity with his description of “outlaws, hackers, and Victorian Gentlemen.” I find his view of “creativity breeds creativity” on the matter quite accurate regarding the current state of affairs. I believe the mindset of the “outlaws” will indeed be the one that reaches the cure for cancer and malaria because it appears in history that countless great discoveries are made by those who were told what they were doing was ridiculous or even unethical. 

Tumor seeking immune system cells are being developed by UCLA researchers to  locate and attack dangerous melanomas.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4142/4919909041_26dc35d1bb_z.jpg

Works Cited:

"Ear on Arm." Web. 11 May 2015. <http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fluxnetwork.net%2Fear-on-arm-stelarc-at-the-media-gallery%2F>.

Sherweb. "5 Recent Breakthrough Innovations in Biotechnology | SherWeb." SherWeb. 23 Aug. 2010. Web. 11 May 2015. <http://www.sherweb.com/blog/5-recent-breakthrough-innovations-in-biotechnology/>.

Tetyana. "Benefits of Starving and Why You Don't Have a Chemical Imbalance." Web. 11 May 2015. <http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scienceofeds.org%2F2012%2F06%2F12%2Fanorexic-brain-neurocircuits-behaviour%2F>.

Wenk, Gary. "Seed Magazineabout." This Is Your Brain on Food . Web. 11 May 2015.

"What Is Biotechnology?" What Is Biotechnology?. Web. 11 May 2015. <https://www.bio.org/articles/what-biotechnology>.