Future shock: the people making science grow

Synthetic biology. It doesn't sound like what it is. At the Science Gallery in Dublin, an exhibition called Grow Your Own is asking questions about who owns biology and what can we do with it? The exhibition has been accumulating headlines for a while, with confrontational and complex pieces such as "human cheese" and a rather bizarre hypothetical scenario of a woman giving birth to a dolphin. But as is often the case with the Science Gallery's increasingly probing conversations, there's a lot more going on than the initial impact.

At the helm of the exhibition is artist and designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, who curates it along with Anthony Dunne of the Royal College of Art, Paul Freemont from Imperial College, bio-hacker Cathal Garvey, and Michael John Gorman o

f the Science Gallery. Basically, synthetic biology is about designing and building new biological systems and machines. It’s incredibly close to us, as well as being futuristic.

Ginsberg (everyone calls her Daisy) has two brilliant pieces of work herself in the exhibition. The first is, well, poo. “Yes, my coloured poo,” she says, very matter of factly. Hugely engaging, her British accent veers off into South African on occasion (that’s from her parents, tea growers) and she chats merrily about the complexities of DNA while crunching her way through a salad.

The coloured poo is a project that projects into the future a time where you’ll be able to buy a supermarket yogurt project that can diagnose illnesses from the bacteria in your gut, and designate colouring to categorise them. Handy, and slightly more advanced than Googling one’s symptoms, but probably just as panic-inducing.

“Biology is wet and it lives, so it’s been a really effective tool to kind of make that quite tangible,” Ginsberg says. “Other projects like the human cheese do that too. That came out of a synthetics aesthetics project that I’ve been running. It really makes synthetic biologists come face to face with the fact that biology is in front of you. Also that synthetic biology is planning to engineer things that are pretty similar to us. Things that are found in our bodies. This relationship is much closer than the abstract discussion allows.”

The coloured poo took off. “We took it to MIT to the jamboree there. It was great. We showed it to the FBI, everyone. I once had an email from a yogurt manufacturer. I had to say ‘no, this is a fictional technology!’ But it could be a future that will come to us. People say, ‘Well, that’s actually a good idea.’ But is it a good idea? I don’t know. I’d rather a doctor test me.”

Ginsberg trained as an architect and never expected to be working in biology, let alone be an artist. After working in urbanism, she studied design at Harvard, and then went to the Royal College of Art to do a Master’s called “design interactions”, and has just returned to start a PhD. During the Master’s, which looked at the social, cultural and ethical implications of technologies, she heard a talk on synthetic biology that caught her imagination. And she began to think that if designers were so important in the industrial revolution, and then in the IT revolution, what will be their role in this new wave of biology?

Before that, she grew up on a farm, and so was always interested in nature. Her first confrontation with the future of nature was learning about genetic modification and all the questions that arise from that. She wondered why she felt uncomfortable with it, “I’m interested in those human reactions to modifying nature. You know, we have these instinctual reactions that might be bad, but those are true reactions, and where do they come from?”

What she began to learn from synthetic biology is that science doesn’t operate in isolation. “All of these much bigger political, cultural, ethical, economic questions and frameworks around science are part of the science itself, and synthetic biology is a really nice example of that and a really interesting test case in a way. How do we own DNA? Who should be owning it? And is it about single sequences of DNA, a function you could patent, or is it about putting them into bigger devices that could be patented? Synthetic biologists are actually building this whole framework of the science at the same time as actually doing the lab work.” That’s some gig. The key now, is to get those questions across to the public and start a conversation.

Ginsberg is intolerant of scientists who dismiss public discourse around something such as genetic modification because it’s undermines real reactions which matter.

“I often hear scientists and engineers say, ‘Well, if only they understood, they would want it.’ I don’t believe that . . . I think a lot of it stems from this division between science and society. There is a tendency to say, ‘Well, we operate separately, we’re just going to get on with the science and society can decide,’ and I don’t think it works like that. Science is part of society. Scientists are part of society, they’re funded by society. We really need to make those discussions much more fluid, open and to have a lot more possibility for critical debate about ideas within science.”

She’s also at pains to point out that she’s not necessarily “pro” synthetic biology, and that her level of understanding has brought her to a point where “All I see is many more questions.”

And that's really where something like Grow Your Own comes in, hitting you over the head with the more fun and sensational aspects, before dragging you into a cave where so much more dwells. For every bacteria modified to smell like bananas (it really does), there are deep ethical and social questions, such as Ginsberg's other piece exploring the possibility of introducing modified creatures into nature. If conservationists are interested in preserving past diversity, then synthetic biologists are interested in inventing diversity. Could you in fact introduce organisms into the wild whose sole purpose was to save and preserve nature?

Her massive print featuring a forest scene asks these questions, “When you look closely, you start to see organisms out of place, strange slugs and weird porcupines with red quills designed to catch seeds in their hair, strange mushrooms that are actually pumping anti-pathogenics to stop trees dying from different pathogens.”

She brings up a remark said to her by a colleague in Italy, "Scientists will say, 'Sometimes I wonder if we need a philosopher in the lab'." Philosophy, along with engineering and design and imagination and the actual science all conspires to throw up a dizzying number of questions and implications in Grow Your Own, a crash course introduction to the potential and work of this relatively new field.

If people are confused, Ginsberg would like them to leave the Science Gallery as confused as they were when they arrived, but with different questions, because it's about "not to be sold on synthetic biology, or against it, but to realise that we as society need to be having this discussion. Because it's up to us to say 'we're not comfortable with this' or 'we are comfortable with bits of it'. " It's going to be a long discussion, but Ginsberg is one to have it with.

Grow Your Own is at the Science Gallery until January 19th. See sciencegallery.com