art science collabo–what is there to it?
getting to the end of my time at SymbioticA and wanted to share probably my favorite art-science collaboration + collaborators, Silent Barrage.
SILENT BARRAGE
“An analogy for shaping Art-Science Collaboration”
Figure 1 Photograph of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower, 1940
The word collaboration is derived from the Latin word ‘collabarare’ meaning to work with. During the Second World War, etymologists show how the word ‘collaborate’ acquired a dark tone when it was used to describe French cooperation with the Nazi regime in the town of Vichy, implying a form of treachery through working with the enemy.[1] In this sense, collaboration has been used to describe situations where unlikely, external or even opposing parties work together. In this paper I shall use the acclaimed art and science piece, Silent Barrage, as a tool for describing and constructing art-science collaboration. I focus on one main theme, the relationship between the artist and scientist, as a way of self-referencing ideas embedded in this piece by its collaborators and in doing so develops a system, laden with values and processes for art-science collaboration. In this process of development, the piece itself Silent Barrage attains its own form of agency and commentary on art-science collaboration depicted in the sub-theme of space, distance, and scale that may compliment and construct beyond those of its producers/consumers.
The function of analogy here is twofold, providing both navigation and bridging between two discursive realms. In ‘Babies in Bottles and Tissue-Culture Kings”, Susan Squier’s exploration of the use of analogy in the development of reproductive technology shows us how the ability to visualize and understand an idea’s counterpart in another culture is a tool for participating in both. For example, in her analysis of the literary text ‘Tissue Culture King’, the main character Hascombe identifies African tribal religion as analogous to Western scientific practice and uses it as a means to apply and represent Western medical techniques to new subjects. Indeed while this story has its own set of complex and ethical dilemmas in its choice of analogy between ‘minister-population’ and ‘animal-human’, its relevance to this essay beyond description and construction lies in its identification of analogy’s limitations and dangers. She identifies the didactic nature of analogy as a way of obscuring important differences between cultures and conversely draws each party into a fragile position of control and manipulation to serve each other’s needs. These differences and positions are discussed in the first and most important theme of this essay which considers the relationship between artists and scientists.
Lastly, the use of analogy in each of the themes pays attention to what the author terms as the ‘domaining effect’, which are subtle shifts that take place in ideas when they move from one cultural or social context to another. Whereas the “Tissue Culture King” asks questions of how analogies between human and animal reproduction shift when they travel between the realm of fiction and the realm of ‘construction of scientific facts’, we are faced with a different set of spaces in Silent Barrage. How does the analogy between Silent Barrage’s loop and art-science collaboration shift as this interacts with academia, the public or within circles of artists and scientists?[2] If artists and scientists through their collaborations develop new language and methodologies for creating their work, which are then employed by each of their cultures, can these exist in symbiosis with existing languages and methodologies? If not, what specific methodologies in their former cultures are in a sense displaced?
I. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF SILENT BARRAGE
The 2009 Ars Electronica exhibition of Silent Barrage in Linz, Austria consists of thirty-two white cylindrical poles positioned in a grid pattern. Supported by a four-legged base, a sleek white cylinder rises to the ceiling above the heads of the audience. An octagonal-like disc caps the customized metallic plate and wired body of a robot, which zooms up and down the pole repeatedly, stopping only at precise points to draw a line around the cylinder’s circumference. A singular pole represents a position of an electrode in a culture of nerve cells sitting in a petri dish, thousand of miles away in Steve Potter’s Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The movement of the audience in the exhibition space is photographed and mapped using remote sensing technology and this camera determines the electrical stimuli patterns that are then sent on the Internet to the nerve cells in Atlanta.[3] As the electrical stimulations in a region of the Petri dish reach a threshold, the nerve cells respond thereby by generating stimuli causing the robotic arm to move up and down and to draw. The cycle of stimulation, transmission and production forms an interactive loop driven by multiple, unpredictable responses.
II. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARTISTS AND SCIENTISTS
The rich history and plasticity of the core group of individuals who have contributed to and directed the project’s ideas is subtly and creatively self-referenced in the landscapes of Silent Barrage. It is important to understand that Silent Barrage itself is not the result of a one-off ‘meaningful-connection’ but rather a maturation of several manifestations of a core idea over time. Therefore as the most recent piece from this collaborative team, which has shrunk and expanded since 2001, the aesthetic and technology bears upon it an accumulated record of different models of art and science collaborations, of which only a small percentage is discussed here.
The booting-up phase of the robot in Silent Barrage, wherein the team simulates a ‘learning phase’ for the robotic arm through a process of measuring and positioning its movements, can be likened to the initial stages of the art- science collaboration in 2001 when a group of artists and two scientists came together in a project named ‘Fish and Chips’. In this project, the idea of ‘moistmedia’[4] representing a symbiosis between dry pixels and wet biomolecules, was articulated by the SymbioticA Research Group. Using the nerve cells of a fish and silicon wafer technology, a robotic arm mapped electrophysiological stimuli as a 2D dimensional drawing. This initial art and science collaboration was for the artists an encounter and familiarization with technological tools. The core ideas expressed in 2001 ‘Fish and Chips’ showcase in Perth’s Biofield exhibition such as geographical isolation and the robot personna of Meart still persist in Silent Barrage, however while the younger robot is concerned embodying the idea of the ‘portrait’, the older Meart focuses on the idea of the closed loop manifested on an architectural and microscale. Furthermore what differentiates the nature of the collaboration after ‘Fish and Chips’ is the idea of studying and defining the robot’s parameters in order to make it function with accuracy and speed. Underlying this incorporation of a ‘scientific method’ was a desire to provide for the needs of the scientist in the project. For Steve Potter, the neurobiologist who becomes a core collaborator with the SymbioticA research group, the idea of Meart provided a unique platform for moving beyond ‘instructing’ nerve cells and alleviating control to the neurons—in effect allowing them to sustain processing data on their own. His phD students, Douglas Bakkum and Riley Zeller Townson at different times, become essential catalysts in developing the software, code source and validation which are the bedrock of their scientific thesis and development of the artwork.
Figure 5 Drawings by Meart based on variations of pen placement, feedback mechanism and population vector
Recording, analyzing and programming codes, quite simply became of way of learning Meart’s way of processing data and communicating this understanding through art, which in turn informed programming. What they learn from this continuous experimentation forms a kind of memory, defining the character of the robot. In this process, artists learn about data analysis while scientists learn about the artistic process, the value of which lies in its ability to communicate and perceive from different vantage points. For the artists and scientists involved their sustained contact in the project is also a process of familiarizing themselves with each other’s habits, languages and interests, which compliment and define the project in important ways. In an interview Guy Ben-Ary, who forms the SymbioticA research group core, two illustrative examples of how these are aesthetically manifested in Silent Barrage is Riley Zeller Townson’s background interests in power-grid which is sustained by artificial neural networks and Phil Gamblen hands-on work ethic which resulted in the motor experiments conducted during an residency in Steve Potter’s lab, directly influencing the up-and-down movements of the robotic arm.
In the neurological landscape of Silent Barrage, the processes of afference and efference serve as appropriate metaphors for the art-science collaborative process. Afference, a process in which neurons carry stimulus from the receptors or sense organs to the central nervous system (CNS) is often seen as the opposite of efference, where impulses are transmitted from the central nervous system to effectors, where reactions happen.[5] Whereas both are defined as distince in some scientific literatures, Silent Barrage constructs these processes as singular. The simultaneous action of afference and efference allow Meart to function normally. These pathways severed are much like the stress caused when these two states of mind are deemed as separate functions and assume the characteristics of hypermetopia and myopia.[6]
If we choose to see the components of the loop as an internal component, we envision that the audience and collaborators as outsiders who are sharing or witnessing the Meart’s internal process of interpretation and transmission. The idea of the audience as a source of stimulation, which constructs knowledge through participation and not by distanced observation is critical.
On various levels Silent Barrage offers a problematic dilemma between who produces, transmits and consumes in this art-science collaboration. The ideas of the audience as a consumer is no longer sufficient, as they are produce stimuli that feed into the loop inefficient in a system of constantly reproducing data. They are drawn into a space for discussion and reflection on ongoing research in neuroscience and art, in this sense it has amplified art as a communicative tool. In effect it shifts the politics of the scientific research, allowing agency to non-scientific practitioners in a transparent and open process. The idea of the artist or scientist as the producer of the artwork is also blurred and their role as productive agents in the response-driven loop is brought to question. Within this critical geography, the agency of Meart as a semi-living entity is advocated for in the next three brief themes.
Lastly, what does this analogy reveal about the domaining effect that happens in the discursive fields of art and science? In many senses the description of this work as ‘one of the few art and science collaborations that is both artistically meaningful and scientifically valid’ alludes to a value system by each party.[7] First it is essential to explain what characterizes art and science in terms of methods of acquiring knowledge, culture and philosophy. Science is defined by the scientific method, a process of forming a hypothesis, experimentation, rational and subjective analysis which affirms, develops or disproves the initial hypothesis. Logical argument and rational expression are paramount in its discourse, even to the extent of identifying rules and conditions which govern the nature of the hallowed term ‘creativity’.[8] The artistic process is plural and fluid, devoid of a set of steps or system that will generate an artistic product. However on a cultural and philosophical level, art and science methods begin to distinguish themselves in terms of how they appropriate such forms of knowledge. For the scientist, the scientific method is a means to proving that there is an implicit reality out there waiting to be discovered, independent of the observer’s mental state or cultural situation. Art on the other hand is an articulation of the complexities of human experience—limited yet unique perceptions and varied interpretations—from the chosen vantage point of the individual.[9] In terms of defining creativity, in the arts an individual may be deemed creative based on how the he/she translates an emotion or adjective into a physical form. In the sciences, creativity mostly infers a particular approach to solving a problem. While the field of cognitive science itself differentiates creativity across the arts and sciences, Silent Barrage comments on creativity as a singular act between artists and scientists based on a particle-pixel analogy.
Figure 6 Pixel-Particle
A more controversial domaining effect arises when one begins to question what makes an art-science outcome meaningful. The artists desire is to creatively translate and communicate decision-making, freewill and research on brain plasticity, addiction, memory, learning, epilepsy, basic neurology and feedback mechanisms. For the scientists, it is an opportunity to simulate and study neural activity for practical applications in each of the aforementioned fields of research. Yet the public’s interpretation of the work and its literature challenge and allocate their own forms of meaning and value to such collaborations.[10] For the collaborators in Silent Barrage, it is seen that meaning is achieved through a process of inclusion of each other’s needs, which becomes inherently linked to the other’s.
II. SPACE, DISTANCE AND SCALE
The landscape of Silent Barrage’s physical and digital spaces articulates the different aesthetics and methodologies of the science laboratory and the exhibition space, however this happens in the other’s space. It is in the exhibition space’s construction of the clean-cut, dynamic sculptures and precise placement of poles in a grid that the audience experiences the scientific laboratory and method. The meaningful marks created on paper, the extent to which the ring moves a certain distance above or below are specific interpretations of the activity of the nerve cell. At Steve Potter’s lab the stimulation of nerve cells caused by movement in an exhibition space allows the scientist to observe the activity of an audience reacting to and within the grid through the visualization of nerve networks. Between the two physical spaces, digital space serves as a medium for translation, closing this loop between geographical locations.
The [Internet is a]continuum that links real events with their transformation into images and media forms know few limits. This is largely because of the power of digital mediation, which is a product of the capacity of digital cultures to aggregate large numbers of phenomena into sometimes quite specific entry portal…We call this the Internet, but that now seems a rather quant way of describing the multi-leveled network that connects individuals and societies with often unpredictable outcomes.[11]
Within the petri-dish itself, another construction of the art-science collaboration occurs when one considers that nerve cells are taken out of their own context and put into new environment, similar to when artists Guy Ben-Ary and Phil Gamblen were immersed in a four-month scientific residency program. Not only are the nerve cells, much like artists, challenged to adopt new languages, make new connections in this neurological landscape they become both nerve centers and periphery effector organs. Their role in the neurological loop, either as depositories of information or sites of stimuli is blurred. The idea of the threshold here is important, linking ideas of human decision-making to neuron stimuli-generation.
Geographical distance is related to how knowledge is situated in art and science. The geographical isolation of Steven Potters lab is a commentary on scientific research’s detachment from external cultural aims while the grid in the artist’s exhibition space, in contact and interaction with the audience can be seen as a likening of knowledge in art as heavily culturally-situated. Digital space as a bridge between the two sheds light on the idea that scientific discoveries are intricately connected to the political, physical and cultural surroundings of a lab. This very idea is also a tool for education, discussion and reflection on contemporary art and science between the artist and audience in the exhibition setting.
Scale in each space also reinforces this commentary on situated knowledge and the importance that art places on the individual and science on the collective. The architectural scale of the project tells the observer that he or she is meant to enter and witness this space; a visitor can relate to the cylinder’s height, lines drawn by the robot and spacing considerations between each column allowing unobstructed movement between each pole. The idea of having each of the nodes represented by a pole speaks firstly to the local inclusion of individuals within a secondary regional scale. These art-science collaborations occurring within this localized builds up knowledge through immersion and experience, from which produces a larger resultant network in another related or discursive field. In another sense the translation of microbiological neural activity to the anthropomorphic realm helps to emphasize the idea of the digital technology as the enabling platform.
Figure 7 Positioning of electrode node in neural network 
Silent Barrage deconstructs the idea of the isolated scientific laboratory from the non-scientist communities through the digital medium connection with exhibition space. The ideas of control situated in centers or peripheries vanish; actors are embedded in a network which requires their participation in generating knowledge through experience. This highlights the importance of the individual’s immersion in a foreign field to form new connections in order become part of a larger meaningful network, in this sense it places an emphasis beyond the individual, which forms the core art-science experience. With digital, biological and robotic systems, art seems to have lost its traditional palette in Silent Barrage, its aesthetic and form of representation shifting to communicate scientific aesthetics and processes. Yet it gains a new aesthetic and palette, creating its own form of identity rooted in its position as a key interpreter of scientific research and new technological means of creating knowledge. The ‘barrage’ of networked activities within the petridish and the larger closed loop is symbolic of the process making connections is articulated in the aesthetic experience of the grid, even in the sound of the ‘lazy Susan’ plates drawing pixels. The very idea of silence, implied by its title, is linked to the quieting of an epileptic attack at the moment in which a ‘meaningful connection’ is made between activities and data in the lab and studio. In a sense Silent Barrage itself is a presumption that a meaningful connection will be made between nerve cells and movement, analogous here to one between the artist and scientist.
REFERENCES
Ascott, Roy (2008) “Pixels and Particles: The Parth to Syncretism” in Mel Alexenberg’s Educating Artists For The Future: Learning the Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bakkum, D, Gamblen, P., Ben-Ary, G., Chao, Z. & Potter, S. “Meart: The Semi-Living Artist”. Frontiers in Neurobotics. November 2007. Vol 1: 5
Bakkum, D., Shkolnik, A. C., Ben-Ary, G., Gamblen, P., DeMarse, T. B. and Potter, S. M. (2004). Removing some ‘A’ from AI: Embodied Cultured Networks. Embodied Artificial Intelligence. Iida, F., Pfeifer, R., Steels, L. and Kuniyoshi, Y. New York, Springer. 3139: 130-145
Burnett, Ron. (2008) “Learning, Education and the Arts in a Media Digital World” in Mel Alexanberg’s Educating Artist for the Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Da Costa, Beatriz (2008) Reaching the Limit: When Art Becomes Science in Tactical Biopolitics. Boston: MIT Press
Ede, Sian (2005) Art and Science. New York: St. Martin’s Press
Scott, Jill (2008) “Afference and Efference: Encouraging Social Impact Through Art and Science” in Mel Alexenberg’s Educating Artists For The Future: Learning the Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Squier, Suan (1994) “Babies in Bottles and Tissue-Culture Kings” in Babies in Bottles, Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
Wilson, Stephen (2010) “Art, Science and Technology” in Art+Science: How Scientific Research and technological innovation are becoming key to 21st century Aesthetics. London: Thames and Hudson
[1] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/es/article.php?ModuleId=10005466. Date accessed: September 21, 2010
[2] Babies in Bottles and Tissue-Culture Kings. Susan Merril Squier In Babies in Bottles, Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 1994. p. 112
[3] Bakkum, D, Gamblen, P., Ben-Ary, G., Chao, Z. & Potter, S. Frontiers in Neurobotics. November 2007. Vol 1: 5. p. 2-3
[4] Ascott, Roy (2008) “Pixels and Particles: The Path to Syncretism” in Mel Alexenberg’s Educating Artists For The Future: Learning the Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
[5] Scott, Jill (2008) “Afference and Efference: Encouraging Social Impact Through Art and Science” in Mel Alexenberg’s Educating Artists For The Future: Learning the Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.127-8
[6] St. John, Robert. “Afference and Efference”. www.metamorphosiscenter.com. Date Accessed: September 5, 2010
[7] SymboticA Press Release. www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/media?f=273980. Date Accessed: September 6, 2010
[8] Ede, Sian (2005) Art and Science. New York: St. Martin’s Press. p.2
[9] Ibid
[10] On the network-blogging website, http://www.asquare.org/networkresearch/2009/silent-barrage, an online contributor questions the description of Silent Barrage as one of the few examples of artistically meaningful and scientifically valid art and science collaborations.
[11] Burnett, Ron. (2008) “Learning, Education and the Arts in a Media Digital World” in Mel Alexanberg’s Educating Artist for the Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.123
PHOTOGRAPHIC SOURCES:
Figure 1 Photograph of Hilter in front of Eiffel Tower. http://www.scrapbookpages.com/natzweiler/History/FrenchResistance.html. Date accessed: September 14, 2010
Figure 2 Grid of Poles. http://www.flickr.com/photos/watz/4385986844/. Date Accessed: September 8, 2010
Figure 3 Robotic Arm. www.silentbarrage.com. Date Accessed: September 14, 2010
Figure 4 Electrode position in neuron culture. www.silentbarrage.com. Date Accessed: September 14, 2010
Figure 5 Drawings by Meart showing Douglas Bakkum’s variaton of pen placement, feedback mechanism and population vector. “Multi-Electrode Array aRT- The MEART art-science project’ from Douglas Bukham’s Presentation at a Conference in Shanghai, China. July 23, 2006. Courtesy of Guy Ben-Ary
Figure 6 Pixel-Particle. “Multi-Electrode Array aRT- The MEART art-science project” from Douglas Bukham’s Presentation at a Conference in Shanghai, China. July 23, 2006. Courtesy of Guy Ben-Ary
Figure 7 Positioning of electrode node in neural network. www.silentbarrage.com. Date Accessed: September 14, 2010
Hydroponics at Home
One of the first things I realized about Perth is that a good part of the people I met in my first week had an ongoing habit of adopting do-it-yourself projects. One of my initial housemates had built his own solar-powered bike which he rides everyday to the university! The project below, a hydroponic system, belongs to my housemate’s good friend, Adam. Hydroponics is simply a way of growing plants in mineral-rich water instead of soil. What is great about Adam’s project is that every waste product is a source ingredient for another process in this system. The cycle in this system is based on production that takes into account that its waste products are the ‘fuel’ for the next process.
The hydroponic setup is simple. It consists of a large, deep tray which contains the plants (a variety of vegetables) that sit in an expanded clay foundation (which serves as the absent ‘soil’). Beneath it is another large basin, this time much deeper, containing water operated by a pump that connects the fresh water in the lower basin to the plant tray above.
The process begins by adding seasol to the water in the lower basin. Seasol is a sort of fertilizer containing nutrients for plant growth. After the seasol settles over a period of time, fish (in this case trout) is added the to the basin. The fish use the nitrites the water and ‘poo’ nitrates into the water.
This very water containing nitrates are then pumped into the plant tray. The various vegetables absorb the nitrates in the water for growth (for structural proteins and cell growth) and in the process ‘filter’ the water which then leaks through the airy environment of expanded clay and back into the water basin below.
The trout fish living the water basin during this winter period below grow over time and once big enough as fished out and cooked. After another batch of fish perhaps the native silver perch or barramundi are used in the summer.
Plants such as duckweed or water chestnuts can also be grown in the water basin.
So in effect, vegetables are grown on the tray, fish in the water basin, water is not wasted but filtered and used efficiently throughout this cyclic, low-tech process.
“Be open, imaginative and be lucky”
Dyson’s advises us…
This week the Syns family met Dyson and we talked heart-to-heart about everything from science, studying across the sciences, beyond the sciences, nuclear proliferation, evolution, spirituality in the biotechnological future…to how he raised such amazing kids. It may seem far-fetched to discuss growing buildings and domesticating biotechnology so genomes would be the new data…where people would be playing with and designing with genomes instead of computers.
But it helped that he was a really humble 86 year old extremely reknowned physicist…
Here is his article from the new york times book review
Our Biotech Future
By Freeman Dyson
1.
It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.
These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.
I see a close analogy between John von Neumann’s blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.
//
I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized. The first step in this direction was already taken recently, when genetically modified tropical fish with new and brilliant colors appeared in pet stores. For biotechnology to become domesticated, the next step is to become user-friendly. I recently spent a happy day at the Philadelphia Flower Show, the biggest indoor flower show in the world, where flower breeders from all over the world show off the results of their efforts. I have also visited the Reptile Show in San Diego, an equally impressive show displaying the work of another set of breeders. Philadelphia excels in orchids and roses, San Diego excels in lizards and snakes. The main problem for a grandparent visiting the reptile show with a grandchild is to get the grandchild out of the building without actually buying a snake.
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too.
Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.
Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous. Rules and regulations will be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others. The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.
If domestication of biotechnology is the wave of the future, five important questions need to be answered. First, can it be stopped? Second, ought it to be stopped? Third, if stopping it is either impossible or undesirable, what are the appropriate limits that our society must impose on it? Fourth, how should the limits be decided? Fifth, how should the limits be enforced, nationally and internationally? I do not attempt to answer these questions here. I leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers.
2.
A New Biology for a New Century
Carl Woese is the world’s greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy, the classification and understanding of microbes. He explored the ancestry of microbes by tracing the similarities and differences between their genomes. He discovered the large-scale structure of the tree of life, with all living creatures descended from three primordial branches. Before Woese, the tree of life had two main branches called prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the prokaryotes composed of cells without nuclei and the eukaryotes composed of cells with nuclei. All kinds of plants and animals, including humans, belonged to the eukaryote branch. The prokaryote branch contained only microbes. Woese discovered, by studying the anatomy of microbes in detail, that there are two fundamentally different kinds of prokaryotes, which he called bacteria and archea. So he constructed a new tree of life with three branches, bacteria, archea, and eukaryotes. Most of the well-known microbes are bacteria. The archea were at first supposed to be rare and confined to extreme environments such as hot springs, but they are now known to be abundant and widely distributed over the planet. Woese recently published two provocative and illuminating articles with the titles “A New Biology for a New Century” and (together with Nigel Goldenfeld) “Biology’s Next Revolution.”[*]
Woese’s main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, with its assumption that biological processes can be understood by studying genes and molecules. What is needed instead is a new synthetic biology based on emergent patterns of organization. Aside from his main theme, he raises another important question. When did Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution he means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species. He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution does not go back to the beginning of life. When we compare genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures, we find evidence of numerous transfers of genetic information from one lineage to another. In early times, horizontal gene transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time.
Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously. In his “New Biology” article, he is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.
But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.
The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.
Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.
I would like to borrow Carl Woese’s vision of the future of biology and extend it to the whole of science. Here is his metaphor for the future of science:
Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow—patterns in an energy flow…. It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as stable, complex, dynamic organization.
This picture of living creatures, as patterns of organization rather than collections of molecules, applies not only to bees and bacteria, butterflies and rain forests, but also to sand dunes and snowflakes, thunderstorms and hurricanes. The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood. The reductionist physics and the reductionist molecular biology of the twentieth century will continue to be important in the twenty-first century, but they will not be dominant. The big problems, the evolution of the universe as a whole, the origin of life, the nature of human consciousness, and the evolution of the earth’s climate, cannot be understood by reducing them to elementary particles and molecules. New ways of thinking and new ways of organizing large databases will be needed.
3.
Green Technology
The domestication of biotechnology in everyday life may also be helpful in solving practical economic and environmental problems. Once a new generation of children has grown up, as familiar with biotech games as our grandchildren are now with computer games, biotechnology will no longer seem weird and alien. In the era of Open Source biology, the magic of genes will be available to anyone with the skill and imagination to use it. The way will be open for biotechnology to move into the mainstream of economic development, to help us solve some of our urgent social problems and ameliorate the human condition all over the earth. Open Source biology could be a powerful tool, giving us access to cheap and abundant solar energy.
A plant is a creature that uses the energy of sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide and other simple chemicals into roots and leaves and flowers. To live, it needs to collect sunlight. But it uses sunlight with low efficiency. The most efficient crop plants, such as sugarcane or maize, convert about 1 percent of the sunlight that falls onto them into chemical energy. Artificial solar collectors made of silicon can do much better. Silicon solar cells can convert sunlight into electrical energy with 15 percent efficiency, and electrical energy can be converted into chemical energy without much loss. We can imagine that in the future, when we have mastered the art of genetically engineering plants, we may breed new crop plants that have leaves made of silicon, converting sunlight into chemical energy with ten times the efficiency of natural plants. These artificial crop plants would reduce the area of land needed for biomass production by a factor of ten. They would allow solar energy to be used on a massive scale without taking up too much land. They would look like natural plants except that their leaves would be black, the color of silicon, instead of green, the color of chlorophyll. The question I am asking is, how long will it take us to grow plants with silicon leaves?
If the natural evolution of plants had been driven by the need for high efficiency of utilization of sunlight, then the leaves of all plants would have been black. Black leaves would absorb sunlight more efficiently than leaves of any other color. Obviously plant evolution was driven by other needs, and in particular by the need for protection against overheating. For a plant growing in a hot climate, it is advantageous to reflect as much as possible of the sunlight that is not used for growth. There is plenty of sunlight, and it is not important to use it with maximum efficiency. The plants have evolved with chlorophyll in their leaves to absorb the useful red and blue components of sunlight and to reflect the green. That is why it is reasonable for plants in tropical climates to be green. But this logic does not explain why plants in cold climates where sunlight is scarce are also green. We could imagine that in a place like Iceland, overheating would not be a problem, and plants with black leaves using sunlight more efficiently would have an evolutionary advantage. For some reason which we do not understand, natural plants with black leaves never appeared. Why not? Perhaps we shall not understand why nature did not travel this route until we have traveled it ourselves.
After we have explored this route to the end, when we have created new forests of black-leaved plants that can use sunlight ten times more efficiently than natural plants, we shall be confronted by a new set of environmental problems. Who shall be allowed to grow the black-leaved plants? Will black-leaved plants remain an artificially maintained cultivar, or will they invade and permanently change the natural ecology? What shall we do with the silicon trash that these plants leave behind them? Shall we be able to design a whole ecology of silicon-eating microbes and fungi and earthworms to keep the black-leaved plants in balance with the rest of nature and to recycle their silicon? The twenty-first century will bring us powerful new tools of genetic engineering with which to manipulate our farms and forests. With the new tools will come new questions and new responsibilities.
Rural poverty is one of the great evils of the modern world. The lack of jobs and economic opportunities in villages drives millions of people to migrate from villages into overcrowded cities. The continuing migration causes immense social and environmental problems in the major cities of poor countries. The effects of poverty are most visible in the cities, but the causes of poverty lie mostly in the villages. What the world needs is a technology that directly attacks the problem of rural poverty by creating wealth and jobs in the villages. A technology that creates industries and careers in villages would give the villagers a practical alternative to migration. It would give them a chance to survive and prosper without uprooting themselves.
The shifting balance of wealth and population between villages and cities is one of the main themes of human history over the last ten thousand years. The shift from villages to cities is strongly coupled with a shift from one kind of technology to another. I find it convenient to call the two kinds of technology green and gray. The adjective “green” has been appropriated and abused by various political movements, especially in Europe, so I need to explain clearly what I have in mind when I speak of green and gray. Green technology is based on biology, gray technology on physics and chemistry.
Roughly speaking, green technology is the technology that gave birth to village communities ten thousand years ago, starting from the domestication of plants and animals, the invention of agriculture, the breeding of goats and sheep and horses and cows and pigs, the manufacture of textiles and cheese and wine. Gray technology is the technology that gave birth to cities and empires five thousand years later, starting from the forging of bronze and iron, the invention of wheeled vehicles and paved roads, the building of ships and war chariots, the manufacture of swords and guns and bombs. Gray technology also produced the steel plows, tractors, reapers, and processing plants that made agriculture more productive and transferred much of the resulting wealth from village-based farmers to city-based corporations.
For the first five of the ten thousand years of human civilization, wealth and power belonged to villages with green technology, and for the second five thousand years wealth and power belonged to cities with gray technology. Beginning about five hundred years ago, gray technology became increasingly dominant, as we learned to build machines that used power from wind and water and steam and electricity. In the last hundred years, wealth and power were even more heavily concentrated in cities as gray technology raced ahead. As cities became richer, rural poverty deepened.
This sketch of the last ten thousand years of human history puts the problem of rural poverty into a new perspective. If rural poverty is a consequence of the unbalanced growth of gray technology, it is possible that a shift in the balance back from gray to green might cause rural poverty to disappear. That is my dream. During the last fifty years we have seen explosive progress in the scientific understanding of the basic processes of life, and in the last twenty years this new understanding has given rise to explosive growth of green technology. The new green technology allows us to breed new varieties of animals and plants as our ancestors did ten thousand years ago, but now a hundred times faster. It now takes us a decade instead of a millennium to create new crop plants, such as the herbicide-resistant varieties of maize and soybean that allow weeds to be controlled without plowing and greatly reduce the erosion of topsoil by wind and rain. Guided by a precise understanding of genes and genomes instead of by trial and error, we can within a few years modify plants so as to give them improved yield, improved nutritive value, and improved resistance to pests and diseases.
Within a few more decades, as the continued exploring of genomes gives us better knowledge of the architecture of living creatures, we shall be able to design new species of microbes and plants according to our needs. The way will then be open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things that gray technology can do, and also to do many things that gray technology has failed to do. Green technology could replace most of our existing chemical industries and a large part of our mining and manufacturing industries. Genetically engineered earthworms could extract common metals such as aluminum and titanium from clay, and genetically engineered seaweed could extract magnesium or gold from seawater. Green technology could also achieve more extensive recycling of waste products and worn-out machines, with great benefit to the environment. An economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability, using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy. New species of termite could be engineered to chew up derelict automobiles instead of houses, and new species of tree could be engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulose.
Before genetically modified termites and trees can be allowed to help solve our economic and environmental problems, great arguments will rage over the possible damage they may do. Many of the people who call themselves green are passionately opposed to green technology. But in the end, if the technology is developed carefully and deployed with sensitivity to human feelings, it is likely to be accepted by most of the people who will be affected by it, just as the equally unnatural and unfamiliar green technologies of milking cows and plowing soils and fermenting grapes were accepted by our ancestors long ago. I am not saying that the political acceptance of green technology will be quick or easy. I say only that green technology has enormous promise for preserving the balance of nature on this planet as well as for relieving human misery. Future generations of people raised from childhood with biotech toys and games will probably accept it more easily than we do. Nobody can predict how long it may take to try out the new technology in a thousand different ways and measure its costs and benefits.
What has this dream of a resurgent green technology to do with the problem of rural poverty? In the past, green technology has always been rural, based in farms and villages rather than in cities. In the future it will pervade cities as well as countryside, factories as well as forests. It will not be entirely rural. But it will still have a large rural component. After all, the cloning of Dolly occurred in a rural animal-breeding station in Scotland, not in an urban laboratory in Silicon Valley. Green technology will use land and sunlight as its primary sources of raw materials and energy. Land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities but are spread more or less evenly over the planet. When industries and technologies are based on land and sunlight, they will bring employment and wealth to rural populations.
In a country like India with a large rural population, bringing wealth to the villages means bringing jobs other than farming. Most of the villagers must cease to be subsistance farmers and become shopkeepers or schoolteachers or bankers or engineers or poets. In the end the villages must become gentrified, as they are today in England, with the old farm workers’ cottages converted into garages, and the few remaining farmers converted into highly skilled professionals. It is fortunate that sunlight is most abundant in tropical countries, where a large fraction of the world’s people live and where rural poverty is most acute. Since sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil, green technology can be a great equalizer, helping to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries.
My book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999) describes a vision of green technology enriching villages all over the world and halting the migration from villages to megacities. The three components of the vision are all essential: the sun to provide energy where it is needed, the genome to provide plants that can convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently, the Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural populations. With all three components in place, every village in Africa could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of civilization. People who prefer to live in cities would still be free to move from villages to cities, but they would not be compelled to move by economic necessity.
Notes
[*] See Carl Woese, “A New Biology for a New Century,” in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2004 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/MMBR.68.2.173-186.2004); and Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese, “Biology’s Next Revolution,” Nature, January 25, 2007. A slightly expanded version of the Nature article is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0702015v1.
