Posts filed under 'Biology'
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
Before their nursery sanitization, fairy tales were savage. Remember how Cinderella’s stepmother mutilated her own daughters’ feet to fit the glass slipper, but was betrayed by the oozing blood? Or the rape and cannibalism in early versions of Sleeping Beauty? If you don’t, then you haven’t read the oldest versions of these now toothless, Disneyfied stories. Fairy tales once captured the primal violence in human nature all too well.
Fairies themselves were often grotesque and inhumanly cruel, and that’s the pre-Victorian tradition to which the work of artist Tessa Farmer cleaves. Her work juxtaposes dead insects and the remains of birds and snakes with tiny, skeletal fairy sculptures so small, she needs a microscope to assemble them, and viewers need a magnifying glass to appreciate them. Unlike the rosy-cheeked, butterfly-winged fairy girls you find on greeting cards, Farmer’s corpselike fairies rip their prey apart bare-handed, gnawing on the legs of hapless insects like ravenous, humorless Gollums. I would normally find a dead, twisted spider corpse disgusting, but Farmer’s gremlins are far creepier than their victims.
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
A 2006 review by Stephen Feeke describes Farmer’s later work, The Terror:
Talking with Tessa Farmer about her work made me think of spiteful little boys who delight in pulling the wings off daddy-long-legs (sic). Seemingly inexplicable, this kind of puerile cruelty actually creates an understanding of the natural world. Pulling something apart helps us to learn how it was put together and how it functioned; it teaches us about life and death and this knowledge helps us to assert our dominance over nature. . .
Farmer is at the centre of all this action. She is complicit in the behaviour of her fairies and yet oddly speaks as if she is removed from it. Distancing herself from the possible carnage the fairies are hatching, she delights in the suggestion that they have the potential to exist independently of her. In this way she heightens our experience of the work, encouraging us to believe it might all be possible and true. Bearing in mind what happened to Dr Frankenstein, however, presumably Farmer herself is at as much risk as the rest of us.
In the artist’s own words,
In 2005 I first observed parasitic behaviour among the fairies, which had shrunk to some 7mm tall. ‘Nymphidia’ (named after a sixteenth century fairy poem by Michael Drayton) is another swarm, again revealing scenes of torture and consumption. The focus of the attack is a wasps’ nest, surrounded by fairies battling with wasps and other insects. On closer inspection they can be seen hatching out of wasps in the cells of the nest, by pushing off their heads and climbing out of the hollow shell of the consumed wasp.
The interesting thing to me is that, in reviews and comments on Farmer’s work, and in her own statement, the violence is described in increasingly naturalistic, pseudo-scientific terms. Are these “fairies” or “parasites”? Are they out of nature, or embodying nature? Is Farmer-the-artist, like Dr. Frankenstein before her, a meticulous scientist who reanimates flesh in order to understand it, or a monomaniac blind to the moral implications of her creation? Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” never seemed so appropriate!
At dinner last night, I disgusted my companions by sharing the appalling reproductive habits of the mite Acarophenax tribolii (courtesy of the Evilutionary Biologist - I warn you, it’s icky). I wish I could claim I was inspired in this misbehavior by Halloween, but as a biologist, I wander into inappropriate dinner conversation all the time. I can’t help it, really. Thinking about it scientifically, objectively, blunts the horror that kicks in when one begins to instinctively anthropomorphize the mites. Curiosity dominates empathy, and fascination displaces disgust - at least for a time. Biology is full of violence and broken taboos, but these natural relationships carry only the moral baggage we bring to them. The mites don’t know how to live any other way, and judging them or reviling them for it is absurd.
The way Farmer speaks of her work, with clinical detachment, is an invitation to follow her into a morally neutral scientific space. She must know full well that the viewer will be unable to sustain that detachment, because her fairies are not mites. They’re nearly human. And we also empathize with the fairies’ helpless victims - birds, ladybugs, bees, even that unlucky spider, curled and twisted in attitudes of pain that are universal. So despite our best efforts to remain detached, we won’t. Like looking at an optical illusion that oscillates from an old woman to a young girl, or a vase to a pair of profiles, we’ll find ourselves identifying first with the victims, then with the cruel aggressors (in these battles, the fairies seem to rarely be at a disadvantage).
By doing this - by forcing human emotions onto her invented ecosystem - Farmer alludes to the destructive effect humans have had on our world. In the scene below, from Nymphidia, a corpselike fairy erupts from a parasitized honeycomb, snaring an unsuspecting wasp. Nymphidia predates the news of honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD) - but isn’t it an appropriate representation? Some unknown force, which we may as well depict as a wasp-sized demon, is invading beehives and destroying colonies in the “real” world. This fairy is the wasp/bee Grim Reaper: fanciful, inaccurate, but standing in for a destructive force that actually exists. And it’s fitting that the tiny Reaper is anthropomorphic, because CCD is almost certainly is due to human influence: something in our husbandry practices is making the bees vulnerable.
Nymphidia (detail)
Mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2005
via Miniature Worlds
In the end, Farmer’s art is barely about “fairies” at all. That is, it’s barely about Disneyfied fairies: Tinkerbell, wishes, magic, romance. It is, of course, very much about the cruel, atavistic fairies of the primal fairy tales - disturbing representations of the extremes of human nature. And it’s human nature that pits us against Nature.
My lingering question about Farmer’s work is this: do the fairies know any better? Are they, like the mites, innocent by reason of insentience? Or are they, like the humans whose skeletons they mimic, not merely violent, but unnecessarily, deliberately cruel? I’d like, as a biologist, to embrace the former. But I think - based especially on her use of words like “torture” - that Farmer intends us to believe the latter. We are Farmer’s fairies. Nature, and we, suffer for it.
October 27th, 2007
Protein #324, 2003
enamel, silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
The protein-inspired art of Steve Miller in turn inspires Visualizing Science: Image-making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge, a cool-sounding symposium to be held next Wednesday, October 24, 2007, at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.
Miller’s strongest work is reminiscent of Japanese brush painting or Hubble photographs: darkly tangible, stylized forms floating in luminous space. But other pieces, like “Protein #330,” rely on the intrigue of the incomprehensible. What can that scribbled notation mean to the audience? Yes, it’s imposing a certain quantitative context on the protein’s inscrutable, cloud-like form, inviting reflection on the tension between the unlabeled natural artifact and the scientist’s interpretation of it. But I have no idea what it means. Nor would it matter if it was mathematically nonsensical; no one would notice. Not sure how I feel about that.
Protein #330, 2003
silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
Steve Miller’s work
Via the indispensible Biomedicine on Display (bookmark it!)
October 20th, 2007
Jason at Cephalopodcast.com challenged me to visit this site, sponsored by the New York Zoo, to create my “wild self.” It’s like one of those flip books where you mix and match body parts. As a biologist, such egregious phylogenetic cross-pollination bugs me a little bit, but darn, I like my new look.
October 18th, 2007
The co-discoverer of the double helix, James Watson, has once again placed his Nobel-icious foot in his mouth.
He was meant to give a talk today in Britain on his new book, but his appearance has been cancelled in the wake of remarks implying that people of African descent are genetically less intelligent than whites. He’s also been suspended by Cold Spring Harbor, which is perhaps a wee bit disingenuous of them, because he’s said many outre things before, and as far as I know they’ve never done anything about it.
The thing that surprises me most is not that he offended people, but that he’s now criticizing the genes of dark-skinned individuals. I thought he was on the other side - when I last saw him talk, he argued that pasty white women have inferior libidos. Oh, and that we should be genetically engineered to be prettier. What-ever. . .
October 18th, 2007
Microviridae: bacteriophage φX174
Bugle beads, seed beads, Czech crystals
Holly Wichman
This sculpture made of purple and clear glass beads depicts bacteriophage φX174, a virus that infects bacteria. It rests on a surface that portrays an adaptive landscape, a conceptual visualization. The ridges represent the gene combinations associated with the greatest fitness levels of the virus, as measured by how quickly the virus can reproduce itself. φX174 is an important model system for studies of viral evolution because its genome can readily be sequenced as it evolves under defined laboratory conditions. (source)
The beaded bauble above represents a virus of the family Microviridae - icosahedral bacteriophages, or bacteria-eating viruses. The Microviridae include a bacteriophage that infects and kills Chlamydia, and another bacteriophage that infects Bdellovibrio - itself a parasite preying on other bacteria. Bacteriophages don’t cause disease in humans, and in some cases may even be used therapeutically (for more, see this interesting article in Science).
The artist is Holly Wichman, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Idaho. Wichman makes beaded models of the bacteriophages studied in her lab. Wichman infected Bentley Fane, a professor at the University of Arizona, with the beading bug, and the two have collaborated on a collection of beaded virus sculptures.
According to the artists, beading has generated some intuitive insights into viral structure:
When Bentley Fane made his models of structures from T=1 through T = 16, he discovered that some beaded structures were very stable, while others (T = 9, 12, 16) were quite unstable. This is because the sides of the numerous facets directly coinciding with the main edges of the icosahedron. Whether this instability can be extrapolated to viral structures in nature is unknown, but the structures that are unstable when beaded tend to be rare in nature. There is only one known T = 9 particle, and no known T = 12. The T = 16 in nature are the Herpesviruses, and they have both envelopes and teguments to add to stability.
“Crystal Structures: Viruses in Glass” opens tonight at the University of Idaho Reflections Gallery (through October 29, 2007).
Thanks to Jane for the heads up!
For more phage-related art, check out this archive from the 2005 American Society of Microbiology, and this collection, both hosted by Forest Rohwer of SDSU.
October 11th, 2007
Der mensch gesund und krank, menschenkunde 1940 . . . . Vol. 2
Zürich-Leipzig, 1939. Relief halftone.
National Library of Medicine
Fritz Kahn
Street Anatomy recently posted a selection of industrial-influenced anatomical art by Fritz Kahn. How I wish the publishers of modern textbooks took design and aesthetics as seriously - it is neither wrong nor wasteful nor unscientific to make a functional illustration artistically challenging.
Bibliodyssey hit the same topic last year. As did Morbid Anatomy. Unfortunately, there are very few Fritz Kahn images online, mostly at Dream Anatomy and the British Library. Like Peacay, I’ve been stymied in my efforts to find more. . .
October 8th, 2007
I just finished Eric Kandel’s new book, In Search of Memory. For those of you who don’t recognize his name, Kandel won the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for his work on the cellular basis of learning and memory. He is also the author, with Tom Jessell and J. H. Schwarz, of the definitive neuroscience textbook, Principles of Neural Science (often called simply “Kandel”). In Search of Memory is part memoir, part popular science, but entirely self-conscious, and it prompted me to think about the way each of us presents ourselves to the world in our writing.
There are two sides to neuroscience: the colorful, anecdote-filled side, and the truly quantitative, equation-filled physiological side. Oliver Sacks, prolific author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, etc., pretty much owns the world of anecdotes. He specializes in rare and unique case histories which fascinate and provoke new hypotheses, but can’t lend themselves to rigorous testing. Kandel’s Principles of Neuroscience rests firmly on the other end of the spectrum, on long, repetitive histories of experimentation in unglamorous model systems like flies, snails, worms, and rats. It’s a remarkably useful and comprehensive reference, but I don’t recommend it to any but the hardiest of science undergraduates.
In Search of Memory, like many popular science books, falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It begins with Kandel’s memories of the Holocaust in Vienna; although he and his family escaped to the United States, he uses his childhood disillusionment, confusion, and fear to frame (and justify) his professional quest to understand the human mind. As the book continues, it becomes a history of the nascent field of neuroscience - a lucid history, but one that inevitably revolves around unfamiliar names and places: so-and-so at Columbia, so-and-so at Harvard, etc. Almost all histories of science are recounted in this way, as a litany of names and places. Unless the scientists are made human and interesting, it doesn’t work, and it’s hard to capture personalities without becoming downright gossipy, as James Watson did in The Double Helix.
Kandel conscientiously tags each scientist’s name with a smatter of personality - this colleague played tennis, that one loved symphonies. These details are sometimes perfunctory, and rather disappointingly, the most memorable anecdote about his best female postdoc was apparently that she ran an afternoon daycare in the lab break room! But given the era in which Kandel began as a scientist, he didn’t have many female postdocs, and he always speaks of his female colleagues with respect. Professionally, Kandel gives scrupulous credit to his collaborators: I couldn’t help but notice all the meticulously grammatically correct usages of “_____ and me” or “I and ______”. He also admits his own failings as a father and husband. As he became increasingly embedded in his work, his wife Denise, a professor in her own right, had to take up the slack at home - at the expense of her own career. I’m not sure Kandel regrets this, given the outcome (he especially seems to relish that Nobel Prize ceremony) but at least he acknowledges it.
Upon finishing the book, my overall impression was one of a lively and humane mind, one perhaps more concerned with the minutiae of synaptic transmission than his kids’ school plays - but then, I expect no less from scientists, and Nobel winners at that. The book wasn’t as engrossing as an Oliver Sacks essay, or The Double Helix, but it was interesting, and refreshed my memory of the major turning points in my own field, neurobiology. It would be a good read for a non-scientist who cared about the topic of how neurons work, and was willing to give it reasonable attention. Well-punctuated with personal history, the tale unfolds at a digestible pace. In the end, I felt very favorably toward Kandel, and grateful for yet another popular science book I could recommend to students or friends. That’s when it gets interesting.
Many of my friends are also biologists. When they noticed what I was reading, they all said that Eric Kandel is obnoxious! They said he is the sort of self-important PI who disrespects his subordinates and pits them against each other, as well as many further complaints which, because they are hearsay, I won’t repeat here. One of them had met Kandel briefly and was downright hostile to him; others had heard stories through the everactive science grapevine. What to make of this new evidence? On the one hand, I couldn’t believe that the book I had just read was by the ruthless man they were describing. On the other hand, he had written the book - the framing was his. The winners write the history books, or the science books, as the case may be.
Had I been conned? Is Kandel’s book a self-redaction, a fictitious portrait edited for, and written for, history? I have no idea, because I’ve never worked with or even met Eric Kandel. I can only go with the impression I have from the book, which remains favorable: it’s a good book, written by an intelligent and accomplished man. But I’m disturbed by the failing I’ve detected in myself as a reader: if Kandel were a politician, I’d have opened his memoir with utter cynicism about his motives and reliability. If this were a novel, I’d go in positively gunning for the unreliable narrator. But he’s a fellow scientist! It never occurred to me to question his authenticity or motives. Even objectionable, bigoted scientists are openly objectionable and bigoted (see The Double Helix). Right?
The answer is No, of course not. We all frame our stories, consciously or unconsciously, to reflect those parts of ourselves that we want to share with our readers. I do it here, on this blog: although I believe that my blog “voice” on bioephemera is an extremely accurate reflection of, even insight into, my personality (those of you who know me offline can weigh in on this), it is by no means all of my personality. There are topics I explicitly do not discuss here, and opinions I do not share. Although not as organized as a memoir, each blog post, comment, diary, letter or classroom lecture is an act of editing: facts balanced with message for a specific audience. It may seem obvious, it is obvious, and yet, we too often suspend our skepticism for a trusted source - like a colleague or a friend.
As you probably know, framing science in the political sphere has been a huge controversy all summer. Just yesterday, The Scientist published another article, with editorial commentary, about framing. Should scientists deliberately frame their science? According to one opinion, If you don’t frame it, someone else will. True - if the science is important at all. But I’d argue that no one can avoid framing completely, even if they try; so we shouldn’t try - we should just be open and honest about it.
Everything we say and do is molded by our experiences, but perhaps more importantly, by the way we want and need others to see us. We all keep secrets. And it behooves us to remember that scientists are just like everyone else in that respect - fallible. Although the best of us try as hard as humanly possible to be objective, we simply can’t. Any self-aware, truly great scientist will admit this. That’s why science is a group activity: our individual biases will be diluted out and mitigated by our colleagues’. It will all come out in the wash. It’s reassuring to be part of that self-correcting mechanism: whether perfect objectivity is possible or not, we are doing the best we possibly can to be objective. As human beings, with our soft, squishy, fallible brains, we can do no more.
But a memoir is not science. Memory, as any neuroscientist knows well, is far from objective - those squishy brains of ours are idiosyncratic and troublesome, and whatever piquant neural correlates of memory we might find, we will never be able to directly compare our memories to anyone else’s. Eric Kandel laid the foundation for our understanding of how neurons learn, so it’s incredibly fitting that it is his memoir that reminds me today how fallible everything we perceive, learn, and believe can be. Whether he is charming or not, obnoxious or not, this book has been one of the most thought-provoking reads I’ve had in some time.
October 4th, 2007
New from Made with Molecules artist Raven Hanna, creator of the serotonin necklace: protein jewelry! This is incredibly clever, because the single-letter protein code is a language most biologists speak. You stand a pretty good chance of running into a fellow bio geek who’ll be able to decipher your signals. The above bracelet is the perfect example: if you can read it, you are one!
But the best part - why I love Raven’s work - is that non-geeks will have no clue. The silver shapes are elegant and simple enough to pass as abstract art. After coveting her serotonin necklace for several months, I finally bought one, and I’m so glad I did. It’s much lovelier in person than on her site, and I received a lot of compliments on it - even though most people weren’t quite sure what it was (the neurobiologists knew, the chemists got the general chemical class, and the physicists said, “is that a molecule?”)
Bay Area residents can see Raven’s work in person on Friday October 5 at Feria Urbana in Oakland, or check out her etsy shop.
October 3rd, 2007
What lies behind our nose?
photography (CT scan rendering)
Kai-hung Fung, 2007
The 2007 Science Visualization Challenge winners have been announced. I love the two (tied) first place winners; although they are both photography, they look like watercolor. Above is Kai-hung Fung’s rainbow rendering of nasal sinuses:
Fung chose to use the patient’s CT images for his rendering, he remembers, because “[she had] a very straight nasal septum and wavy maxillary sinuses; … the anatomy was exceptionally beautiful,” he says.
Normally, CT renderings meld slices together into smooth surfaces, but, in what he terms the “Rainbow Technique,” Fung instead broke them apart, creating a topographical map of the airspaces described by the contour lines of individual slices, and colored according to the density of the tissues that border them.
Fung digitally removed the bones, soft tissue, and fat from the rendering to create a solid “cast” of the sinuses’ air envelope. “The sinuses are hollows in the bone just like the central cavity in a papaya,” he says. One way to get a feel for the shape of such a cavity is to look at a cross section of it, but, he says, it’s much more readily apparent in a mold. (source)
Tied with Fung’s sinuses was an elegant botanical photo, “Irish Moss,” by Andrea Ottesen. The unfurled algae glows against deep black, like a golden mandala.
All the winners, including some remarkable videos, can be seen in this slideshow. The competition was jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science. Felice Frankel was one of the judges.
Notably, no awards were made in the category of illustration (defined as “Traditional or computer-assisted illustrations and drawings produced to conceptualize the unseen or recreate an object, process or phenomenon (technique). Illustrations and drawings rely primarily on the created image to convey meaning.”)
Also, none of the winners were in traditional media, like watercolor or ink. Does this represent a shift away from using traditional media to depict scientific concepts? I’m really not sure. I hope not. But I do know that traditional media can be a hard sell, both for the added time required to execute a piece, and perhaps because of an implied subjectivity/inaccuracy/”artistic license” when compared with photography. As scientific imaging techniques generate more and more intuitive, even “artistic” results, the need for an artist to reinterpret those results may be diminishing. It’s an interesting question.
September 29th, 2007
Pecoxus Ferexus
ink and resin
Dustin Yellin , 2006
Resin blocks are commonly used to preserve medical specimens so they can be viewed from all angles without the prgressive fragmentation of a specimen suspended in solution. But in artist Dustin Yellin’s hands, resin is used to deceive: “specimens” such as the one above are not really solid objects, but illusions created using ink. And although the result is convincingly 3D, like a true biological specimen, it can defy classification. Consider the Pecoxus above - is it flora or fauna? Are those skeletonized leaves or the brittle wings of an insect?
According to Culture Catch,
The art of Dustin Yellin is a cross between painting and sculpture, science and science fiction. His magical objects, some taller than the viewer, are comprised of dozens of layers of resin that are meticulously painted with acrylic and inks - layer atop layer - until a sinuous “life form” appears that looks like it would be at home in sea, sand, or air.
Each object is a comment on nature, genetic experimentation, color and form, culminating, in this reviewer’s mind, in some of the freshest and most distinct art being made today. I was reminded, even before I saw the exhibition’s title, of suspended animation because these works are expressions frozen in time. And they have an otherworldly feel, like encapsulated specimens brought back from space exploration, that gives the entire installation a strange viral cast. (source)
It’s absolutely exhausting imagining the process that must go into Yellin’s work. My favorite is this one, which reminds me of some kind of transdimensional alien overlord from Dr. Who. . .or wait. . . is that the Eye of Sauron?
Xexus Knotilus
resin and ink
Dustin Yellin, 2007
Thanks to peacay for yet another heads-up on this one!
September 23rd, 2007
Author and illustrator Peter Sis has written a beautiful book called The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin
which follows Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and re-creates the naturalist’s travel-stained maps and notebooks. The book was released in 2003, and got a gazillion awards, but I haven’t ever seen it in a bookstore. Of course, I’ve also been living in regions where children’s books on evolution are not, uh, the hot gift concept of the season (though such a gift would be a good way to get yourself disinvited from future juvenile birthday festivities).
Anyway, if you happen to need a present for a budding young naturalist, this is ideal. View the gorgeous animated excerpt here and see if you don’t agree!
A MacArthur “genius grant” winner, Sis has written many books, including Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei
, and illustrated still more, such as Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. He has a quiet sense of absurdity, particularly about domestic life. Here’s his explanation of why he switched from pastel to watercolor:
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. There was a shortage of everything (freedom most of all) — and only one kind of paper, one kind of ink, one kind of paint. I was one happy artist when I became an illustrator in the U.S.A. So many materials! I settled on oil pastels, which I scratched into. That created lots of residue, tiny pieces of paint everywhere. It didn’t matter as long as I was single. It started to matter a bit when I met my wife-to-be and we lived in a loft. It mattered a lot when we had our first baby. It mattered even more when Madeleine began to crawl. We built a wall, but I had nightmares about her getting into my paint thinner and X-Acto blades. I switched to watercolors, but I still wasn’t sure how safe they were. On the other hand, I found out that baby formula dissolves aquarelle. Madeleine loved it. I had to look for a studio outside the house. No more paints at home. I found myself a studio — a little apartment, really — with a kitchen.
I have to fix dinner every day at six p.m. Watercolors dry too slowly, but I can dry them in front of the oven, and bake while I’m drying my pictures. I notice people’s surprise when they meet me in the street carrying a bag smelling like a roast or a chicken. Some of the shapes on my pictures just might be sauce. Now that I have gotten used to watercolors, Madeleine paints at home (with oil). (Peter Sis, “Tiny Pieces of Paint“, in The Horn Book)
One of the most amusing illustrations in The Tree of Life depicts the young Darwin fleeing a nightmarish theatre of dissection (and, fortuitously, his career in medicine):
Poor Darwin! But what a good thing for biology that he was so squeamish. . .
September 16th, 2007
A model of female anatomy by an anonymous artist
Collection of Axel Vervoordt
Photo: David Yoder, NYT
Two anatomic models
Collections of Axel Vervoordt / Museo di Storia Naturale, Donazione Conte Querini Stampalia
Artempo exhibition in Venice, Italy; NYT review and slide show
via bookofjoe and le divan fumoir bohemien
Previously on bioephemera: Wombs, Waxes and Wonder Cabinets
September 13th, 2007
Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions
Hunterian museum
One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible.
The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended skeletons:
Illustrated London News, 1845
The Hunterian Gallery before the wars (source)
So I was shocked when I entered the grey, columned Royal College, climbed a graciously curving stairway, and found this extremely modern, two-story crystal-and-glass atrium:
The Crystal Gallery at the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
Definitely not what I was expecting! But it grew on me. I love ornate curiosity cabinets, but there is something very elegant about unadorned bones, and simple glass jars. Biological structures are so rich with intrinsic beauty, there’s no real need to gild the lily (that means you, Damien Hirst).
Though the new Hunterian galleries are peaceful and refined, I felt a slight pang of regret for the railings and wood cabinetry Darwin would have touched, when he studied here in the 1830s and 40s. Unfortunately, many of the specimens Darwin saw were destroyed when the Royal College of Surgeons was bombed in 1941. Like the gallery housing it, John Hunter’s collection is no longer what it once was. But what remains is still pretty darn amazing.
Hunter, a renowned surgeon and fellow of the Royal Society, worked tirelessly to collect medical anomalies like the 7′7″ skeleton of the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne (for which Hunter paid 130 pounds). He also amassed thousands of less exotic teaching specimens: though he did not have access to formaldehyde, he took wet preservation in alcohol to its highest level. After Hunter’s death in 1793, his ~13,000 specimens were purchased by the British state. The collection would be maintained (and enlarged) by the Royal College of Surgeons for the next two hundred years.
Hunter’s collection is organized according to some rather unusual curatorial precepts. As a physician and early experimentalist, Hunter was less interested in taxonomy than in physiology. He grouped specimens not by family or type, but as exemplars of processes - mouthparts and digestion, reproduction, etc. From the Victorian perspective,
The design of Mr. Hunter, in making this collection, was to exhibit the gradations of nature, from the most simple state in which life is found to exist, up to the most perfect and most complex of the animal creation, man himself. By his art, he was able to expose and preserve in a dried state, or in spirits, the corresponding parts of animal bodies; so that the various links in the chain of a perfect being may be readily followed and clearly understood. (Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights, 1844)
But Hunter’s collection does not exemplify linear progression, so much as ramification: the incredible diversity of ways that animal forms have evolved to accomplish given functions. Most of the specimens displayed here are not human; the Hunterian is a shrine not to Man, but to our entire extended family.
I first heard of the Hunterian through the delightful book Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture of Natural History Museums
, by Stephen Asma at Columbia College, Chicago. (I highly recommend this book, if you don’t own it already). Asma’s first impression of the Hunterian was similar to my own:
Without a grasp of Hunter’s underlying principles, the cases seemed slightly irrational. In one case, marked “Digestion,” I found various dissections of mammals, parasitic worms, a cicada, a locust, slugs, a squid, a vulture, a woodpecker, and a puffin. This hodgepodge arrangement follows no taxonomic grouping. . . Individual species, genera, and even families are displayed together to illustrate the unique ways that their structures fit the functions of digestion, circulation, respiration, and so forth. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 63)
My copy of Pickled Heads has been with in storage with the rest of my belongings for months, so I’d forgotten Asma’s words. But when I walked up to the first case of Hunter’s jars (mouthparts of squid, beaks, teeth, mouthparts of bees and cicadas), I immediately remembered Asma’s description, and recognized what he meant. The intestines of fish were right next to the stomachs of mammals, including a rat which substantially outweighed the tiny human fetus next to it. There is no mistaking the idiosyncratic style of this little museum, so different from the aggressively educational dioramas of the London Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Modern biology museums are full-color, multimedia entertainment factories - it’s a way to engage the audience, true, but it sometimes teeters toward the tawdry and didactic. Asma expresses the difference far better than I could:
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Hunterian Museum–besides the bleached and bloated “monsters”–is that it’s not intended for a lay audience. The Hunterian doesn’t really care whether the average person is “getting it.” This is unexpectedly unnerving, since most other museum encounters come complete with torrents of helpful information. Almost every museum specimen that you have ever encountered, be it a fossil, a jar, or a mount, is accompanied by a plaque, a chart, or a recording that announces to you–even before a question has been formulated in your head-”what you are seeing is so and so. . . .”
What was Hunter trying to communicate when he grouped his specimens? This question alone gives one a more interactive relationship with the museum than any computer gadgetry could. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 78-79)
It’s a little unfair to say the Hunterian doesn’t care if visitors “get it.” I saw a class of kids around twelve years old when I was there, moving in and out of a room set aside for teaching purposes, and they seemed to be “getting it” pretty well. The point is, they were being allowed to draw their own conclusions, and with a little guidance, to simply wander and wonder. Refreshing indeed.
What do I do when confronted with a mute collection of natural wonders? Why, break out the sketchbook. But I didn’t have one! It’s been so long since I felt peaceful enough to sketch in a museum - I’m normally buffeted by thousands of obnoxious children, and worse, tourists who act like children. I wasn’t prepared. I had to buy a little 5″x8″ Moleskine at a nearby bookshop, and sketch with a mechanical pencil while sitting on the floor. Since the museum does not allow photography, not even for earnest, sincere bloggers, these little doodles are all I have to represent Hunter’s myriad curiosities. I can’t believe I didn’t even get to the bound foot, or the lion with rickets, or the male and female ivory anatomical models. Argh.
Sepia officinalis (preparation showing the mouthparts of a cuttlefish)
Hunterian Museum
If you are active in the biomedical professions (and yes, they will ask for proof of this, like an ID card) you may also visit the Wellcome Anatomy and Pathology Museum upstairs.
At first glance, the Wellcome collection seems like the neglected younger sibling of the Hunterian prodigal son (or, if you prefer, the Harry-under-the-stairs to the spoiled Hunterian Dudley Dursley). It’s one outdated, drab room, filled with hundreds of specimen jars. No sexy lighting or pedagogical dioramas here - to figure out what you’re viewing you have to thumb through well-used, slightly sticky binders of notes. These binders are tucked in shelves or tables, wherever the last user left them; I couldn’t find one of the binders at all, so I’m still in the dark about some of the skeletal abnormalities I saw.
But the biggest difference is that the Wellcome specimens are all Homo sapiens, representing a variety of obscure, rare, or dramatic medical conditions - conditions, like keratin horns, that I never expected to personally see in the flesh! And they’re generally in better condition than the Hunterian specimens (most date from the 20th century). I could have spent five to ten minutes examining a single specimen, and there are hundreds of prosections in the Museum. I was completely overwhelmed, and didn’t sketch a single thing (sorry).
I wondered why the Hunterian and Wellcome collections were spatially isolated in this way, and the Wellcome closed to the public. It couldn’t be about shock value - some of the Hunterian exhibits were pretty gruesome. So I asked the head of conservation, who told me that it has to do with the legal status of the collection.
The UK has a long history of scandalous “body-snatching” (see this Curious Expeditions post for more on that nefarious activity). Since the 1832 Anatomy Act, enacted to discourage the illicit sale of body parts, specimens like those in the Wellcome collection have been more and more tightly restricted. Since 2006, the Human Tissues Authority has regulated the donation, disposal, and use of medical specimens and cadavers, and requires special licesning for the public display of remains from persons who died since 1906 (according to their FAQ, they also require licenses of plastination exhibits, such as Body Worlds). But since John Hunter lived, collected, and died years before the Anatomy Act, his collection can be displayed without the restrictions that impact the pathology collection.
Skull of 25-year-old man showing enlargement due to hydrocephalus
Liston collection at Hunterian Museum
I highly recommend both the Hunterian and Wellcome collections to any biologist, artist, kunstkammer fan, or interested layperson visiting London. The Hunterian is perfectly suitable for older children, and surprisingly peaceful for a (free!) museum so close to both the British Library and Inns of Court. There were tourists everywhere, but only a handful stopping by to see John Hunter’s life’s work. You might make a day of it and also visit the Wellcome Collection, around the corner near UCL, or Sir John Soanes Museum, which is literally across the street - but then, I still need to post about those, don’t I?
So much to see, so much to blog, so little time. What a wonderful world.
September 9th, 2007
The cephalofabulous Pink Tentacle Blog uncovers paper artist Taketori’s origami creations:
Kiri-origami artist Taketori cuts and folds paper to make realistic-looking insects. Each critter is crafted from a single sheet, without glue, and paint is often used to add to the realism.
The artist, like God, seems inordinately fond of beetles.
More here. Taketori’s homepage (cheesy midi music warning)
September 9th, 2007
Science Magazine just published research suggesting that a foreign virus, which apparently arrived via Australia, could be causing the mysterious colony collapse disorder (CCD). About 96% of CCD colonies were positive for this virus, which is confusingly named Israel acute paralysis virus (IAPV). Still unanswered: why Australia’s bees, if they’ve all got this, are doing just fine. Also, although there is a strong correlation between CCD and IAPV in the US, there is no clear chain of causation - CCD bees may be more susceptible to IAPV than unaffected bees.
Researchers have found an imported virus that may be associated with the sudden disappearance of honey bees in the United States, known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). This baffling syndrome, which earlier this year made headlines around the world, may have afflicted as many as 23% of beekeepers in the United States and caused losses of up to 90% of hives in some apiaries. The identification of a suspect is an important step, says Nicholas Calderone of Cornell University. “Before, we didn’t even have circumstantial evidence.”
The suspect is a pathogen called Israel acute paralysis virus (IAPV). A team of researchers reports online in Science this week (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1146498) that they found the virus in most of the affected colonies they tested, but in almost no healthy ones. If the virus proves to be the cause of CCD, it could have international economic implications, for the researchers point to Australia as a possible source. Since 2005, U.S. beekeepers, especially those struggling to keep up with the insatiable demand for almond pollination in California, have imported several million dollars’ worth of bees from Australia. The researchers report that they have found IAPV in imported Australian bees.
Full text, if you have a Science subscription: Puzzling Decline of U.S. Bees Linked to Virus From Australia
If you don’t, a pretty good news article about it
September 6th, 2007
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