BOOK REVIEW

and science, they answer to very different standards of authenticity and Molecular gaze for the sci guy reference. Visual art is artificial by , and it gets its effect by tricking the ‘simplified physics’ of the viewer’s brain (Nature 434, 301–307; 2005), The Molecular Gaze: Art in the but it is judged valid by its ability to evoke real perceptions and emotions. Genetic Age New art and science are both held to the standard of creative originality, By Suzanne Anker & Dorothy Nelkin but the scientific paper declares its references explicitly, whereas the art- work incorporates them indirectly. An artwork can be widely appreciated Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, if some of its implicit references are shared between artist and viewer, but 2004 many contain intensely private sources, such as depiction of a childhood 216 pp, hardcover, $45 nightmare of the artist (or even of the viewer) alone. ISBN 0879696974 To say, as the authors do on page 189, that “in science, beauty is a subset, a by-product” is to ignore the primacy of curiosity as the Reviewed by Myles Axton mutual wellspring of art and science. Just as, for a dog, there are no

http://www.nature.com/naturegenetics bad smells, artists and biologists can revel in grotesque and horrifying images and concepts too gamy for the business world. The beauty of In The Molecular Gaze, artist Suzanne Anker and sociologist of science elegant execution is shared between artist and scientist, but science Dorothy Nelkin have done more than map and explore the new territory has no counterpart for the artist’s stealth weapon: the beautiful image, between art and science—they find landmarks and archetypes among which retains the contemplative gaze, redoubling the power of the the symbolic elements that artists create and juxtapose. This is no coffee work’s critical message. table tour, but a sustained academic analysis of the idea that artists who Should artists create new symbols, or can they use symbolic elements in “interpret scientific processes and engage in cultural critique” present a new ways and be equally creative? Perhaps these processes are comparable serious challenge to the meaning of genetic science. Their themes are the to the paradigm shifts and within-paradigm research of the scientists. reduction of life to a script; monsters, chimeras and boundaries; beauty Anker’s own Micro Glyph (Soma Font) on page 29, full of anthropo- and eugenics; and commodification of the body, its cells, its fluids and morphic figures, and letters suggests not opposition but Nature Publishing Group Group Nature Publishing

6 reproductive potential. a creative continuum of symbol creation and reuse. This argument is They don’t convince me that these themes are particularly genetic, completed by Zhang Huan (page 39), who letters the names of ancestors 200

© although may be the first discipline to claim them all at onto his face until his skin is completely black. The coalescent process once. Bodies have always been sold. Chimeras from the Sphinx to the and the migration out of Africa now have their icon. Wolpertinger (jackalope) are traditional monsters, easily constructed by In the right context, the “pragmatic and bemused—even celebratory” artists from borrowed references. Life was reduced to a word in religion artists that Anker and Nelkin accuse of merely cheerleading are making and to a script in golem stories. a more subtle, subversive and lasting statement than those who overtly Grotesque images spread themselves, perhaps traveling even faster protest against a future of genetically modified dystopia. The work of dis- than beauty. Some memes propagate from mind to mind in a viral credited stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang highlighted the principal way by creating shared discomfort. There may be no significance to ethical bottleneck to stem cell research: the treatment of women willing their spread other than the spread itself. This idea, which I think was to donate their oocytes. This context changes Chrissy Conant’s packag- first articulated by Richard Dawkins, is a problem for the thesis of this ing of one of her oocytes as caviar (page 161) from an artistic one-liner book because it undermines the interpretation of an artist’s work as an to a rich set of references on reproductive autonomy in a commodified intentionally critical statement. The hot-buttons of sensation are too world. Kate and Helen Storey’s anaphase bodice (page 162) is in part a tempting for artists: the fetus, genitals, skeletons, blood, feces, bodily light pun on cleavage, but its broken-heart shape and its suggestion of fluids, barbed wire and the symbols of terror and slavery. Biologists may breast cancer cells proliferating is enough to give it uncanny layers of be robust enough not to be shocked—and certainly not in New York, emotional resonance. where flayed plastinated corpses wave expressionlessly from every bus Simply seeing the familiar with new eyes can be revolutionary, as stop poster—but the artistic grotesque is becoming annoyingly intru- in Catherine Wagner’s depiction of –86 °C freezers (page 180) full of sive. I have to admit there are exceptions that forced me to reevaluate what must be forgotten, mislabeled, transformed, infected, freezer- this view, like the poignant photo by Rosamund Purcell (page 70) in burned and expired samples. No researcher would leave even one of which a little hydrocephalic skeleton bows to show where its skull flares these freezers open for more than a few seconds, but the artist leaves open like a tulip. twelve open at once, forever. I finished the book convinced by Anker A worse monster than the chimera is the false friend. Anker and and Nelkin that the artist’s duty is to continually disturb us with Nelkin only begin to explore the “meaning of veracity, authenticity and freshness of her vision, not to protest any particular version of the esthetics in the two domains”. Although forgery is the common enemy of transgenic future. That should not threaten the practicing scientist, for whom reality is provisional and whose beautiful ideas are con- Myles Axton is Editor at Nature Genetics. stantly at risk of falsification by experience.

NATURE GENETICS | VOLUME 38 | NUMBER 3 | MARCH 2006 269