Picturing
DNA
Epilogue
In 1973, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency sent the Pioneer 11 spacecraft on a journey though the solar system, passing the outer planets and sending back pictures. Six and a half years later, it continued its travels indefinitely, carried by momentum into the Oort Cloud that lies beyond the planets and then out beyond that into the starry wonder of the Milky Way. After much thought, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake had designed a gold-anodized aluminum plaque for Pioneer 11 to carry. It showed a line drawing of the male and female human bodies reminiscent of da Vinci's Man and Woman along with an image of the planets in the solar system and a silhouette of the spacecraft with its antenna pointing to the third planet from the sun. Should an intelligent life form discover the image, it would know who we were and where we came from.
Plaque from Pioneer 11
In the
decades since Pioneer, the scientific community has replaced the sketch
of the man and woman with the image of the double helix. And in 2000,
filmmaker Brian De Palma adopted this new description of humanity in his
movie Mission to Mars, in which a group of astronauts go to Mars to rescue
the remnants of an earlier Earth-to-Mars mission. There they find a gigantic
sculpture of a human face from a vanished Martian civilization and, in
entering the face, discover the holographic image of a double helix and
realize that the lost Martians had same DNA as humans do. In De Palma's
film, they were our ancient human ancestors.
Our
self-portrait as a species has undergone a massive transformation. We
have replaced stick figures, sketches and images of bodies with the portrait
of our genetic code. And Brian De Palma is not the only artist to adapt
to this new vision. Multimedia artist Suzanne Anker uses the double helix,
too, and we can expect other artists to be inspired by genetic research.
Our mind's eye can now see through and into the nucleus of each human
cell, even when we don't have a microscope. We understand the double helix
as the key to longevity, health and happiness. Now that the human genome
has been mapped, the image of the double helix represents the reality,
no longer the symbol, of what humankind can manipulate to ensure a better
future-if we have the wisdom to use the map well.
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Picturing
DNA by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles & Marilyn Nissenson
Copyright © 2000 Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles & Marilyn Nissenson
All Rights Reserved