Picturing DNA
An Interview with davidkremers

[davidkremers is a conceptual artist in the Biology Division at the California Institute of Technology. He is especially interested in organic possibilities for works of art; that is, art that grows. The work he is discussing uses living tissues that have been "painted" with genetically manipulated bacteria.]

Q. How do you, an artist, explain your profound interest in science?

davidkremers: I think I was born with science genes, and I have been lucky to have been allowed to develop them.

Q. Could you explain what you mean about your genetic inheritance?

davidkremers: Sure. On my father's side I am directly descended from Mercator, whose real name was the same as mine. Gerherd de Kremer, the famous map-maker who lived in 1532. All of his descendents are scientists. On my mother's side, the whole family are doctors. From them I inherited a predisposition towards science.

Q. And what do you mean by having been allowed to develop them?

davidkremers: Human beings have spent the last 10,000 years mastering the art of natural selection. Humans are really good at this and I am fortunate to be the beneficiary of really valuable genes. Some are purely academic, the others are more difficult to pin-point, but they have enabled me to find support for my creative designs. Here is where I think I was fortunate to be raised in an environment where I was exposed to art all the time. I had an eighteenth century art education, traveling and visiting museums and architectural monuments. Unlike other children, I did not have my natural creativity schooled out of me.

Q. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

davidkremers: I started work at the age of five. I've been working full time as an artist since then, in a scientific family where science and art were yoked together.

Q. As an adult, when did your career begin.

davidkremers: I started designing gardens in college, and by accident met the head of an Air Force department that was developing space operations in California. I started designing space stations between 1983 and 1985. By 1986 I put together a grant to develop space stations that would grow in space, like coral reefs. [The] Challenger [explosion] put that project on hold.

Q. How did you get from there to the biology department at Caltech, where you are an artist-in-residence?

davidkremers: Just as I'd met the Air Force director by chance, in the early '90s I met a molecular biologist, a post-doctoral fellow who was then at Caltech, who showed me the protocols for genetic research. I saw at once that they could be used to make paintings. I could use the same plasmids and substrates that cause chemical reactions in DNA and other stuff to produce naturally occurring enzymes.

Q. I don't understand the chemical terms you are using. Can you explain them to me?

davidkremers: I don't know how biochemistry works, but following biochemical protocols I grow paintings. I use genetically engineered bacteria that produce naturally occurring colored enzymes to grow portraits of the early development of humans.

Q. How do you think the map of the human genome will effect the future of biology?

davidkremers: I think that there are no blueprints in biotechnology and we cannot pretend to be able to provide them. The genome is not a blueprint. It is an instruction set that is influenced by environmental factors. There are no interchangeable parts. Biotechnology is not separate from all technology today. This is very important. We are rapidly moving from a civilization based on the manipulation of inanimate objects, into a culture where everything will be based on the generation of more or less living organisms. While the genome does not provide a map that we can follow, it does open up a whole level of complexity that we have no choice but to explore.

Q. How does this apply to your portraits?

davidkremers: There is no way I can know in advance how my genetically engineered portraits will turn out.

Q. Who are the subjects of your portraits?

davidkremers: All of us. These are portraits of the earliest stages in our embryonic development. Not only does our whole species look identical, but in these portraits humans look the same as mice and whales. These are portraits of mammalian life, for in our earliest days as embryos, we look as if we could as easily develop into whales, or mice, as into people. We have to remember that the embryo is in an environment in the mother. The mother is the first environment. We have our predisposition to become human, but the human genome is like software that can only be run in the environment of human mothers.

Q. What does this mean for the future of people?

davidkremers: If you clone a human being, you don't get a Frankenstein assembly of adult parts. You get a baby. We should be talking about how to provide for and raise healthy babies, not monsters.

Q. Have you ever developed, by chance, any art works that could have turned into monsters?

davidkremers: No. Because I'm very careful to grow my works of art, not fabricate them.

Q. What about the occasional mutant?

davidkremers: I have lots of photographs that I have taken of mutant tissue, but I can't tell by just looking at them whether we would call them monsters or not. When I take these experimental photographs, I take the pictures not to classify the tissue as human or mouse, but to make an image that is representative of the wonder and value of life even at a stage most of us do not recognize as life.

Q. Has the mapping of the human genome changed your attitudes towards human life?

davidkremers: As the human genome has become knowable, and as we see the similarities with the genomes of other animals, I am more than ever overwhelmed by the notion of life as something we share with each other. I see that humans are, by our very evolution, creatures who survive by integrating and sharing with each other. We are different from plant life, for instance, because plants live in isolation. We humans live in neighborhoods.

Q. Are you comfortable with the impact that the Human Genome Project will have on society?

davidkremers: The greatest danger to society from technology and the human genome is not scientific, but cultural. We live in a society where everything is either/or. This is not the way it should be. To take advantage of the map that the human genome project will provide, we have to invent a way to simultaneously share that information, and protect it for ourselves. The biggest problem facing biology today is not a science problem, it's an art problem.

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Picturing DNA by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles & Marilyn Nissenson
Copyright © 2000 Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles & Marilyn Nissenson
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