September 30, 2012
The Art of Stem Cells
From Harvard Magazine:
Jennifer Quick, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of the history of art and architecture, stood before her audience in the main gallery of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Behind her, on a free-standing wall running down the middle of the gallery, hung more than a dozen works by Michael Wang ’03, a visual artist who creates micrograph images of artificially produced stem cells.
But as Quick began to lecture on Wang’s works, another voice could be heard from behind the wall. It belonged to cellular biologist Gabriella Boulting, Ph.D. ’12, who was speaking to her own audience about pieces Wang had created that hung on her side of the wall. Dueling gallery tours? Wang, an artist who aims to bring together art and science in interesting and thought-provoking ways, prefers to think of two lecturers working as one. “I wanted to literally stage an encounter between two disciplines, the artistic community on one hand and the scientific on the other,” Wang says. “I don’t think of artworks as ending with the individual artistic object. There is an expanded field that includes context and discourse around [that object] so I really wanted to make sure that could be an expanded part of the work. I wanted people from within the University to provide two very different insights at the exact same time.” His latest work, Differentiation Series, is a sequence of micrograph images of artificially produced stem cells that have been hand-tinted using a system that matches a unique color to every specific cell type that can potentially be produced from these initially undifferentiated cells.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:24 AM | Permalink
Comments
Why not some art work representing the roughly half million cancer victims every year who likely died at the hands of the money machine cancer industry carried out by the negligent medical doctors dispensing these killer drugs with legal immunity?
Why not some art work illustrating the many billions of dollars squandered by the cancer generals over the years on the dismal failure of the war on cancer?
Why not some art work on the similar failure of the physicists and their dismal failure to produce clean and cheap energy for about the same time as the failed war on cancer has been going on?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/science/fusion-project-faces-a-frugal-congress.html?_r=1&hpw
When the physicists fail like the cancer generals have so dismally failed, both give the same lame excuses. Perhaps both failed because of the same reasons; namely, personal and institutional prejudice and conflicts of interest got in the way of science.
Even physicists must always check their assumptions. As Richard Feynman said, "I never pay any attention to experts."
Posted by: w.j.abbe | Sep 30, 2012 7:11:33 PM
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