DNA & Plasmid Vectors
As a traumatised sparrow flew frantically about our heads we spent this morning’s session learning about DNA extraction, restriction enzymes and electrophoresis (that is an awesome link – click it, go on). It involved a lot of metaphors: ‘nature’s scissors’ and a rather amusing reference to the equisite corpse. As I write we’re about end our discussion of the theory and begin our first physical experience of DNA.
To produce glow in the dark rabbits and transgenic corn, genes must be introduced into cells. One of the ‘vectors’ used to carry new DNA information into cells is Plasmid DNA. To some degree the steep learning curve experienced by many of us (being visual artists and designers) may owe a lot to the largely verbal exploration of these concepts. To alleviate this please look at this picture. Ok, now breathe.
Jo Russell-Clarke
Couldnt help but be reminded by your trapped sparrow of Bruno Latour’s “What is the Style of Maters of Concern?” which opens with a discussion of a trapped bird:
“This must have happened to you, surely: you hear the fluttering noise of a bird, who by some mistake, some strange conduit, has become a prisoner of the room where you are sitting; desperate to escape, he comes thrashing against the windowpane, which he takes, mistakenly, for the open sky, unaware as he is of the human invention of transparent glass. What do you do then? You try to open the window without frightening him.”
He goes on:
“Can we, too, open the window and follow the poet who directs us to carefully follow the behaviour of the bird? The difficulty of becoming, in effect, the ethologist of such behaviour, of such a bird, of such poetry, of such an escape toward reality, comes, as I will argue in these two lectures, from a strange philosophy invented somewhere in the 17th century… The diagnosis of this philosophy has been discussed by Alfred North Whitehead under the name of the “bifurcation of nature”:
‘What I am essentially protesting against, he says, is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although in this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.’ ”
… and much more interesting stuff here in a consideration of a nature-culture, art-science consideration of the plastic and plasticity as grappling for the ‘real’…
Nov 18, 2009 @ 5:31 pm
Jo Russell-Clarke
oops, meant to add you can read Latour here: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/97-STYLE-MATTERS-CONCERN.pdf
Nov 18, 2009 @ 6:04 pm