Categoriearchief: Biology

The study of living organisms.

Human Caviar

Chrissy Conant
Chrissy Caviar, 2002

chrissy caviar

White Sturgeon roe, or Beluga caviar, one of the world’s greatest delicacies, is usually marketed in metal tins or glass jars. I am reassigning the use of small, glass jars, in order to create a conceptual art object. By slightly adjusting the standard wording on the product label to reflect its new, unique contents, and replacing the usual image of a fish with a photograph of myself, reclining in elegant evening wear, I am creating a new product: Chrissy Caviar®, of the Human, Caucasian variety. Placed inside each jar there is, instead of fish roe, one of my eggs. Combined with human tubal fluid, each egg is anaerobically sealed inside the same sort of biology specimen research and transport tube that scientists use for mouse and human eggs and/or embryos (note: mouse and hamster eggs are physically and genetically similar to human eggs, and they are used by in-vitro fertilization labs for practice and research purposes). Each filled tube is suspended in a clear, viscous silicone-based liquid, inside each jar, and sealed. The series includes twelve jars, based on the idea of hens’ eggs being commercially packaged by the dozen.

chrissy caviar 2

chrissy caviar 3

www.chrissycaviar.com

Follow the Green Rabbit

Eduardo Kac
GFP Bunny, 2000

Eduardo Kac green rabbit

“Alba”, the green fluorescent bunny, is an albino rabbit. This means that, since she has no skin pigment, under ordinary environmental conditions she is completely white with pink eyes. Alba is not green all the time. She only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light (maximum excitation at 488 nm), she glows with a bright green light (maximum emission at 509 nm). She was created with EGFP, an enhanced version (i.e., a synthetic mutation) of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammalian cells (including human cells) than the original jellyfish gene.

The first phase of the “GFP Bunny” project was completed in February 2000 with the birth of “Alba” in Jouy-en-Josas, France. This was accomplished with the invaluable assistance of zoosystemician Louis Bec and scientists Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Prunet. Alba’s name was chosen by consensus between my wife Ruth, my daughter Miriam, and myself. The second phase is the ongoing debate, which started with the first public announcement of Alba’s birth, in the context of the Planet Work conference, in San Francisco, on May 14, 2000. The third phase will take place when the bunny comes home to Chicago, becoming part of my family and living with us from this point on.
Alba is a healthy and gentle mammal. Contrary to popular notions of the alleged monstrosity of genetically engineered organisms, her body shape and coloration are exactly of the same kind we ordinarily find in albino rabbits. Unaware that Alba is a glowing bunny, it is impossible for anyone to notice anything unusual about her. Therefore Alba undermines any ascription of alterity predicated on morphology and behavioral traits. It is precisely this productive ambiguity that sets her apart: being at once same and different. The mystery and beauty of life is as great as ever when we realize our close biological kinship with other species and when we understand that from a limited set of genetic bases life has evolved on Earth with organisms as diverse as bacteria, plants, insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals.

alba1 alba2

Alba is undoubtedly a very special animal, but I want to be clear that her formal and genetic uniqueness are but one component of the “GFP Bunny” artwork. The “GFP Bunny” project is a complex social event that starts with the creation of a chimerical animal that does not exist in nature (i.e., “chimerical” in the sense of a cultural tradition of imaginary animals, not in the scientific connotation of an organism in which there is a mixture of cells in the body) and that also includes at its core:
1) ongoing dialogue between professionals of several disciplines (art, science, philosophy, law, communications, literature, social sciences) and the public on cultural and ethical implications of genetic engineering;
2) contestation of the alleged supremacy of DNA in life creation in favor of a more complex understanding of the intertwined relationship between genetics, organism, and environment;
3) extension of the concepts of biodiversity and evolution to incorporate precise work at the genomic level;
4) interspecies communication between humans and a transgenic mammal;
5) integration and presentation of “GFP Bunny” in a social and interactive context;
6) examination of the notions of normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, hybridity, and otherness;
7) consideration of a non-semiotic notion of communication as the sharing of genetic material across traditional species barriers;
8) public respect and appreciation for the emotional and cognitive life of transgenic animals;
9) expansion of the present practical and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to incorporate life invention.

Eduardo Kac

‘I will never forget the moment when I first held her in my arms, in Jouy-en-Josas, France, on April 29, 2000. My apprehensive anticipation was replaced by joy and excitement. Alba — the name given her by my wife, my daughter, and I — was lovable and affectionate and an absolute delight to play with. As I cradled her, she playfully tucked her head between my body and my left arm, finding at last a comfortable position to rest and enjoy my gentle strokes. She immediately awoke in me a strong and urgent sense of responsibility for her well-being’.

Industrial Evolution

Maarten Vanden Eynde
City of a thousand trades, 2007

Maarten Vanden Eynde city of a thousand trades

Maarten Vanden Eynde city of a thousand trades 2

Birmingham played a leading role as front runner for the Industrial Revolution, changing the world beyond recognition and paving the way for the largest population explosion in human history. In 1791, Arthur Young, the writer and commentator on British economic life described Birmingham as “the first manufacturing town in the world.” The Lunar Society, based in Birmingham, was the brain and fuel for the machine that powered the evolution of human civilization. The members of the Lunar Society were Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Galton Junior, James Keir, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, John Whitehurst and William Withering. More peripheral characters and correspondents included Sir Richard Arkwright, John Baskerville, Thomas Beddoes, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Anna Seward, William Small, John Smeaton, Thomas Wedgwood, John Wilkinson, Joseph Wright, James Wyatt, Samuel Wyatt, and member of parliament John Levett.

In 2007 most of the manufacturing companies have moved out off Birmingham to other parts of the world where labor is cheaper. Together with the companies the knowledge to manufacture things is disappearing. In two generations there will be hardly anyone left who has the ability to make something. The Eastside area is being redeveloped and the predominant manufacturing business will be replaced by a service and culture oriented industry. Some huge factories are already transformed in yuppie-flats. I went around visiting every factory of Eastside to excavate the remnants of the manufacturing industry.

Above the Jennens road I only discovered university buildings and brain parks for the IT sector. In the middle there is Millenium Point and huge shopping areas surrounding the Bullring, one of the biggest shopping centers of the world. Everything is imported. Only in the south east, in Digbeth (the historical center and birthplace of Birmingham) I found manufacturing factories. Half of all the buildings is empty already, abandoned, to let. The others are scheduled to leave within a few years, some even in months. It felt like I was just in time to collect a few samples before it’s all gone. Like a contemporary archaeologist I wandered through the area to look for left overs. I asked the factory owners if they wanted to contribute to the collection of manufactured goods being made in Birmingham anno 2007. I wanted to preserve them for future archaeologists to discover. It was now or never.

The reactions were overwhelmingly positive. Somehow the necessity to preserve something of this important period in the history of Birmingham does not need much explanation. Almost 90% of all the manufacturing companies participated and did so by giving samples for free. The only three things I had to buy – because they were too valuable and too big – I got with a huge discount. After 30 seconds of suspicion I was welcomed very friendly and personal life stories came on the table accompanied with a cup of tea.
The stories were very consistent and similar: after having worked in the factory for all their lives, often even for several generations, it was not possible to compete with the cheap imported goods anymore. The rents became too high, hiring more people too expensive. The ground was to centrally located and therefor to valuable. They were simply bought out. Offers which they could not refuse… Or their children were not interested or skilled enough to take over the company. They all felt part of a disappearing tribe, the last generation of traditional workman.

I asked two pieces of each object, referring to Noach’s arch and proving somehow the multiplicity of it, the possibility to be mass produced and re-produced if needed. It takes two to tango… The objects are lined up, from small to big, marching to an uncertain future, destiny unknown.

Maarten Vanden Eynde Industrial Revolution 1

Maarten Vanden Eynde Industrial Revolution 2

Maarten Vanden Eynde Industrial Revolution 3

Maarten Vanden Eynde Industrial Revolution 4

Maarten Vanden Eynde Industrial Revolution 5

‘I remember Birmingham being epitome of modernity… Birmingham was the future – in a sense it has been the future, but that bit of the future is worn out now and we need a new one’

[Will Alsop, architect]

Prehistoric Pets

triops

The tadpole shrimp (scientific name = Triops longicaudatus, which are in the order Notostraca in the class Branchiopoda) inhabits freshwater, ephemeral ponds ranging from the southern regions of western Canada, through the United States and into Central and South America. Triops translates in Latin to three eyes and longicaudatus refers to the elongated abdomen and associated structures. Two genera (Triops [formerly Apus] and Lepidurus) constitute nine to twelve species within the Notostraca taxa. Triops is distinguished from Lepidurus by the absence of an anal plate. Fossil records indicate that these crustaceans evolved over 350 million years ago during the Devonian period and have remained relatively unchanged in external morphology. The persistence of these taxa during several geological extinctions may be related to the ability to remain in embryonic stasis for several decades.

triops 2

Populations of Triops are comprised of males and hermaphrodites, with wide variation in the numbers of both sexual types. Most populations have many more hermaphrodites than males, and in some ponds, no males are found at all. The hermaphrodites can fertilize their own eggs, or can mate with a male. The fertilized eggs are called “cysts” or “resting eggs,” and can be dried for several years to decades before being hatching when rehydrated. In this cyst form, Triops can withstand extremes of heat and cold. (This is why they can be sold in plastic bags in novelty stores!) The eggs are carried by the hermaphrodites in small “brood pouches” located on two of their swimming appendages (about half-way down the length of the body, on the left and right sides). The eggs are either white or pinkish in color, and are carried in these pouches for between 12 and 24 hours before being laid in the ponds. The Triops have two large mandibles that they use for grinding up both live and dead food items. They eat plants, other animals, and sometimes even each other.

triops drawing

Simon said: Modernism

Simon Starling

The British artist Simon Starling refers to objects or individuals in his projects, which embody the possibilities and ideas of Modernism. Based on extensive research, he elucidates the meaning of the vocabulary of Modernism, as well as the structures, on which this myth is based. By transforming auratically charged objects, reconstructing them or transferring them to different contexts and materials, he questions their original intentions and conditions. In this, unlike the avant-garde that focused on a break with history, his new definitions stress the continuation of history and its variations.

Simon Starling

Rescued Rhododendrons, 2000, Filmstill

Playing with contextual shifts also characterizes Starling’s project “Rescued Rhododendrons”, in which a historical development is reversed, and which Simon Starling shows as a video installation in the gallery of Secession. The video work deals with returning the plant “Rhododendron ponticum” to its original site. Imported from the south of Spain to the north of Scotland in the mid-18th century, it is considered a weed there today. In the course of an announcement for a sculpture project in the
Scottish landscape, Simon Starling learned that the rhododendrons were to be uprooted and destroyed, so that they would not alter the original heathland ecosystem. Starling counteracted this plan and set out with the plants – in a red Volvo 240 Estate as transportation – on a rescue mission to return them to their original homeland.

Modern Taxonomy

Jeroen Kuster
Symbos dorcas, 2005

Jeroen Kuster

Already from a young age Jeroen Kuster (1971) has developed a craze for everything what is part of the animal world. He is especially curious to how an animal has been build and what structures are to be seen. Kuster collected skulls since he was 12 and analysed about five hundred animals already. A remarkable hobby which resulted in valuable knowledge of the inner spirit of every separate animal. He plays God and recreates new species as he sees fit. Everything originates from his fantasy combined directly with his anatomical knowledge. He frequently uses everyday materials, like plastic spoons and other inorganic construction materials to build his own fictitious taxonomy. Within the universe of Kuster the animals carry biological names which find were their origin in the Systema Naturae of Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the founder of the modern taxonomy.

Symbos ovibos lervia, 2005
Jeroen Kuster 2

Taurulus Surmuletus, 2004
Jeroen Kuster 3

Nematocera Hystrix, 2005
Jeroen Kuster 4

http://jeroenkuster.nl/

Bionic Body

Bionic Body
©deenine

Claudia Mitchell is the first woman to receive a “bionic” arm, which allows her to control parts of the device by her thoughts alone. The device, designed by physicians and engineers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting the movements of a chest muscle that has been rewired to the stumps of nerves that once went to her now-missing limb.

The bionic arm makes use of several features of the human body that would be impossible to create from scratch. Luckily, a person still has them even after suffering an injury as grievous as the loss of an arm at the shoulder.

One feature is the “motor cortex” of the brain, where cells that control voluntary muscles reside. The millions of nerve cells that “drive” the arm and hand remain after amputation. When an amputee pretends to move his missing hand, those cells fire and send impulses down the spinal cord and out to nerves that terminate at the stump.

Those nerves are huge electrical conduits filled with tens of thousands of fibers carrying a wide assortment of information. Some are motor nerves telling muscles to move. Some are sensory nerves, carrying impulses back from the hand to the brain, where the information will be interpreted as touch, temperature, pressure and pain.

source: David Brown, Washington Post

A short story
by Warren Ellis

She used to have eyes I could lose myself in, and then she had them replaced with laser pointers. Little red dots jumping up and down on the bedroom wall as I took her from behind. I could live with that until she had the animal voice import. The cheetah purring was okay, but the dingo noises just killed the mood. The combination of the red eyes and the gorilla sounds when she jerked off was horrible. A few weeks later, things were moving down there that shouldn’t have. Don’t be scared, she said, as stuff pumped like organ stops under her skin. Something extended itself and waved at me.

I threw up between her legs and she didn’t talk to me for a week. Which I suppose you can’t really blame her for, but still.

I knew it was over when she cut her legs off.

Had them hacked off at the knee and came home with a suitcase full of modular replacements. The stumps had little Firewire ports that plugged into the new lower leg units. She fitted what she called her Sex Legs and flexed artificial toes, feet fixed in a perfect arch to accomodate the welded-on six-inch heels. Apparently there were Segway gyroscopes in the calves to keep her upright when she walked.

I came home one night to find her in a red latex minidress and sixteen legs. Spider things were sprouted from her knees, eight legs each. She paraded on the plastic kitchen floor for me, swinging her hips. Clackclackclackclack on the floor. Clackclackclackclack.

She stuck her tongue out at me when I started retching. There was what looked like a DC power inlet on the tip.

After that, it just got ugly. I had to go. I saw her again a couple of weeks ago. She introduced her new boyfriend as Spin. His skin was cold and shiny, like white plastic coating over steel. He had a revolving drum in his stomach. She leant against him and grinned.

I’m living in my car now. My car loves me. I mean, it wouldn’t have grown a real vagina for me otherwise, would it?

The body/mind conflict

Future-Humans
NASA/JPL

Humanity Gets an Upgrade at the MIT Media Lab

Two years ago, IFTF’s Technology Horizons program explored the implications of what we called “the extended self”. The core hypothesis was that the body is becoming a platform for a whole range of technological augmentations. These deliberate enhancements run the gamut from mobile phones and social network software, to cochlear implants to restore lost hearing.

One of the really interesting implications of that research was the insight that we are increasingly seeing people leveraging therapeutic technologies to create super-human abilities. This is clearly the case in athletics, but you can also this at work with college students abusing drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to maintain focus during long study sessions. Michael Chorost, who wrote so eloquently about his relationship with his cochlear implant, forecasts that people will almost certainly exploit the potential of that technology to provide super-human hearing for healthy people. Even though only six people have had therapeutic retinal implants to date, it probably won’t be long before someone develops a retinal implant that gives its symbiant the ability to see X-rays or infrared…. if they haven’t already.

source: Institute for the Future

Metalosis Maligna

still form Metalosis Maligna, a fictitious documentary, by Floris Kaayk , about a spectacular yet viciously disabling disease which affects patients who have been fitted with medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions.

“Western philosophy has betrayed the body; it has actively participated in the great process of metaphorization that has abandoned the body; and it has denied the body. The living body, being at once ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ cannot tolerate such conceptual division, and consequentely philosophical concepts fall into the category of the ‘signs of non-body’.” -Henri Lefebvre-

Mammoth Clone: Science, or Simply Fiction?

mammoth

Bill Gasperini

The idea of cloning a mammoth is just a fantasy,” says biologist Ross MacPhee, an expert on the giant fauna of the last ice age and chairman of the American Museum of Natural History’s mammalogy department. Alex Greenwood, a molecular biologist who studies ice age extinctions (and a colleague of MacPhee’s in New York), agrees: “I am really stunned,” he says, “that there are scientists still pushing this idea.” MacPhee, who has worked extensively with the Jarkov mammoth in Siberia, and Greenwood say that making an exact copy of a species that died off 10,000 years ago is possible only in science fiction movies.

The main reason is simple: To have any chance at a successful cloning, scientists must start with pristine, complete DNA. But even in cold environments, cells quickly break down after an organism dies; entropy occurs, and bacteria and certain enzymes latch onto or destroy cellular material. All the DNA found from long-extinct animals (even those remains found in the Siberian permafrost) has been incomplete and fragmented.

“If freezing is done under special conditions, such as in a modern laboratory, cells with their genetic material can be preserved indefinitely,” explains Russian scientist Alexei Tikhonov. “But conditions out in the permafrost are far from perfect.” Tikhonov has worked with the best-preserved mammoth ever found, a baby mammoth carcass pulled from a construction site in 1977. Nicknamed “Dima,” the small calf still had its skin and looked like it could have died just days earlier. But it probably fell into a mud pit and died quickly 44,000 years ago. Dima now rests in Tikhonov’s institute in St. Petersburg. Studies have shown that proteins in Dima’s cells were seriously modified after death, and that other substances common in living tissues (such as phosphorous) disappeared entirely.

Cloning is only possible when the nucleus taken from a living cell (such as with Dolly the sheep) is placed into an egg from which the original nucleus has been removed. This substitute nucleus, with its DNA, proteins and other crucial material completely intact, was what controlled the development of Dolly. Injecting fragments of DNA into a cell without a nuclear transfer would not result in a clone. Greenwood explains it this way: “If I throw all the parts needed to make a car down the stairs of a building, I will not have a Porsche 911 in the stairwell when they land.”

Ryuzo Yanagimachi, a scientist in Hawaii who has successfully cloned mice and other small mammals, says he would like to clone a mammoth. But he agrees that this could happen only if intact DNA is ever recovered from a long-dead mammoth. In recent years, a Japanese team has mounted several expeditions into Russia’s far north with the expressed aim of trying to bring a mammoth back to life. The team’s main intent is to recover frozen sperm from a mammoth and then use it to impregnate a female elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative. But Greenwood and MacPhee say this is equally problematic, even on the off-chance that intact sperm DNA from a mammoth could ever be found. “Mammoths and elephants have been separated by about 4 (million) to 6 million years of evolution,” says Greenwood. “This would be like crossbreeding a human and a chimp and expecting to have a successful generation of a hybrid.”

Is it possible that in the march of time and scientific advance, technologies may be developed that will allow extinct creatures to be cloned? Or, someday, may a perfectly intact chain of mammoth DNA be found? According to MacPhee, such questions remain too tough to answer. “There isn’t even a direction we can point to,” he says, “which would indicate whether cloning extinct animals will ever be possible.”

© 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

mammoth-baby

Baby Mammoth discovered in Siberia in 2007

Eric Adler
Cloning a Better Tomorrow

cloning

Human Genome Project

dna art

The longest and final chapter in the Book of Life, the human genetic code, has been published.
Scientists have completed a detailed blueprint of Chromosome 1, which contains 8% of all human genetic information and 3,141 genes. It marks the last part of the vast jigsaw pieced together by the Human Genome Project (HGP), the mapping out of the entire human genome, described as a “monumental achievement”.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was one of the great feats of exploration in history – an inward voyage of discovery rather than an outward exploration of the planet or the cosmos; an international research effort to sequence and map all of the genes – together known as the genome – of members of our species, Homo sapiens. Completed in April 2003, the HGP gave us the ability to, for the first time, to read nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being.

Chromosomes are the bundles of DNA that exist at the heart of every cell. Humans have 22 pairs of chromosomes plus the X and Y sex chromosomes. The largest of all is Chromosome 1, which is associated with more than 350 human diseases linked to altered DNA. Among them are conditions as varied as cancers, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, high cholesterol and porphyria – the nervous system disorder thought to have afflicted King George III.
The completed sequence published in the journal Nature has already been used to identify more than 1,000 new genes. It is expected to help researchers find novel treatments and ways of diagnosing many diseases.

In the past year alone, genes involved in a dozen diseases, including cancer and neurological disorders, have been identified using the Chromosome 1 sequence. Dr Simon Gregory, from Duke University, who was in charge of the project while at the Sanger Institute, said: “The sequence we have generated, like that produced by our collaborators throughout the Human Genome Project, has driven biomedical discovery. “This moment, the publication of the sequence from the last and largest human chromosome, completes the story of the HGP and marks the growing wave of biological and medical research founded on the human genome sequence. Chromosome 1 contains fascinating stories of chromosome biology, of our evolution, and our health, and it’s inspiring to have played a part in a programme that will have so much power to understand the essence of human biology.”


dna sample

Create your own DNA artwork!

Human vs Chimp

Jeff Koons
Michael Jackson and _________, 1988

jeff-koons

Koons: “I’m interested in the morality of what it means to be an artist. As an artist I’m most concerned with what art means to me, how it defines my life, etc. And then after that, my next concern is my actions, the responsibility of my own actions in art in regard to other artists, and then to a wider range of the art audience, such as critics, museum people, collectors, etc. Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the world a better place.”
The sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey Bubbles has fetched $5.6m (£3.8m) at a contemporary art auction at Sotheby’s in New York.

Gareth Cook
Humans, chimps may have bred after split, 2006

Boston scientists released a provocative report that challenges the timeline of human evolution and suggests that human ancestors bred with chimpanzee ancestors long after they had initially separated into two species.

The researchers, working at the Cambridge-based Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, used a wealth of newly available genetic data to estimate the time when the first human ancestors split from the chimpanzees. The team arrived at an answer that is at least 1 million years later than paleontologists had believed, based on fossils of early, humanlike creatures.

The lead scientist said that this jarring conflict with the fossil record, combined with a number of other strange genetic patterns the team uncovered, led him to a startling explanation: that human ancestors evolved apart from the chimpanzees for hundreds of thousands of years, and then started breeding with them again before a final break.
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Bacterial (R)Evolution

Ira Bartell
Delft Anthrax, 2005

anthrax
Ceramic tile, Delft blue transfer (15 x 15cm)

‘This began as an email at the time of the anthrax scare in the United States, I decided not to send it to various U.S. government agencies as an antidote to mass hysteria. It is a 300x magnification of an anthrax bacteria arabesque.’

Maggie Fox
Bacteria in Dirt May be “Born” Resistant to Drugs, 2006

Bacteria in dirt may be “born” with a resistance to antibiotics, which could help shed light on the problem of drug-defying “superbugs,” Canadian researchers said. They tested 480 different bacteria found in soil and discovered that every single one had some resistance to antibiotics — meaning they had evolved a mechanism for evading the effects of the drugs. The findings, published in the journal Science, could help explain why bacteria so quickly develop resistance to antibiotics, and why drug companies must constantly develop new ones.

“It explains where these things come from in the first place,” Gerry Wright, chair of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at Ontario’s McMaster University, said in a telephone interview. “This work could prove to be extremely valuable to the drug development process.”
Wright’s team dug up 480 strains of Streptomyces bacteria and tested them for resistance to various antibiotics. “Without exception, every strain … was found to be multi-drug resistant to seven or eight antibiotics on average, with two strains being resistant to 15 of 21 drugs,” they wrote in their report.

‘A LOGICAL PLACE TO START’

These particular bacteria do not infect people, but Wright believes the findings almost certainly apply to other species of microbes. “It turns out that Streptomyces make lots of antibiotics,” Wright said. “Anything that ends in ‘mycin’ comes from streptomycin — vancomycin, streptomycin.” That was why they chose this group of bacteria.

“We were curious to see where these things might come from in the first place, so it seemed that was a logical place to start. I expect lots of these (drug-resistant) genes are peppered all over the microbial community,” Wright said.
They exposed the bacteria to known antibiotics and then searched for genes that were activated when the microbes survived. “We found old mechanisms and new mechanisms. We found a brand-new resistance mechanism to an antibiotic called telithromycin,” he said, referring to Aventis’ drug Ketek, only approved in 2004. Ketek was designed to overcome resistance to antibiotics, but one of the bacteria Wright tested evolved a way to prevent it from working.

Almost as soon as penicillin was introduced in the 1940s, bacteria began to develop resistance to its effects, prompting researchers to develop many new generations of antibiotics. But their overuse and misuse have helped fuel the rise of drug-resistant “superbugs.” The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 70 percent of infections that people get while in the hospital are resistant to at least one antibiotic. Wright said his findings do not get doctors off the hook. He said they still must prescribe antibiotics only when they are needed, and stress to patients the need to use them properly.

Soil bacteria live in a constant kind of arms race, making antibiotics to protect themselves against other bacteria, and then evolving antibiotic resistance to evade the antibiotics made by other bacteria. “Their coping tactics may be able to give us a glimpse into the future of clinical resistance to antibiotics,” Wright said.

Spiders on Speed

spider web
Normal spider web

In the 1960s, Dr. Peter Witt gave spiders various kinds of drugs and alcohol to observe the effects on their webs. The results were pretty interesting.
In 1995, NASA scientists seeking to measure toxicity relationships examined the webs of spiders dosed with various chemicals. Their experiments have shown that common house spiders spin their webs in different ways according to the psychotropic drug they have been given. Nasa scientists believe the research demonstrates that web-spinning spiders can be used to test drugs because the more toxic the chemical, the more deformed was the web.
(Source: Noever, R., J. Cronise, and R. A. Relwani. 1995. Using spider-web patterns to determine toxicity. NASA Tech Briefs 19(4):82. Published in Britain’s New Scientist magazine, 27 April 1995.)

spider speed

* Those on Benzedrine – “speed” – spin their webs “with great gusto, but apparently without much planning leaving large holes”, according to New Scientist magazine.

spider marijuana

* Spiders on marijuana made a reasonable stab at spinning webs but appeared to lose concentration about half-way through.

spider caffeine

* Caffeine, one of the most common drugs consumed by Britons in soft drinks, tea and coffee, makes spiders incapable of spinning anything better than a few threads strung together at random.

spider sleeping pills

* On chloral hydrat, an ingredient of sleeping pills, spiders “drop off before they even get started”.

Industrial Melanism

peppered moth
Peppered moth (Biston betularia) on a birch tree.

The evolution of the peppered moth over the last two hundred years has been studied in detail. Originally, the vast majority of peppered moths had light coloration, which effectively camouflaged them against the light-colored trees and lichens which they rested upon. However, due to widespread pollution during the Industrial Revolution in England, many of the lichens died out, and the trees which peppered moths rested on became blackened by soot, causing most of the light-colored moths, or typica, to die off due to predation. At the same time, the dark-colored, or melanic, moths, carbonaria, flourished because of their ability to hide on the darkened trees.

Since then, with improved environmental standards, light-colored peppered moths have again become common, but the dramatic change in the peppered moth’s population has remained a subject of much interest and study, and has led to the coining of the term “industrial melanism” to refer to the genetic darkening of species in response to pollutants.

Melanism is the opposite of albinism and occurs naturally with about the same frequency. The genetic basis is not clearly understood, but inbreeding is considered partially responsible.

In the photos below, a pale form (typica) and a dark form (carbonaria) rest side-by-side on an unpolluted lichen covered trunk in Dorset (above), and a soot-covered trunk near Birmingham. (From HBD Kettlewell, 1956, Heredity 10: 300).

biston carbonaria

biston carbonaria 2