Maarten Vanden Eynde
Since January 1st, 2007, the Union consists of 27 member states! Is further expansion desirable when the old 25 member states cannot successfully bring about an unequivocal policy? Does Europe need borders and if so, where do you draw the line? Croatia? Bosnia Herzegovina? Albania? Or Turkey? Georgia? Azerbeidzjan? And what about Russia? Or Canada? Israel?
Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info
Maarten Vanden Eynde
We have drifted too far away from the Utopian ideas that were essential to the foundation of Europe. Equality concerning basic resources and means should create freedom and stability that will make war in the future unnecessary. ‘To unify Europe is to make peace’, said the spiritual father of the European idea, Jean Monnet, in 1950.This is an ideology similar to that of the League of Nations and the United Nations and which should apply to the entire world population. And it is precisely this deviation, this betrayal of the ideology, which causes the present suspicion and ultimate rejection of the European Union. Is Europe a new country with new borders, or is it a concept for freedom and equality?
Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info
Maarten Vanden Eynde
In 2006 there were still only 15 countries represented on the flag. The ten new member states of the European Union, which joined in 2004, have not been treated equally due to fear of a tidal wave of economic refugees. A special backdoor provision was created to allow each member state to implement its own restrictions (until 2011) against one or more countries at will. This inequality and discrimination is at odds with the founding spirit of the European Union. Should free movement of people, goods, services and capital be implemented universally and immediately upon accession to membership of the EU or is an adjustment period a better strategy?
Join the forum on Europe Day, the 9th of May on www.europeday.info
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.
Baby Mammoth discovered in Siberia in 2007
Eric Adler
Cloning a Better Tomorrow
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.”
Create your own DNA artwork!
Jeff Koons
Michael Jackson and _________, 1988
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.
Lees verder
Ira Bartell
Delft Anthrax, 2005
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.
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.)
* Those on Benzedrine – “speed” – spin their webs “with great gusto, but apparently without much planning leaving large holes”, according to New Scientist magazine.
* Spiders on marijuana made a reasonable stab at spinning webs but appeared to lose concentration about half-way through.
* 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.
* On chloral hydrat, an ingredient of sleeping pills, spiders “drop off before they even get started”.
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).
Betty Chu
The color of rabbits is determined by 5 letters: A, B, C, D, E.
Wild rabbits carry color genetic make up of AABBCCDDEE which appear as chestnut agouti. Over thousands of years, mutations occured. In addition to all capital letters genes, some genes of lower letters and lower letters with subscripts show up. There are some rules to remember:
* The capital letter genes, in principle, are the dominant genes. The lower letter genes are recessive to the capital letter genes.
* A rabbit’s appearance is determined by the dominant gene, it may carry copies of recessive gene that we do not see.
* A sire and a dam with the appearances of all reccessive genes can not produce offsprings with dominant gene.
* The bunny will obtain one gene from the sire and one gene from the dam.
With the above in mind, I’ll discuss the ABCDE in 5 series, all the letter are arranged in the order of dominance.
1. A Series: determines Agouti (A) or non-agouti (at or a)
Chestnut Agouti picture of Chestnut Agouti
– A stands for Agouti: Since A is dominant, all agouti patterned rabbit carries at least one A gene. Examples of Agouti colors are: chestnut agouti, chocolate agouti, chinchilla, opal, fawn, etc.
– at stands for tan or marten pattern. Tan and marten pattern are not accepted in Angoras. It will not be discussed here.
– a stands for non-agouti: a is recessive to A, that means an Agouti patterned rabbit may carry a gene but a non-agouti rabbit will not carry A gene. Examples of non-agouti colors are: black, blue, chocolate, lilac, tort, blue tort, pearl, … etc.
2. B Series: determines Black (B) or brown (b)
– B stands for black. There are only two variations of black: black and blue. If a rabbit is a black or blue, the rabbit must carry at least a B. Whether it is a black or blue will be determined by the D series gene.
– b stands for brown. In Angora, we call it chocolate. There are two variations of chocolate: chocolate and lilac. If the rabbit is chocolate and lilac, the rabbit must carry two b genes. b is recessive to B, so a chocolate or lilac rabbit can not carry B. Whether the rabbit is chocolate of lilac will be determined by the D series gene.
3. C Series: determines Colored (C), dark chin (cchd), sable (cchl), himi (ch) or Albino (c)
– C stands for colored: Most of the regularly colored rabbits carry C. If you see a black, chocolate, chestnut agouti, tort, …. rabbit, you can be sure it carries at least a C gene. C is dominant of cchd, cchl, ch, c. The second gene may be a C or any one of the four lower letters.
– cchd stands for dark chinchilla. Chinchilla is a colored rabbit but does not carry a C, sort of an exception to the rule. A special notation for the chin – gene is cchd, a chinchilla rabbit cannot carry C since cchd is recessive to the C gene. cchd is dominant of chl, ch and c, so the second letter to cchd may be cchd or any of cchl, ch and c. In order to get a chinchilla rabbit, it has to carry a A for agouti gene. If not, it may cause a non-agouti rabbit to have wrong eye color.
– cchl stands for light chinchilla. It is more correct to think of it as a sable gene. If a rabbit carries cchl and combines with A, the color of the chin is muddy with brownish, reddish tinge- a very poor chin color. However, the sable color needs a brownish reddish tinge. cchl is the gene which makes the right color. Sable requires non-agouti a to be combined with cchl. If the rabbit carries two cchl, in Angora breed, it is called dark sable. If one cchl with ch or c, it is a regular or light sable. Both cchd and cchl rabbits do not carry the true color gene C, so some of the eye colors tend to have a ruby glow.
– ch stands for himi or pointed white. ch gene covers the colors on the rabbit’s body and only allows the colors to show on the points. So the rabbit has all appearance of a white rabbit except the points. There is no color in the eyes. The eyes appeared to be pink, what we see is actually the blood vessals.
– c: stands for albino. The appearance of the rabbit is ruby eye white. The rabbit may carry any of the genes in A, B, D, E series, but the cc genes act like a white sheet covering all other characteristics of the color genes. c is the most recessive in the C series. Breeding two ruby eye white rabbits will result in nothing but ruby eye white.
4. D Series: determines Dense color (D) or dilute color (d)
– D stands for dense color. Black, chocolate, chestnut agouti are dense colors, the rabbit must carry at least one D gene.
– d stands for dilute color. Blue, lilac, opal are dilute colors, the rabbit must carry two dd genes.
5. E Series: Es, E, ej, e
– Es stands for steel. As a general rule, mutated genes are recessive to the original gene. Es is an exception to the rule. This is a mutation but takes dominance. Es acts differently from other genes – it modifies the color rather determines the color. I have not seen a steel English Angora in all my years of raising the breed. There are steel French and Satin Angoras. When combined with Agouti gene, it look like a very dark chestnut or wild grey agouti. The easy way to identify a steel is to look at the tummy. A chestnut or wild grey agouti has white or light color tummy, a steel has a dark tummy. When combined with a gene, it look like a black rabbit with brown hairs stick out – it is a disqualification.
– E stands for extension. When a rabbit carries at least one E gene, the color of the rabbit extends from base to tip. Black, blue, chocolate, lilac, chestnut agouti, opal, chinchilla, …. all of these rabbits has extended colors.
– ej stands for Japanese, not relevant to Angoras.
– e stands for non-extension. Tort, blue tort, choc. tort, lilac tort, fawn, cream, pearl, all these rabbits have something in common: they are colored rabbits but the body color is different or lighter than the point color. They all carry two copies of non-extension gene ee. As a result the true color of these rabbits are not extended to the body, only the points carry the true color. Example, a tort is a black rabbit whose black color is not extended over its body.
The above is a very simplified version of basic color genetics. I did not cover red which requires rufus gene, broken which requires En gene and blue eye white which requires vv gene.
If there are color genetics experts out there shaking their heads when reading this article, please excuse me. Over the years, I found out that if I tried to use all the big and correct words in genetics to explain the basics, I got lost and most people got lost. When I use this method, I was able to help many of my fellow breeders to understand the basics and got interested in mapping out the color genetics of their own herd.
Damien Hirst
Mother and Child, Devided, 1993
The impulses driving Damien Hirst’s work stem from dilemmas inherent in human life: ‘I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live for ever. I can’t escape the fact and I can’t let go of the desire’. The materials he uses often shock, but he says he ‘uses shock almost as a formal element . not so much to thrust his work in the public eye . but rather to make aspects of life and death visible’.
Fritjof Capra
The Systems View of Life, 1982
Chapter 8 of the “Turning Point”
As the notion of an independent physical entity has become problematic in subatomic physics, so has the notion of an independent organism in biology. Living organisms, being open systems, keep themselves alive and functioning through intense transactions with their environment, which itself consists partially of organisms. Thus the whole biosphere – our planetary ecosystem – is a dynamic and highly integrated web of living and nonliving forms. Although this web is multilevel, transactions and interdependencies exist among all its levels.
Most organisms are not only embedded in ecosystems but are complex ecosystems themselves, containing a host of smaller organisms that have considerable autonomy and yet integrate themselves harmoniously into the functioning of the whole. The smallest of these living components show an astonishing uniformity, resembling one another quite closely throughout the living world, as vividly described by Lewis Thomas.
Damien Hirst I Want You Because I Can’t Have You, 1992
There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm…..They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hill. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of seagulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window. Through them, I am connected: I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place.
Although all living organisms exhibit conspicuous individuality and are relatively autonomous in their functioning, the boundaries between organism and environment are often difficult to ascertain. Some organisms can be considered alive only when they are in a certain environment; others belong to larger systems that behave more like an autonomous organism than its individual members; still other collaborate to build large structures which become ecosystems supporting hundreds of species.
Lees verder
Ira Bartell
Flowerpot, 2005
In a town of Roman antiquity like Cologne, a pottery shard is not simply a piece of ceramic. A shard speaks – to archeologists most completely – but to us all. To a professional, a shard tells of its origins: the period, place, likely use, possibly the former contents. To the rest of us, a shard means that what once was held together as a functioning vessel is now no more than pieces; to paraphrase the Buddha, “Whatever is put together, comes apart.” Perhaps the shard tells of violence. Certainly it speaks of destruction, and most ineluctably, the passage of time – a point Bartell underscores by dating this object. On a emotional, human level, a shard points to broken structures, broken relations, broken plans, broken dreams. Here is a broken thing.
Acknowledging all this – having broken the pot himself – Bartell takes several triumphant steps past depression or nihilism. He has re-assembled the pot – not back into a seamlessly, cleverly, glued camouflage job – but loosely, so that the pieces remain pieces, and the destruction remains present and visible. This airy reconstruction of shards into the shape – the former shape – of a flowerpot, becomes an act of bravery and pluck. Bartell says, “yes, things break, my things too. But you can do with the pieces. Pick them up, put them together. Make something.”
The pot Bartell has wrought is indeed a beautiful thing – much more lovely than the original, unbroken, garden variety. It attracts all who see it, simply because it looks so good. This pot is a three-dimensional mosaic (a nod perhaps towards Cologne’s oldest and most beautiful resident artwork – the million-piece mosaic dining-room floor from an Roman villa in the middle of the old town.) The attraction of this object comes in the first instance from the artistic integrity and the craft in it. Bartell knows the importance of doing things well, and that it is not enough simply to make jokes or create objects of the absurd. The pot is empty; it holds nothing but beauty and bravery, and this is magnetic.
David Schieider, 2005
Ira Bartell
The History of Egypt
©Mike Mosedale
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (publ. 1859) is a pivotal work in scientific literature and arguably the pivotal work in evolutionary biology. The book’s full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It introduced the theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It was controversial because it contradicted religious beliefs which underlay the then current theories of biology. Darwin’s book was the culmination of evidence he had accumulated on the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s and added to through continuing investigations and experiments since his return.
Theory in a nutshell
Darwin’s theory is based on key observations and inferences drawn from them:
1. Species have great fertility. They make more offspring than can grow to adulthood.
2. Populations remain roughly the same size, with modest fluctuations.
3. Food resources are limited, but are relatively stable over time.
4. An implicit struggle for survival ensues.
5. In sexually reproducing species, generally no two individuals are identical.
6. Some of these variations directly impact the ability of an individual to survive in a given environment.
7. Much of this variation is inheritable.
8. Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce, while individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce.
9. The individuals that survive are most likely to leave their inheritable traits to future generations.
10. This slowly effected process results in populations that adapt to the environment over time, and ultimately, after interminable generations, the creations of new varieties, and ultimately, new species.
Koen Vanmechelen
The Cosmopolitan Chicken, 2000
The Cosmopolitan Chicken is the world-wide breeding project by Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen (1965) to which the cross-breeding of different national chicken races is central and crucial. The cross-breeding as the quintessence of the dynamic, fertile and creative life and of the peaceful living together of different races.
The story officially starts in 2000, in the Flemish village of Watou, at the boarder between Belgium and France. As his participation at the exhibition ‘Storm Centers’, curated by Jan Hoet, Koen Vanmechelen has cross-bred the Belgian chicken “Mechelse Koekoek” (cuckoo of Malines) with the French pride “Poulet de Bresse”.
The descendants of this crossing, named “Mechelse Bresse’s” were consecutively and at their turn cross-bred with the typical English chicken ‘English Redcap’; this happened in 2000 too at the group show ‘A Shot in the Head’ at Lisson Gallery, London.
In 2001, at Deweer Art Gallery in Otegem (B) a one-man show entitled “Between natural breeding and genetic enginering” was presented with the descendants of the cross-breeding between the “Malinese Bresse’s” and the “English Redcap”, thus called “Mechelse Redcap”.
After that, the “Malinese Redcap” was cross-bred with the American chicken “Jersey Giant”: in real at the artist’s studio in Meeuwen (B) and ‘artificially’ (i.e. in the form of a transparent glass chicken) at the Miami Art Fair, USA. The “Mechelse Giant’ was the subject of an installation presented at the exhibition “3 FEB 2002”, curated by Edith Doove, at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle (B).
The “Malinese Giant” was at his turn cross-bred with the German “Dresdner Huhn”, a fully German hen (the race was made to remember the bombing of Dresden). This cross-breeding too happened at the studio of the artist. Most stunning is the fact that the cross-breeding of the Dresdner cock with the Malinese Giant hen procreated only male chicks!
In the spring of 2003 the cross-breeding of the “Mechelse Dresdner” with the Dutch hen “Uilebaard” (Owlbeard) effected two exhibitions in Amsterdam. First there was the exhibition “Koen Vanmechelen – “Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Mechelse Dresdner – The Desire” at the De Brakke Grond, which was meant as an appeal to Dutch institutions to patron the cross-breeding of the Malinese Dresdner with the Dutch Owlbeard. The exhibition resulted in the acceptance of the GEM – the museum for contemporary art of The Hague to patron the cross-breeding with the Dutch hen and in the presentation of the “Mechelse Owlbeard”, the sixth generation of the Cosmopolitan Chicken at the KunstRAI in Amsterdam. Due to the influenza aviaria disease that at that time struck both Holland and Belgium the 2 exhibitions in Amsterdam were set up without living animals.
In September 2003 Koen did a second one-man show at Deweer Art Gallery, entitled “Koen Vanmechelen – Cosmopolitan Chicken Project – Second Generation: Mechelse Bresse – Sex & Mortality”. It was an exhibition about the now naturally dying out first and second generations of the “Cosmopolitan Chicken Project”, and about the off-spring of life in general.
In November 2003 Koen Vanmechelen undertook a second expedition to Nepal to study the Bankiva hen, the so-called ‘primal chicken’, from which all domesticated chickens descend.
In the mean time the cross-breeding of the Malinese Owlbeard with the Mexican “Louisiana” was organised in Meeuwen to originate the “Mechelse Louisiana”.
In his current installation for “ECLiPS / 25 Years Deweer Art Gallery “ at Transfo Zwevegem Koen Vanmechelen brings forward a Malinese Owlbeard cock in surveillance of thousands of fresh eggs.
Obviously, “The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project ” is a project with a high metaphorical value that touches a lot of contemporary social issues such as genetic manipulation, cloning, globalisation, multiraciality, multicultural society etc.
Although the artist has a lot of inspiring contacts with the medical and scientific world, “The Cosmopolitan Chicken” has found its ideal setting in the art world.
From the project spring an endless series of works, such as great chicken portraits, drawings, installations, stuffed chickens, story boards, videos etc.
Together with Dr Ombelet, a gynaecologist, the artist publishes “The Walking Egg”, an English magazine in which ethicists, philosophers and scientists debate about all sorts of procreation items. Koen Vanmechelen joins in with artistic reflecNons. The Cosmopolitan Chicken has nothing to do with cloning, but it goes without saying that the artist follows with great interest and attention those congresses. “The chicken wants to be in the middle of natural breeding and genetic manipulation” he says. “We should never forget the natural breeding. It is full of surprises”.
A representation of the internet
(Credit: Bill Cheswick, Lumeta Corp.)
In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it.
The term ontology has its origin in philosophy, where it is the name of a fundamental branch of metaphysics concerned with existence. According to Tom Gruber at Stanford University, the meaning of ontology in the context of computer science, however, is “a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents.” He goes on to specify that an ontology is generally written, “as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary.”
Swoogle is a search engine for the Semantic Web on the Web. Swoogle crawl the World Wide Web for a special class of web documents called Semantic Web documents, which are written in RDF (Resource Description Framework). Swoogle is a research project being carried out by the ebiquity research group in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
Dr. Chris Evans
Science Fact, 1977
‘Anyone who doubts the potential of computer modeling to influence public opinion and action should remember that the whole of the modern surge to ‘ecology’ and the rejection of thow away capitalism arose because of the first large-scale computer simulations – the warning of the Club of Rome that continued profligacy with natural recources would lead to the destruction of modern society’.
>>>
The Club of Rome is a global think tank and centre of innovation and initiative.
As a non-profit, non govermental organisation (NGO), it brings together scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of state and former heads of state from all five continents who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies.
The Club of Rome was founded in April 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrialist, and Alexander King, a Scottish scientist.
Hasan Özbekhan, Erich Jantsch and Alexander N. Christakis were responsible for conceptualizing the original prospectus of the Club of Rome titled “The Predicament of Mankind.” This prospectus was founded on a humanistic architecture and the participation of stakeholders in democratic dialogue. When the Club of Rome Executive Committee in the Summer of 1970 opted for a mechanistic and elitist methodology for an extrapolated future, they resigned from their positions.
The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth, which has sold 30 million copies in more than 30 translations, making it the best selling environmental book in world history. Published in 1972 and presented for the first time at the ISC’s annual Management Symposium in St. Gallen, Switzerland, it predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil. The 1973 oil crisis increased public concern about this problem.