Responce to Articles and Previous Posts

To begin, I would like to address some of the questions posed in the previous post. Would I modify an animal? Well if you extend this to organism or cell lines, then I already have in lab and class work. It is a normal procedure to do this and almost odd to question. For example, I have worked with tagging genes with GFP in bacteria and studied GFP tagging in C. elgans, a very small worm. My question is why these ethical concerns are not raised towards these organisms. C. elgans are so well studied that a group of scientists in England have traced each cell division form embryo to mature cell. This makes C. elgans an incredibly good model organism. Creating organisms with GFP or any added DNA sequence takes an incredible amount of work and patience. To the scientist who finally see a success, in the case the C. elgans a green nervous system, that moment is beautiful, inspiring and makes up for many failures it took to get to that point. Successfully adding DNA sequences is in fact an art form in itself and takes many repetitions and man hours to create.

Its seems that part of this question of what is bio art lies the question of what is art. In A history of Art Involving DNA it states that one theory "that art arose from the human mind or spirit and was therefore outside of and superior to nature." pg 270 Also stated that one argument against why plants could not be art was "the claim that their aesthetic attributes did not sufficiently reflect human choice" pg 271. Both of these thoughts create a gap between art work and subject. As if the subject does not have the same meaning as the art work itself. That these two entities are separate in their core. In my mind this is not the case. The work is mearly a the capturing of a moment of beauty, emotion, and/or meaning. The artist either creates, envisions, or recognizes a moment of importance and captures it in the medium of choice. And if art is defined by our own choices one could chose to see meaning and importance in many things in life, making those things art themselves. Life forms in art carries the traditional paintings and photographs that capture a moment one step further towards a better representation of the moment because the art form is fleeting. Bio art creates an extended moment of the artists mind that for a time may be seen but keeps more of the essence of what makes a moment important, the fact that it does not last.

As part of Bio-art many ethics questions are raised. I question the necessity of some of these questions. Yes, we should question whether the proper care is given to animals being studied and question current and proposed practices. However some questions that are raised involve circumstances that may never arise. One in particular is the dilemma about genetically choosing one trait over another. The arguement is that we may one day be able to use science to select for certain traits that will offer a better life for our children by removing genes that could lead to heart disease or other genetically linked diseases. However the fact of the mater is that we have just begun to unravel the gigantic yarn ball moster that is the cause and effect of many of these diseases. There is not telling what we may find a few layers in. It is very possible that one day we will discover that removal of genes that cause disease cause other worse conditions or that nature plays a more direct impact on. These ethical concerns about whether this should be allowed are no where near relevant as we do not see the direct situation in front of us. The application of this potential procedure, along with many others, cannot be judges as a whole but on a case by case basis and not until those situations arise.