Black Cat / White Cat

november 7th, 2009

Red cat




Chinese Cryptozoology

juni 17th, 2008

Shen Shaomin
Unknown Creature – Three Headed Monster, 2002

shen shaomin three headed monster



Unknown Creature – Mosquito, 2002

shen shaomin mosquito


Body Double

november 13th, 2007

BEAVERTON, Oregon (CNN) — Oregon researchers say they have cloned a monkey by splitting an early-stage embryo and implanting the pieces into mother animals.

The technique has so far produced only one living monkey, a bright-eyed rhesus macaque female named Tetra, now 4 months old.

clone monkey 2 clone monkey 2

Tetra the monkey is different from Dolly the sheep, which was produced by Scientists at Scotland’s Roslin Institute using a process called nuclear transfer — taking the nucleus out of an adult cell and using it to reprogram an unfertilized egg.

Some scientists argue that animals like Dolly are not 100 percent clones because they have genetic material both from the adult cell they were taken from, and from the egg that is hollowed out to make the clone. Tetra was produced by a technique called “embryo splitting.” Here’s how it works:

* An egg from a mother and sperm from a father are used to create a fertilized egg.

* After the embryo grows into eight cells, researchers split it into four identical embryos, each consisting of just two cells.

* The four embryos are then implanted into surrogate mothers. Schatten said that in effect, a single embryo becomes four embryos, all genetically identical.

clone monkey drawing

In the case of their experiment, three of the embryos didn’t survive. The fourth, Tetra, was born 157 days later. Her name means “one of four.” Tetra isn’t the first monkey to be cloned, but she is the first using the embryo-splitting technique. More are on the way.

The Future Farm

september 27th, 2007

Alexis Rockman
The Farm, 2000

Alexis Rockman
oil and acrylic on wood panel, 96 x 120 in.
Courtesy of JGS, Inc.

‘My artworks are information-rich depictions of how our culture perceives and interacts with plants and animals, and the role culture plays in influencing the direction of natural history.

The Farm contextualizes the biotech industry’s explosive advances in genetic engineering within the history of agriculture, breeding, and artificial selection in general. The image, a wide-angle view of a cultivated soybean field, is constructed to be read from left to right. The image begins with the ancestral versions of internationally familiar animals, the cow, pig, and chicken, and moves across to an informed speculation about how they might look in the future. Also included are geometrically transformed vegetables and familiar images relating to the history of genetics. In The Farm I am interested in how the present and the future look of things are influenced by a broad range of pressures- human consumption, aesthetics, domestication, and medical applications among them. The flora and fauna of the farm are easily recognizable; they are, at the same time, in danger of losing their ancestral identities’.

cloned pigs

Five cloned piglets: Noel, Angel, Star, Joy and Mary
Born on Christmas Day 2001 in the US Scottish-based firm PPL Therapeutics

These are not the first pig clones, but PPL, a commercial offshoot of the Roslin Institute in Scotland, says the pigs are the first to be engineered in a way that should help prevent their tissues being rejected by the human body.
The animals’ biological make-up is slightly different from ordinary pigs. PPL says that it intends to use the pigs as part of its programme to seek a cure for humans suffering from diabetes.

Mice and Men

juli 31st, 2007

Bryan Crockett
Ecce Homo, 2000


marble and epoxy, 30 x 40 x 70 in.




Follow the Green Rabbit

juli 26th, 2007

Eduardo Kac
GFP Bunny, 2000

Eduardo Kac green rabbit


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’.

Mammoth Clone: Science, or Simply Fiction?

april 28th, 2007


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



april 20th, 2007

Betty Chu






Chestnut Agouti picture of Chestnut Agouti





5. E Series: Es, E, ej, e
ej stands for Japanese, not relevant to Angoras.



Darwins Nightmare

april 13th, 2007

©Mike Mosedale


Theory in a nutshell


4. An implicit struggle for survival ensues.
7. Much of this variation is inheritable.

Koen Vanmechelen
The Cosmopolitan Chicken, 2000

Koen Vanmechelen





Koen Vanmechelen