RIP: Alba, the Glowing Bunny

RIP: Alba, the Glowing Bunny

RIP: Alba, the Glowing Bunny

























Kac believes the scientists were simply afraid of public criticism. Meanwhile, he wanted to do the opposite – to encourage discourse on the transgenic rabbit.

"This director refuses to participate openly in a debate about what is done with public money," he said. "It's very easy to fear and reject what you don't know. As long as they continue to isolate themselves, this mistrust will continue."

The eyes and ears of the rabbit are green under ultraviolet light, Houdebine said, but the fur does not glow, because it's dead tissue that doesn't express the gene. Only if the rabbit were shaved would the body glow, he said.

Other researcher/artists who have done projects similar to Kac's have doubted the photograph's authenticity.

"The picture itself is a construction," said Reinhard Nestelbacher, a molecular biologist at the University of Salzburg, who created a similar art project called Green using mice that carried the GFP gene.

"The rabbit could never look like that," he said. "The main reason is that the GFP gene is expressed, for example, in the skin and cannot be expressed in the hair."

Kac said the photo was not altered. It was taken with an ultraviolet light and a yellow filter, which removes the blue light and reveals the fluorescence – the same way some GFP mice were filmed by a TV crew for his The Eighth Day project, and also the way Nestelbacher photographed his mice.

But a photograph of Nestelbacher's GFP mice with fur shows only a tiny hint of green inside the ear.

Some have suggested that a "control" rabbit should be photographed.

"I wonder if an albino rabbit without the GFP gene would glow green under those conditions," said Hunter O'Reilly, an artist, geneticist and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside.

Peter Barna is a color and lighting expert in Brooklyn, and teaches color theory in the graduate school of industrial design at the Pratt Institute. He has done lighting for the Guggenheim Museum in New York as well as NBC.

"There are lots of ways of doing what's been done, but I would not discount the fact that it could be done genetically," Barna said.

Barna said he didn't have enough information to know exactly how the image was created, but there are dozens of possibilities.

A white shirt lit with an ultraviolet light appears to glow, as anyone who's been to a dance club knows.

"Most of it comes from the detergents you use, because they contain phosphorous that makes it look whiter than white," Barna said. "So, who knows, you could bathe a rabbit in it. That's aside from just painting or dying it."

In any case, Barna said it's always tricky to replicate light seen by the human eye in a photograph.

"It's almost impossible to duplicate," he said. "Photographs always do lie in some way or another whether you intend to or not."

Others figured Kac didn't intend for people to think the photo realistic.

"Art misrepresents reality all the time – and he's an artist, not a scientist," said Stuart Newman, a member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and a cell biologist at New York Medical College, "but I think people are beholden to tell the truth."