The genetically engineered find a post-natural home
April 11, 2012 6:27 pm Kaitlynn Riely / The Pittsburgh Press
Richard Pell needed a place for genetically engineered salmon, for mice bred to be overweight and for zebrafish that glow in ultraviolet light.
Displaying them in a museum of natural history wouldn't make sense, said Mr. Pell, 36, who teaches different kinds of electronic media in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. The salmon, mice and zebrafish, altered by human engineering, were no longer completely natural.
They were … post-natural.
“If you've changed the breed, then that's part of this post-natural history,” Mr. Pell said.
An idea was born, and Mr. Pell, an artist whose work has drifted toward the engineering field, decided to create his own Center for PostNatural History.
He first stumbled upon the idea of preserving the artifacts of post-natural history at his high school reunion a few years ago. He was trying to impress a classmate by talking about his work dealing with robotics, but his classmate ended up impressing him by talking about his work in synthetic biology.
Soon, Mr. Pell found himself tagging along with his high school classmate to discussions about synthetic biology. In the emerging field, all ideas were welcome.
“Having an artist at the table made as much sense as anything else,” Mr. Pell said.
For the past few years, he has been collecting examples of post-natural artifacts. He has a model of a breed of Atlantic salmon that grows rapidly due to the addition of a growth hormone taken from a Chinook salmon.
He has dead mice that have been altered for the purposes of research, including one bred to be overweight and another bred to be hairless. and he has GloFish, the flourescent zebrafish,
But there has long been a need to find a place to store the artifacts — the Center for PostNatural History has existed as a traveling exhibit for a few years. In March, Mr. Pell found his artifacts a home in Garfield.
‘Sherlock Holmes’