Round Table

Summer 2014 – Parisian teams decided to organize a French meet up in the Paris-Sud University. Teams from France came as Evry-Genopole, Paris-Bettencourt, Bordeaux and Lyon’s team.

During the event, our team suggested to raise some ethical issues about synthetic biology and Bio-Art. Indeed our project is based on ethical reflection and we thought that having the point of view of teams from other tracks should be interesting.

At the beginning, we asked what Bio-art really is according to them. As it is very difficult to obtain a very specific and exact definition, we had a long discussion. Indeed, Bio-art could mean everything because there are no exact frontiers for the word art which is endless. Simple modification of a bacteria could be seen as Bio-art as well as human body. Behind the meaning of art, there is especially human thought and interpretation. Science and art are both similar when they look for something new. Because Bio-art involved living science as biology and art, an important question was raised: what aspect should be more represented? Is one of these 2 aspects more visible than the other one? Indeed, for instance, if the scientific aspect is more visible, we may miss the artistic trait, and only think that it is a scientific work. Thus, could someone be scientist as well as artist? Is it compatible? We thought that artistic and scientific trait could exist together in a whole person, however, according to the background of everyone one aspect will lead the other one.

Art is also a way to report not common practices and to raise questions about made facts. Use science as living science allows to bring a different angle of vision to the artist in order to deliver his message.

Art’s mount is already very diversify: blackboard, stone, body’s expression… Thanks to biology a new mount appears: living being.

However, can we define precisely what living being really is? Synthetic biology raised this question: Actually what is living being? Until where are we allowed to transformed the nature? Is there a limit? We realized that we did not share the same definition of living. For some of us, a living organism is something that is able to reproduce itself. However, a computer program could also reproduce itself, would it therefore belong to living organism?

For example a lot of granolas, (as corn and wheat) belong to varieties that are selected by human according to their advantages: size of the grain, resistance to insect… but we do not call them GMO (Genetically modified organism)! Whenever we act on the genome, the responsibility of those who practice it is very important because there is no fundamental difference between making a cross and make a GMO. Indeed, if there is a human desire to make a cross, there is no fundamental difference between a genetically modification made directly to the laboratory.

Nowadays, we already find some genetically modified organism as:

• Alba rabbit from Eduardo Kac (Febrary 2000). The use of fluorescence is here the innovative part.

• Plant from Eduardo Kac (2003-2008). This hybride plant comes from the cross between human and plant DNA.

• Human bio-art with Marion Laval-Jeantet’s work. Indeed, she transfused horse’s blood in order to test “limits of the embodied conscious”.

An important question must be raised: Using animal in an art purpose is it considered as animal abuse? Does animal’s pain the only criteria that we have to consider when we use animal in an art purpose? We think that it should not be the only criteria to make a decision but it should be primordial for the decision and should be very well questioned. Finally it is the artist’s choice and he/she must justify his/her choice to use living being for his/her work. But the distinction between plants and animals is not really based or justified because the only fundamental thing that differentiates is the cell structure. Indeed we took for example the sea anemone. Conceptually, many people associate the anemone to a plant because, it’s very far of the definition that we have about an animal, and however anemone is part of the animal kingdom. So for this question, we conclude that what distinguish two living organism is the intelligence and that why humans are more disturbed by the killing/genetically a mouse than bacteria, a plant or an anemone. A man will have more qualms about manipulating a being with whom he interacts.

Bioart, is a new subject and it allows to show an innovative science

Some artists use this new concept to denounce the use of transgenic organism. We deeply believe that it exists a huge paradox to denounce the use of transgenic method usine transgenic organism themselves.

Bioart is a useful tool to show our thoughts but we do not have to forget limits we defined. It may also be issue because some persons who are not familiar with biology could be afraid about this genetic manipulation. We believe that humans always try to innovate and this innovation with biological material may be dangerous.

Some skeptical against contempory art raise some issues about the current manipulation of living being and its “banalisation”. Bioart may be part of this fear because it open a huge window on a world we do not know yet. However, Bioart raise all these questions and make people aware about these current issues. Indeed, interest about biology increases since bioart was created.

However, scientists and artists are very different because they have different background about biology and more precisely about safety.

Bioart is a new tool for artistical communication.

Bioart may be considerate as a new step in the future’s art that tends to shake already admitted code.