ALAN RAWLS

I think art can play a very important role in the scientific community. It's actually one of the facets of this project, which has interested me the most. Before starting working with Eduardo, I didn't really appreciate the role of non-scientists and spreading the message of scientific discovery. More often than not, scientists aren't very good at expressing their own research. There is a great deal of pressure to stay within the jargon of science. And so an artist is able to distill the important features of science and bring them to the public within a social context, it's public. It's much easier for the public to digest. And so they actually play an important role.
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The reason that I initially got into this project other than the idea of …the intrigue of creating transgenic art… is really to be involved in interdisciplinary work at ASU. I think that is an important part of the university is people reaching out across department to create something that we wouldn't necessarily create as individuals. I've been committed to working on this project and seeing it through to its end in order to bring out this new relationship and it's one that I've thoroughly enjoyed.
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Well, my work is a…Developmental Biologist. So a lot of research is looking at embryos and their development and it's a very visual process. It's important to get across your ideas to be able to take proper pictures and to place your images under the circumstances so that the most important issues come out. So the idea of aesthetics and science is a really important issue and it translates well with artists. So working with Eduardo in that sense has been fun because you can appreciate somebody who is not looking at it strictly for its scientific merit but also for its visual merit. The challenge in working with artists is having them appreciate the value of science often because they're distilling it down to its most important issues, in their mind, quite often the detail is lost and that is something that scientist often guard against, losing details in the big picture. And so that often is a place of conflict.
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The same animals that are being used in this project are the same animals that were created for further advancement of medical research. So it's not as if these animals are being specifically created for the purpose of art. They're being used by an artist to get a message across and I think that is the fundamental difference. This is not frivolous work, the creating of these animals. This is no way a frivolous matter, created by an artist or created by researchers around the U.S. for specific purposes related to their research. And in creating the art, there has been a great deal of effort that has gone into creating a stress free environment trying to make sure the animals are in no way affected by being put into an art exhibit.
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GFP is a green fluorescent protein, which was isolated from Pacific jellyfish. What's interesting about this is the protein will cause a green fluorescence. And so naturally within the organism it glows green in the water. And why that's important to us is that the green fluorescent protein was cloned and it was found that you could introduce it into many other organisms and under the right lighting condition it would glow green. That's important because that allows scientists to tag individual cells and mark them and visualize them without having to kill the animal.
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My role in the project really has been to identify labs around the country, which are currently using GFP in their research and have already generated organisms, which we were interested in, that bodily express GFP. So we started making phone calls and we identified a group who had generated a transgenic mouse, a group who had made transgenic zebra fish another one who was expressing GFP in dictyostelium which is a slime mold and another group who are expressing GFP in tobacco. Each of those groups volunteered to provide organisms for the project and we have since been growing them here at ASU. That's been our primary job is acquiring the animals and maintaining them here at ASU. Secondarily to that has been as an advisor on the xyna-proper (?) environment to house the animals within the project and make sure they can cohabitate.
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This project has brought new insight to me, into a bigger picture of how science is viewed in the world. That for the most part scientists tend to speak to scientists. In order to get papers published, they're peer reviewed by other scientists. In order to get grants funded they're also peer reviewed by other scientists. So it's rare that we look out and find out how we're being viewed by the world at large. And, working with this art project we've had a lot of opportunity to discuss science with non-scientists and see where the difference in perception lies. That's actually been quite valuable in understanding as a scientist we could do a lot better job at sending our message out to the public both locally within the schools and within different organizations as well as on the national level.
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