See cut up reading by artist Tagny Duff in Cut up reading actions blog entry comments.

The ongoing working across and in more than one tissue culture lab continues to yield variations of approach, cultures of containment, aseptic technique and attitudes. It’s really fascinating and challenging and I end up going with the dominant culture of whichever lab I am in. Watching someone with alot of eperience tissue culture is like observing a good cook or baker, their approach appears perhaps casual, short cuts are made but it’s all based on an intuition and embodiment of the principles, the processes formed by considerable experience.

However it is perhaps left to artists to extend some of the handy hints offered in the tea room - where alot of the real info gets delt, after the stars have been read at 10 am. One converstaion discussed the efficient defrosting of aliquots (small measurings in tubes of various ingrediants used in protocols). Placing said aliquots in warm places on ones person like down the inside of a latex glove or perhaps ones clevage were offered as effective techniques. The cleavage thaw method brought to mind Incubra, a work by Oz artists Cynthia Vesparget and Adam Fiannaca who constructed a fetish corset embedded with a micro incubator merging the technological aparatus of the biotech and the explicitly modified body into one performative act.

I took a look at the 3T3 cells and spider silk on glass cover slips today. There are four cover slips in total, two in two bacteria dishes. Three are pretty much useless, probably not enough silk on glass in the first place, loads of cells crowding the glass and beyond. On ehe fourth one I was able to make out the silk, but it seemed to be on a different plane to the cells, as though they had managed to grow underneath, the silk appeared intact, not moved or altered by the cells. Occasionally I could make out some attachment but really the non-attachment was more striking.

I was disappointed, I’d wanted some fabulous silken fibroblasty thing to be receiveing my gaze and wondered what to do next. Rerunning and perhaps trying some other approaches seems to be the thing. And getting some photos where and when possible.

Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world. All our literatures are leavings - of the same order as the myths of wilderness peoples, who leave behind only stories and a few stone tools. Other orders of beings have their own literatures. Narratie in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer with an art of interpretation that is instinctive. A literature of blood-stains, a bit of piss, a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone.And there might be a “narrative theory” among these other beings - they might ruminate on “intersexuality” or “decomposition criticsm”.
Blue Mountains Constantly Walking
by Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader, Prose, Poetry and translations 1952 - 1998.

. . . [Craig Venter] is also unveiling two other major projects this month. The first is his autobiography, A Life Decoded, the product of five years’ toil without the aid of ghost writers. It gives his account of the race to decipher the human genome - the code of 3.1bn letters that forms the instruction manual that is the basis of all human life.

While the literary book looks back on his life to date, the genetic one gives glimpses of his life ahead.
Gene genie
Any day now Craig Venter - geneticist, yachtsman and Vietnam veteran - will announce that he has achieved one of the greatest feats in science: the creation of artificial life. He talks to Ed Pilkington
Ed Pilkington
The Guardian
Saturday October 6 2007

Simultaneous readings of:

Blue Mountains Constantly Walking
by Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader, Prose, Poetry and translations 1952 - 1998.

Towards a Georgraphy of Bodily Biotechnologies
by Beth Greenhough and Emma Roe, Guest Editorial of Environment and Planning, 2006, volumn 38, pages 416 - 422

The Effects of Fibroblast Growth Factors in Long - term Primary Culture of Dystropic (MDX) Mouse Muscle Myoblasts
by Janet Smith and Paul N. Schofield, Environmental Cell Research 210, 86 - 93 (1994)

I made readerly random cut ups of the above narrative texts, read silently in and around the laboratory between doing stuff with things - in the said laboratory.

So poetic discourse and Dharma gots to interface with theoretical discussions of the ecconomies and politics of the movment of biotechnical bodies, hyperlinking with science paper speak of nuanced protocols of how to coax life from precious animal bodies - all utternaces on life, living and extending and how it slips and overwhelms it’s conceptual and semiotic containment within and without matter, flesh and substance.

Life is not just a diurnal poperty of large intereesting vertebrates; it is also nocturnal, anaerobic, cannabalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentive: cooking away in the warm dark. Life is well maintained at a four-mile ocean depth, is waiting and sustained on a frozen rock wall, is clinging and nourished in hundred-degree desert temperatiures. and there is a world of nature on the decay side, a world of beings who do rot and decay in the shade. Human beings have made much of purity and are repelled by blood, pollution, putrefaction. The other side of the “sacred” is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots. Coyote, Orpheus, and Izanagi cannot help but look, and they lose her. Shame, grief, embarrassment, and fear are the anaerobic fuels of the dark imagination. The less familiar energies of the wild world, and their analogs in the imagination, have given us ecologies of the mind.

Blue Mountains Constantly Walking
by Gary Snyder, The Gary Snyder Reader, Prose, Poetry and translations 1952 - 1998.

Working in the Biomaterials Lab in the Dental Hospital, working on some gossamer and 3T3 cell experiements. The idea is to see if spider silk can function as a scaffolding for cell cultures.

The first attempt used household spider webs collected on watch glasses - shallow, concave glass dishes. They were placed into a petri dish used for growing bacteria - which means that the cell cutlure won’t want to attach to the dish. A culture of 3T3 cells in media was pipetted onto the combination of watch glass and dish in the hope that some of the 3T3 cells would attach as they were pipetted on or migrate along the silk threads as the culture prolifertates. One watch glass was placed face down, the other face up. The dishes were then placed into clear, plastic boxes the minimise contamination and then placed into the incubator.

Because of the depth of the combination of dish and glass, observing cell growth on the spider threads was dificult, however some clusters of cells did attach, particularly at the junctures of threads. Whether the cells had migrated or taken to the thread was not clear. That the cultures were not contaminated provded that the spider silk had gone through the autocalving process successfully without any loss of structure.

Decided to collect more webs onto glass cover slips and to try culturing onto them, mostly to see better how much the cells are growing onto the silk, however they will grow on the glass so it will not necessarily be so easy to see. Cover slips are very thin, small layers of glass used in microscopy.

New webs are easier to collect and cleaner, especially the central areas which stick to the cover slip more successfully as they are stickier. I’ve been passing the slips through the webs, sometimes more then once if they are big and have large gaps between threads so as to get denser crossing over on the slips. The newer webs tend to remain intact despite the massive tears I’m making. The spiders obligingly respond by constructing new, replacement webs within a day. Hoping to get some images of the cell growth this time.

I caught one of my main producers in a large, glass tube to see if it would spin in vivo for me, I left the tube in the garden propped on a plant pot. I checked it at the end of the day and found the spider huddled on the cotton wool that was keeping it enclosed. Felt sorry for it and let it go and it made several stunning webs. I do wonder though about how to faciliate conditions that a spider would want to spin in, so I can work with some webs constructed in glass.

This came from a conversation with someone else in biomaterials, Dr. Rachel Sammons, who works with hydroxyapatite, a mineral found in bone. It is used to create inplants that promote bone ingrowth - it exploits bones innate growing mechanisms. She works with a version of it that is produced by bacteria. We discussed the possibility of investigating whether we could produce hyrdroxapatite onto spider silk towards some kind of scaffolding. For this I ideally require intact webs in situ in glass tubes.