From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog

In the play I’m going to write, which is going to be called “The Fly Room”, the characters are the inhabitants of a total library. Like in the legendary Library of Alexandria (of which this is a 19th Century German engraving of an imagining thereof), all the wisdom of the ages, including all the genetic information, is stored in one place, curated and researched by a genetically dedicated team, whose universe this library is.

Years ago, something happened. A power outrage…a war…they don’t know. What they do know is that they have had no contact with the outside world for hundreds of years, and that, in the disruption, the total information the library held was scrambled…not destroyed, but differentially encoded. Now, at last, they’ve found the code…and are beginning to re-assemble and reinterpret the material of their world. The ideationalunderpinning of this sci fi scenario comes from my own experience of texts…and libraries. I was writer in residence at the National Library of Scotland before coming here…

As to texts, if 1859’s Origin of Species was the Ur-text of evolutionary thought, then Erwin Schrodinger’s ”What is Life?” from 1944 was the founding text of what one might call the genomic view of life. The great quantum physicist applied what he had come to understand about matter to the special form of matter that “lives”…and his text was a direct inspiration to the generation of physicists turned biologists…Crick, Gamow,Szilard, Urey etc etc etc…who took his intuitions about the mechanism of inheritance and turned it to evidence and then an industry in the seventies and eighties…an industry that pulled clumsily, expensively and not always happily together to accomplish biology’s equivalent to the Apollo missions to the Moon : the sequencing of the total human genome.

That text…the genome…is now itself a foundation and a map for a dizzying array of ideas and explorations, and, most crucially, mechanisms…life has in FACT as well as idea, become amachine. But the logic of all this still comes down the question Schrodinger asked in his introduction :

How can events in space and time which take place within a living organism be accounted for? 

Accounted for, that is, within the materialist viewpoint of physics and chemistry, rather than a teleology - divine or otherwise. From the point of view of the physicist, what is strange about “life” is how orderly it is. Life is an island of anti-entropy. James Lovelock noticed the same thing…it’s the basis of hisGaia hypothesis, where all life on earth needs must be considered as a single self regulating entity…jut like the individual organisms that make it up.

Now, I’m agnostic on Gaia. This is partly because I’m instinctively attracted to arguments that start by treating the familiar as anomalous. Hence I’m loath to dismiss it as easily as most right thinking materialists have.

(My theatrical master, Bertolt Brecht, said that the playwright must always treat what his or her society sees as self-evident as surprising!)

It’s also because I have yet to come across the argument that would convince me that it is any more weird to regard life-in-total as “impelled by the survival imperative” than it is to regard individual cows, fruitflys or mushrooms as “impelled” to live and survive and reproduce…and self regulate. Genomics has demonstrated self-regulation, switching…choices being made by molecules in four dimensions at every level of natural selection from genes to populations…and at every stage in embryonic development into adulthood and beyond. So why not life in the world? All of it? Real question.

Anyway, my librarians exist to be tortured by the certainty that they have access to all the information any conceivable civilisation could ever need…but that none of it is reliable. They only have their own inherited flaws and capabilities to go on and to judge with. What they are hoping to discover first is who has put them here and why. For they know that a library cannot, surely, have arisen by chance…I mean…if you found a watch lying by the roadside, could you not deduce a watchmaker?

Oh…there is a fab cartoon set about Schrodinger’s famous dead-and-alive cat at:http://abstrusegoose.com/secret-archives/in-a-parallel-world

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog

I asked very early in the residency about whether or not this thing called “genomics” represented what’s called a paradigm shift. This is the confirmation of a scientific idea or principle that fundamentally alters both the general frame of ideas and the daily practices of science and was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962.

I still don’t know the answer, but maybe it wasn’t quite the right question. There’s lots of work going on using the genomic understanding of evolution, and of development in utero, of personalised genetic diagnosis, of the making of nanomachines for targeted drug delivery, for the synthesising of micro and macro organisms for the purposes of research. Despite out straitened times, there’s still a lot of money around. There’s a lot of thinking about the economic potential of all this, and the potential impact on our ideas about identity, humanity…life itself.

Does this constitute a paradigm shift? Are we really asking different questions or arriving at different answers?

If the Higgs Boson turns not to be anywhere at any voltage, THAT’s a shift…that’s a rending of garments and a gnashing of textbooks)

As I head away from researching primary sources and towards scripting the first performed sharing of some ideas specific to the play that I’ve started to write, it is general ideas, worlds, that I am starting to imagine. A play is, in one way of thinking, a place. The theatre space in the imagined here and now is an arena, a world where personality and principle can fight it out. It is a place with rules…and it is those rules that I’m thinking about at two very different orders of scale.

First…that my life, our lives, a paramecium’s life, a dog’s life….rather than being actually existing things that share an abstract quality called life, are in fact all distinct abstract expressions of an actually existing thing…a thing that is called life.That matter itself, let alone living matter, is best metaphor-ed as “an island of localised order”…and is a temporary anomaly soon to be corrected…”in an ocean of entropy” - and if James Lovelock isn’t onto something with his Gaia hypothesis, I wish he was.


In terms of daily practice…that The Fly Room, the experimental space where the evolution of fruit flies has been messed around with by biology students since TH Morgan more than a hundred years ago, is where we live every day. That our daily practice of life is taking place in an experimental environment where we have no control and no guarantees of ever understanding what’s going on and who or what the test is all about.

This is the world view my play will describe and that its characters will inhabit, and I’ll be reading and thinking about it and sharing it every so often…as I go looking around in it, testing it on their behalf.

And is that a paradigm? Is the world of a play a sort of paradigm? Where only certain actions can take place and are comprehended in specific ways…and if a character escapes from the world the playwright makes, does that break the play and make it unwatchable?

Or is that the shift we’ve been waiting for? Is that what makes it a hit?

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog.

H5N1 is a strain of bird flu. Scientists in Wisconsin and Rotterdam have just proved its future transmissability between mammals by repeatedly infecting a chain of unfortunate ferrets, and the virus has evolved along the way, like viruses do. This hellish material now exists in a new strain that is airborne and can pass from mammal to mammal.

This research is of course essential. One of these days a virus is going to make the species jump that was made in the past by Measles (from cows), Scarlet fever (horses), HIV (chimps) …and will one day become a threat to human health. And we need to know if and how that’s going to happen. Hence the research.

But none of them, according to the US National Science Advisory Board for BioSecurity(NSABB) have got anything on this baby. NSABB chair Paul Keim said in November “I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one. I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

In 1918 and 19, a form of bird flu killed 100 million people…with a death rate of 2%…that is, for every 100 people who were infected, 2 died. This one, apparently, comes in at 60%.

Sixty. Six Nothing. So…do the wee bit of math…with the same spread as last time, that’s three billion people…now factor in an increased human population and air travel…and…

AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH! Stop breathing! Everybody! Immediately!

The reason this has been in the news in the last couple of days is that the NSABB has asked Science and Nature to redact…censor…the publication of these results. They think that we’re going to get some fundamentalists buying themselves some chickens and some ferrets and start making this stuff in a garage somewhere. There is a lot more horror from the scientific community about the censorship than there is about the apocalyptic potential of terrorists getting hold of this stuff. Research and prophylaxis will be hampered, they say, unless the the flow of information gets everywhere it needs to get.

And making a weaponised version of this stuff is going to be TOUGH…you can’t just pop it in the post. It was a long time ago that the idea of how to make an atom bomboccurred to Leo Szillard. And no one’s put one in a suitcase yet.

(He was crossing a road in London in 1933. He blanked out when he put one foot on the road…and when he found himself standing on the other side of Southampton Row, he knew that it would work. But it took a lot of time and money to turn his epiphany into a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima…after which he reinvented himself as a biologist and sci-fi novelist.)

Besides, and this is the real point, something is going to get us one day. Bound to. Nature works like that. Viruses evolve very very fast…and they’re always looking for new places to live. HIV doesn’t want to kill people…you don’t want to blow your new house up…but it takes a while to adjust to each other. We’ll be naturally immune in a thousand years or so…and we’ll both be happy. In the meantime, however…

Remember Jared Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel”? It was Measles that conquered America. John Wayne only had a bit part. The Europeans had immunity. And the Native Americans didn’t…the rest was just mopping up.
And one day sooner or later evolution of some kind or other, cosmic, climactic or biological is going to give us a right good kicking. Asteroids, climate change, viruses are all waiting in the queue for the apocalypse.




(This is all ending up in the play I’m going to write, by the way. It’s a science fiction play, and no good science fiction can miss the trick of wiping out humanity some way or other.)

I think I’ve just found the way it’s going to be. But it won’t be terrorists who do it. Nah. Who needs blokes with beards and fixed opinions on homosexuality? As Mark Honigsbaumwrote in yesterday’s Guardian, when it comes to terror, nature is the man for the job.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/21/bird-flu-bioterrorist-h5n1?INTCMP=SRCH

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog.

So what’s keeping them? When will ET do his duty by us? And save us from ourselves?

Well, the more I read in the converging disciplines of developmental biology, chemistry, paleontology, climatology…and genetics and genomics, the bigger the conceptual gap between fl and fi, the fourth and fifth terms of the equation, seems to be. And the more apparent it is that we have to look to ourselves a bit sharpish for salvation.

Andrew Knoll, in his magnificent, every five pages mind-boggling “”Life on a Young Planet” , summarises it like this: “While the story of evolution undoubtedly includes human beings, it is not about us…life’s history is a gripping saga of cyanobacterialsurvival, a cautionary tale of trilobitic fall, or the inspirational story of yeasts finding sustenance in rotting fruit…Whatever the merits of viewing earth as our world, we could not persist without the bacteria and algae, as well as the plants and animals”

The number of things that had to go right, and keep going right, for life not only to exist but for life to exist with the right chemistry for getting on for 4 billion years, with water having arrived here at just the right time, for the temperature to have ranged so narrowly, for the right abundance of oxygen and calcium to coincide for the formation of skeletons (a prerequisite for diversity of form and function), leaves a yawning, maybe more or less unbridgeable gap between there being life and there being complex, multi-cellular life…leave alone all the stuff that’s happened since the Cambrian explosion gave rise to plants and animals…including mass extinctions and climate change that has fortuitously coincided with mutations in wheat grass to let us discover agriculture which is the sine qua non…etc etc etc…and I didn’t even get to beating Hitler, which was helpful

Man made global warming is the least of it. Take a look at this graphic.

The present day is at the right hand end. As you can see, it’s pretty damn cold at the minute…earth has usually beenmuch, much hotter than it is now. It is, nicely for us, a bit parky.

And before Nigel Lawson gets all excited and says “Well there we are then…fire up my Hummer immediately”, just because climate change is natural doesn’t mean it’s good for us. Our civilisation has emerged in a period of warming at the tail end of a glaciation period (whose end we are accelerating) and the climate owes us diddly squat.

God may be dead, but his shadow falls over us whenever we imagine that we are “meant” to be here. Meant by whom? Ourselves, of course, is the only possible answer to that question, which means that, as as ever, we are, like all forms of life ever, on a cusp between altruism and individuality as a survival strategy. We have to decide who “we” are.

The language of evolution has been hijacked ever since Darwin to justify the rich in doing whatever they feel like doing and paying no tax in the meantime. Progress and natural selection have been culturally identified with psychopathic behaviour in the marketplace and on the battlefield. Just like Divine Providence once upon a time.

The fact, however, is that the tension between cooperation and competition as alternatives WITHIN taxonomic groups is as universal as DNA itself…more so. I am finding it possible now to conceive of all our political conflicts within this view of life, and to read in the graph of climate change a political imperative to identify the values that will alone protect us from the next set of depredations of the rich, for which, honest to God, the latest unequal division of economic pain is only a minor rehearsal. If people like Murdoch are still in charge when the whip comes down, then the survivors are not going to be nice liberal folk like you and me…they’re going to be unpleasant beyond the dreams of Al Quaida. There’s an unnatural selection coming, and we really don’t want those people making the rules.

I observe too, tangentially, that just as it was possible for Dante Alighieri to write a poem that encompassed the universe in 1309, for the first time since, that holistic view is possible again. And it’s called human science. As abovwe so below…uncertainty at every scale, convergence and homogony and happenstantial selection are evetrywhere you look. It is breathtaking and beautiful to be alive right now.

Science awaits its Dante. And climate change its Karl Marx. I don’t imagine that’s a job description I could fill…I’m just writing an undivine comedy about genetically engineered librarians. But to finish my blogs before the hols, I did want to attempt a brief panegyric.

We live on rare earth
At exactly the right time
We should act like it.

There. Stick that Boson up your accelerator and detect it.

Happy Holidays.

From Jo Clifford’s blog:

I tell myself there’s no need to be frightened. Or nervous, even…

At the start of the week, there were two days of technical rehearsal that were the calmest and most creative I have ever experienced.

Everyone was working together so well. As if making up a new theatrical language as they went along - incorporating the text with the set with the lighting with the music and with the projections in a way that moved me profoundly. Because all this highly technical, highly skilled and highly co-ordinated activity was happening at the service of the text, and I could trust it all completely.

And then yesterday the actors, who hadn’t done a run for 5 days, did two dress rehearsals that made giant strides towards incorporating all this new and amazingly complicated information into their bodies’ creative intelligence.

And then a few people were in for the second dress rehearsal, and it all seemed to make sense to them.

A perceptive piece in the Herald on Tuesday mentioned a dream I’d recalled. A dream a friend of mine had in 1985, around the opening of LOSING VENICE, when she’d seen me naked on the Traverse stage.

It’s like that: all these precious dreams, intimate moments in my deep heart, exposed on the stage.

Worse than naked: flayed. Held up as an object for dissection.

But there it is.

Nothing to be done.

The fear has to be acknowledged. Given thanks for even.

And then we’ll see.

The Tree of Knowledge previews from tonight. Read more here. 

From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog.

1

At the heart of
Lived and illusory experience
Is the feeling that there’s somebody watching

That we’re apart from the things we are a part of
That there are always two of each of us.
That only one of us is us
And he isn’t even the real one.

2

Our ancestors became objects of worship
So very early on,
Because it is unsettling that the dead
Stay present in our minds
Those who are absent from the world.

Let alone to think, one day that’s going to be me.

I suspect that our being incomplete and double,
Has, Ab-originally speaking.
Something to do with feeling
that if, after we’re dead
We exist - Why not now?

3

The future tense
The ability to imagine consequences
To make plans, have ideas, write them down
Is a subset of the initial, unnerving intuition
Of finding death when we discovered life

4

In compensation for the experience
of memory and anticipation,
We evolved or we invented
(it hardly matters which)
Our sense of self, a continuous being
With a name
Who was, and is now, and ever shall be.
Perhaps that’s what happened when
Eve bit the apple.


5

Our conversations with God
Have always been ways to talk
About the future with ourselves.

(The future briefly replaced God, even,
As an object of hope and worship
And as a repository for justification
It has been found to be equally untenable.)



6

While atheists are fond of saying,
Leaning forward with a pipe and a pint,
God has proved himself
An unnecessary hypothesis,
Some of us, even atheists
Are not comfortable
With the future going the same way.

To live without God and Hope too
Makes us mean and instrumental
Narrow and unpleasant to be with


7

Reality isn’t good for us
We’ve always known that
We’re still looking for something, anything, in reality
To console us for dying

In the molecules of our sameness
Of memory and inheritance,
Can we find in genomic longevity
A substitute for immortality?

In molecular homogony, belonging?

Can we find in the changes and contingencies
Of amino acids our identity?
And ways to be happy about what happens next?

Can we pray to the way things really are?
Can we learn 
How not to need God
And how not to be him as well?

8

There is the comfort
That our questions now
Across the wastes of time and political economy
Are the same ones we’ve been asking
Since we got ourselves kicked out of the garden.

Our answers too are all the same
Negotiations of the same dualities
Lostnessess and wishes,
And all of these have been useful.

We’ve made beauty from them
As well as thefts and murders.

9

Our deeper realities than the real
Called Brahma and quanta and the like
Are better means than they are ends.

Lovely things have been done with them
Our condemned and privileged, evolved or invented
loneliness and love

10

We are adapted to watch ourselves experiencing
The unlikeliness of being real.

Like all adaptations to reality
The only end is failure
while reality goes on.

The measure of everything is everything
The rest is games and silence.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

www.traverse.co.uk

From Peter Arnott’s Genotype blog

Following on from the philosophical ramblings in previous posts, I think I’m ready for a case study of living in two worlds at once. The source of the story I’m going to attempt to reconstruct is James Watson’s racy and readable account of the making of the DNA business from inception to corporation (DNA : The Secret of Life Random House 2003). The immediate inspiration, however, is watching my colleagues here at the Forum, talented brainboxes to a man and woman, spending most of their time filling out funding applications. Whatever we think our jobs might be, our real occupation is seeking for the Great Money River.

(Hence the above illustration of John Manning Speke and his splendid beard “discovering” the place where the chaps in the background have been living for quite some time.)

“The Great Money River” fiction fans may recognize as the single most instructive image of capitalism ever devised…from God Bless You Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, who passed on to sit on the right hand of the Almighty not too long ago.

I quote:

” forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. Go where the rich and the powerful are and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You’ll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. “

Well, for a while there the Human Genome Project was a ladder down the bases to the Great Money River…allaying anxieties and promising immortality to the rich. There’s a book I’m reading published at the height of the genomic hype in the 1990s (BEFORE the thing was sequenced/published/drafted, significantly) called The DNA Mystique by Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee where they quote entertainingly from the claims of universality and truth which were the marketing hallmark of the enterprise.

The scientists themselves, unless they’re chasing money, tend to eschew what some call “astrological genetics” - where there are held to be, for example, genes “for”:

“obesity, criminality, shyness, directional ability, intelligence, political preferences, violence, celebrity, pleasure seeking, sinning, saving and being a couch potato….Genetic essentialism reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings with their genes”

Nelkin and Lindee go on to say that “DNA in popular culture functions as a secular equivalent of the soul. Independent of the body, the genome is immortal. Fundamental to identity, DNA explains individual differences, moral order and human fate”

That was the pitch…that was the temptation. And it ignored the fact that most of the genome isn’t “genes” at all - but junk. It turned out later on that the junk - repeats, introns - was fascinating in its own right. As a structure, as a moleculer, the human genome is a biography of all of our “species” encounters with viruses, and with evolutionary paths not chosen…and some of it, in terms of the spaces between genes (and hence how they work together in different organs, different stages of life) is essential to how the genes…the exons…work

…none of this was (or is) of much interest to the rich…who want power and cures…and hence offers no route-map to the money river. So why I’m following it above all God knows…

Handing over to Watson, remembering the early days of the project from which he was edged out: “Why should we sequence the entire genome - why bother with the junk? There is actually a quick and dirty way to secure a snapshot of all the coding genes in the genome using reverse transcriptase technology” - that is, working back from the messenger RNA to the coding sections of DNA - “Purify a sample of messenger RNA from the brain…using reverse transcription you can create DNA copies (called cDNAs) of these genes…and the cDNA’s can be sequenced.”

Not just sequenced (cloned) but OWNED…patented…liscenced.

And that’s exactly what happened…and would have kept happening had not the publiclyfunded scientists not just started publishing them in open internet sources…

(Gawd bless the public sector…sod you Michael Gove)

This meant that the new science od “Genomics” was already divided into two…one half (the sexy bit) was capable of being monetized, while the other remained “merely” a description of how things are and what it all means.

Which is, I think, a local manifestation of the dichotomy, or split personality, of all knowledge…which is what I think I’ve been going on about.

Anyway…

Cooperation and cheating, appearance and reality. An old story. Well…it’s even older than you think.

I’ve been finding that “genomics” is altogether more nuanced, altogether more altogether than the hype threatened and promised. Genetics and environment interact unpredictably at all parts in the life cycle. Though this has the advantage of being true, it’s a lot harder to sell. At the same time though, there is a holistic, fractional, metaphysic arising…a sameness, a conditionality which I find attractive. And I find it all over the place.

For instance, and to tie this entery together with stuff I wrote in earlier posts about human altruism and its viccissitudes, it turns out that it may well be that the only thing that has saved us from extinction (so far) may be that bacteria, like people, seem to have choices; to be able to choose to collaborate in groups or compete within groups. To “cheat”

(This harks way back in the blog to when I was writing about the problem of human altruism as tragically played out in the life and death of Geoprge Price…ie if we are all Darwinian individuals solely driven by reproductive genetic self interest, what makes us give money to Save the Whale? inter alia?)

I quote again…from up to the minute research:

“It has been suggested that bacterial cells communicate by releasing
and sensing small diffusible signal molecules in a process commonly
known as quorum sensing (QS). It is generally assumed
that QS is used to coordinate cooperative behaviours at the population
level. However, evolutionary theory predicts that individuals
who communicate and cooperate can be exploited. Here
we examine the social evolution of QS experimentally in the
opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and show that
although QS can provide a benefit at the group level, exploitative
individuals can avoid the cost of producing the QS signal or of
performing the cooperative behaviour that is coordinated by QS,
and can therefore spread.”

(Diggle et al. Nature September 2007)

Bacteria, having been around long before us and being dominant in life on earth now and long after we’ve all succumbed to whatever it turns out to be in the long list of things we’re going to have available for us to succumb to…cooperate and cheat. Just like we do. And if they got it together, we’d be a meat store…

Gives a man pause, shore nuff. I wonder how I could sell THAT?

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

www.traverse.co.uk