Infinite Membranes

I recently visited a biological sciences lab at Stanford University to learn about genome editing and to talk about a collaborative art project with a research scientist there. For a few years I have been studying living systems in the natural world that can be observed with the naked eye, and currently I am in the research phase of a collaborative painting series about something much smaller. This was my second visit to learn more about the molecular world. I started by speaking with a resident at Columbia University, working in psychiatry and neurobiology.

I am not a cell biologist, nor a neuroscientist. I am an artist. Yet, despite starting this project from nearly complete ignorance about the terminology and functional processes of cells, and feeling wildly illiterate at first, I found my architectural training to be very useful for developing a quick rough map of relationships that helped me to understand enough about the things I was learning to ask some good follow up questions.

At Stanford, I learned that individual proteins assemble into complex forms due to both their physical shapes and the chemical forces between them, including electrical attraction. These proteins band together to create things like cell membranes and their unique shapes make them more or less adapted to certain tasks, like linking together, allowing transmission between the inside and outside of the cell, and transporting things.

I learned that scientists have (miraculously) figured out how to borrow structures from existing viruses to carry different cargo into cells. A virus is already good at getting inside a cell. Proteins on a virus membrane can bind to particular receptors on a cell, beginning the process of entry. The virus will have a membrane that ‘feels’ similar to a cell membrane because of these compatible receptors, and so the cell will merge with the virus as it would with another cell. Researchers can use parts of that machinery to deliver tools for gene editing. I think of it as a double Trojan horse: a virus uses an entry point to establish an infection, and scientists repurpose that entry point to deliver something that might help treat disease. Broad Institute

One of the tools we discussed was Cas9, a protein used in CRISPR gene editing. RNA helps direct the editing machinery to a particular DNA sequence, where researchers can introduce a targeted change. National Human Genome Research Institute

At Columbia, we used microscopes to take high-resolution images of neurons, and other cells in mouse brain tissue. I learned that it is possible to isolate specific cell types by administering antibodies colored with florescence that are attracted to a particular cell type. The degree of detail visible through these microscopes was shocking, and I’ll admit that after seeing some of the slides, I felt some existential confusion about how I could possibly paint anything as beautiful.

In addition to viewing static slides of mouse brain tissue, that are around 5 microns thick, through a traditional microscope, we also looked through a sci-fi-esque microscope that could target super fine light beams at individual layers of a slice of flesh, so that turning a knob on the side of the machine would bring each individual layer of the slice into successive focus, creating the illusion of moving through the tissue as if you were infinitely small. But perhaps even more incredible was a microscope connected to a tiny pipet that could be controlled like a fine grain etch-a-sketch, allowing scientists to puncture cell membranes, and even delicately compose microscopic scenes.

I got to see some stunningly beautiful living rat neurons, and we looked at astrocytes and the fractal branching of passages in some mouse tissue involved in smell. These tiny structures, and the maps used to construct plasmids at the Stanford lab, caused me to feel two things at once. Firstly, I feel very lucky, almost like a god. It is amazing to me that it is possible to find so much complexity in something that we can’t see without significant assistance. The organizations of life at this scale remind me of watching city lights from an airplane. Secondly, I feel very small. I feel as if I am looking at the whole universe.

I feel that paintings I make of this subject could benefit from being very large. I want to stand in front of something that normally fits inside a cell and have it dwarf me. I find it beautiful and unnerving that these tiny weird proteins form relationships with one another, and those connections become increasingly complex until they make up our bodies and the living systems around us.

It makes me think of octopus skin again (remember Smart Skin?) and to the way a cephalopod’s nervous system extends through its body. I wonder how sensing and responding are coordinated across a body the size of a cell, and how it ‘feels’ to each protein to be part of something bigger than itself. Octopus nervous-system research

And what happens as artificial intelligence networks continue to grow in scale and complexity? I find myself trying to picture a digital cell. I want to keep exploring, to keep learning about microscopic biological structures. When I am ready, I will paint what I can’t stop wondering about. For now, I am looking more closely at how connections are made at this scale, and what those connections make possible.