Cheese, Art, and Synthetic Biology

An Interview with Christina Agapakis

Katherine Liu

Katherine Liu: What can art and design teach us about biology and synthetic biology?

Christina Agapakis: That’s a great question. There are two different ways you can think about it: first as a way to reach different groups of people and have a different kind of conversation or debate around biotechnology. The second way that you could think about it is more interesting to me as a scientist, because I think using art and design helps us ask different questions and think about problems and technological solutions in different ways. To make a good technology, we need to be aware of both the biological and the cultural issues involved, and I think the intersection of art and design with science and technology helps us see those connections better.

KL: What kinds of projects have you done by combining art and biology?

CA: I’m really interested in bacteria and bacterial communities and how bacteria show us a different part of the world that we don’t normally see. So a lot of the work I’ve been doing with art hasn’t necessarily been about synthetic biology directly, but instead about how we interact with bacteria on our bodies and in our environment and how these relationships might change in the future as synthetic biology develops. So for example, although it came out of Synthetic Aesthetics, which was about connecting synthetic biology with art and design, the cheese project isn’t really about the potential ...

Get BioCoder #2 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.