This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
American biologist Christina Agapakis has cultured her own body bacteria into a series of 100 living
"exposures" in Petri dishes. She's also made art from the salt-loving microbes of the Salton Sea and, most famously, used author Michael Pollan's belly-button microbes to make cheese. It's all part of the 29-year-old synthetic biologist's ambitious plan to blur the lines separating science, art and design, thus changing our relationship with the microbial world. "I think we're at an existential crisis point with bacteria," says Agapakis. "They are both probiotics that can cure all diseases and dangerous invisible pathogens that can kill us with the slightest provocation." The scientist first began to cross over into art in 2010 while a graduate student at Harvard, where she collaborated with Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian scent-artist studying how we interact with the world through our sense of smell. At the time, Tolaas was studying body odour, which they soon realised included some of the same bacteria used to make Swiss cheese.
Interested in this overlap, they decided to make their own cheese out of human bacterial cargo -- swabbed from human navels, armpits, mouths and toes. The result, exhibited last year at the Science Gallery in Dublin, left viewers squirming. "The feelings that people get are important when we're talking about the cultural dimension of biotechnology," says Agapakis, now researching bacterial communities at UCLA.
Her other projects include an exhibition of a new work this month, assembling a "microbial
biogeography of California" out of dirt samples taken along the 5,000-kilometre Pacific Crest Trail. Next up, Agapakis is writing a book chronicling our historical and future relationships with bacteria. In the book, Agapakis imagines a time in which we'll interact with bacteria more closely than we do now.
But first, she says, "We'll have to get over our fear of germs and redefine what it means to be 'clean'."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
