This article was taken from the June 2013 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.
Anna Dumitriu is bursting with pride: "I have two different strains of Staphylococcus aureus -- one up each nostril," says the Brighton-based 44-year-old. As artist in residence on the UK Clinical Research Consortium's Modernising Medical Microbiology project, Dumitriu (pictured) works hands-on with live bacteria and viruses, and uses herself as a subject. Her recent work includes a quilt stained with Staph aureus's MRSA strain.
Dumitriu's fascination with the subject stems from childhood: she remembers being terrified by a school project on the Great Plague, and by the 1971 sci-fi film about an alien virus,
The Andromeda Strain. After obtaining her art degree, she began to collaborate with microbiologists and incorporate living cells into her work.
One of her current projects explores tuberculosis. She's making tiny pairs of felt lungs, which she will embed in agar to grow Mycobacterium vaccae (a safe bacterium of the same genus as TB), Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (used as a TB vaccine), and, if she can get access to a suitable lab, Mycobacterium tuberculosis itself. The project will evoke the cultural history of TB and some of its more romantic associations as a disease of the tragic, creative and beautiful in the 1800s. She also wants to remind us that there are ten times more bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells, and we'd die without them. "We're not just humans," she says. "We're bacterial superorganisms."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
