Often, scientists use DNA to highlight what sets individuals apart. In an ongoing exhibit at the Esther Klein Gallery at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, artist Paul Vanouse is using DNA to illustrate exhibition visitors’ oneness.
For “The America Project,” Vanouse isolated DNA from the combined spit of visitors to the exhibit’s opening. He is now using this DNA as the raw material to create images with gel electrophoresis, a process by which an electric current pulls DNA fragments across a porous gel at differing rates depending on each fragment’s size.
Vanouse, who is director of the Coalesce Center for Biological Art and a professor at the University of Buffalo in New York, told The Scientist he is playing off of the idea of DNA fingerprinting, a method used by forensic scientists to identify individual people. Because DNA is mostly uniform among humans, it is also possible ...
