“Hybridizing” gets new meaning in the work of University of Minnesota plant biologist Neil Olszewski and Chicago artist Eduardo Kac. Their “Edunia” is a petunia suffused with Kac’s DNA.
Kac is a “bioartist” who blends genetic materials. (He made a rabbit that glows green under blue light thanks to the addition of a jellyfish gene.) Kac’s petunia is novel as art, but not as science, which has been putting human genes in plants for decades, according to Olszewski.
“When you produce proteins for medical purposes or enzymes that you want to use in industrial processes, you have a variety of different organisms that you can produce them in,” he says. Proteins might be grown in yeast or bacteria in industrial fermenters. But Olszewski says that for at least 20 years, scientists and companies have explored plants as hosts, for quality and economic reasons. “If you can produce it in a field in a plant, you don’t have to provide growth media”—nutrients to feed those yeast, say. “The sun provides the energy.”
Olszewski says he and Kac decided not to commercialize the Edunia as “art you can grow,” preferring not to detract from the ideas it raises. “Eduardo’s artistic gesture is in looking at the commonalities between life forms, how close plants and humans—which both have vascular systems—are to each other.”
