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professors took in us children. Reisman’s richly
illustrated book recalls this aspect of family life
in the community.
Looking back, some seventy years later, how
should we judge the impact of the European
academics? The draconian measure of closing
the darülfünun to create Istanbul University
left deep wounds. The 2006 Nobel laureate in
literature, Orhan Pamuk, remarks in his book
Istanbul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) on the unjust
dismissal of traditional Ottoman scholars. His
concern is the loss of the nation’s identity in the
Atatürk reforms. Although distancing Turkey
from its Ottoman past, the modernization
has not yet led to Turkey’s full acceptance as a
Western nation.
Nevertheless, as Reisman notes, Istanbul
University became established almost over-
night and the foreign professors continued to
educate Turkish students from 1933 until about
1948. By then a strong academic community
had been built with talented young Turks.
Dozens of new universities began springing
up across the country, and the assistance of
the foreign professors, many of whom went
on to productive careers elsewhere, was no
longer needed.
Today, Turkish names appear on articles in
leading international journals, showing how
the vision of one man and the organizational
acumen of another laid a foundation on which
Turkey has continued to build. ■
Martin Harwit is former director of the National
Air and Space Museum, Washington DC 20560,
and is emeritus professor of astronomy at Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
Martin Kemp
How can artists possibly confront the
excruciating complexity of the human
genome — or any genome for that matter?
There are just too many of the letters
C, G, A and T. It is possible, however, to
make some general artistic statements
about the human genome project and its
implications, and about genetic engineering
as a whole. But it is all too
easy to sink to the level
of the ‘Frankenstein food’
headline that appeared
in the British newspaper
the Daily Mail on
13 February 1999.
Sarah Jacobs shows
that the complexity can
be tackled head on. She
has a record of working
with the blank poetics
of modern scientific
discourse, with its
studied eschewing of
personal expression.
Her 92-page e-book
Deciphering Human
Chromosome 16: We
Report Here is studded
throughout with phrases
from the original article, ‘The
sequence and analysis of duplication-rich
human chromosome 16’ (Nature 432,
988–994; 2004). “We report here” is one
of these, together with “We observed”
(of course), “Here we describe”, “We
constructed”, “We adopted a strategy”, “We
then eliminated”, “Finally we identified”, and
so on. Isolated, phrases that are so much
part of scientific normality assume the
quality of an incantation.
After the Nature article was published,
Jacobs googled such terms as “human
chromosome 16”, “chromosome 16 book”
and “chromosome 16 expression”. She even
searched for odd combinations, such as
“chromosome 16” + “Saddam Hussein”.
She sifted out around 250 website links on
the basis of what appeared intellectually or
intuitively interesting and “looked good”.
The e-book proceeds through simple pages
of the incantatory phrases interspersed
with coloured lower-case overprinting of
the website links with fragments of their
text and numbers from the original article in
large capitals (see the page shown below).
The result is a doggedly
accumulated ‘report’ on the incredibly
rapid Internet diffusion of the knowledge in
standard and bizarre forms. The contents
are subject to constant mutation, so every
six months Jacobs takes screen shots to
document the changes.
To accompany the report, Jacobs has now
issued an ‘index’ as a print-on-demand
book, with a fixed form of 552 pages
(www.informationasmaterial.com). Against
the background of the CGAT permutations,
the accumulated number of characters
is remorselessly spelt out, up to “Sixteen
million five hundred and forty-one thousand
and nine hundred” — still some way short
of the roughly 80 million base pairs noted in
the original article. They are accompanied
by enigmatic fragments from the websites.
Given the vagaries of the production
process, each index assumes an individual
character. The letters C, G, A and T on every
left-hand page are bled to the page borders,
and their visible expression on the unbound
edge of the closed book varies unpredictably
as the result of minute variations in the
trimming process.
The report and the index are odd, difficult,
perplexing, suggestive
and strangely beautiful
— and awesome
in their numerical
persistence. Jacobs
has created something
drawn directly from
the science and its
diffusion, using the tools
of a bibliographer. Yet
the result subverts the
science in the direction
of chaos and cacophony.
The effect is analogous
to the way that the
particularity of each
individual person seems to
confound the overwhelming
similarity of our genetic
constitutions.
At least, this is one possible
interpretation. There are others. Jacobs is,
I suspect, resisting any closed or dominant
reading. And therein lies the difference
between the original Nature article and
Jacobs’ visual play. The scientific exposition
provides as little latitude for alternative
readings as possible, whereas Jacobs
provides a field for interpretative flexibility
that triggers thoughts and insights of an
unexpected nature — unexpected, perhaps,
even to the author herself.
Martin Kemp is professor of the history of art
at the University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 1PT,
UK. His new book, Seen | Unseen, is published
by Oxford University Press.
Gene expression
Sarah Jacobs mutates genetic information into art.
SCIENCE IN CULTURE
S. JACOBS
496
NATURE|Vol 446|29 March 2007
BOOKS & ARTS
