The burial of King Tut attempted to preserve, however, more than his image and possessions. The ancient Egyptians believed firmly in the survival of the "ka," or spirit after death. The ka inhabited the tomb, and many of the artifacts in it were intended for use in the hereafter, including statuettes of servants that could magically become animated and resume their activities. A central necessity, however, was the preservation of the body, whose survival was essential if the spirit, heart, body, and name were eventually to be reunited and resurrected, resuming their earthly existence.

When the tomb was reopened, millennia later, the results appeared mixed. The art had survived in all its glory, but the mummy was considerably decomposed, and the ka was nowhere to be seen. It appeared that artistic immortality had been achieved, but not bodily survival. That verdict would have been made before the advent of modern genetic engineering.

In 1953 three and a half millenia after Tut's burial, and thirty-one years after the reopening of his tomb, James Watson and Francis Crick deduced the structure of the DNA molecule. Their discovery revealed the way in which each of our cells stored the plan for the construction of our bodies. This information permits a single fertilized egg, given sufficient sustenance and time, to develop into an adult human being. Many fantasies had been spun, from Tut's time and before, about our hereditary mechanism. Suddenly, the answer became clear: our plan is written down in a four-character language that is billions of years older than the earliest human script.

In the four decades since Watson and Crick's theory was introduced, scientists have devised methods to extract genetic messages from human cells, record the sequences of DNA characters stored in them, and interpret their meaning. Currently a massive international effort, the Human Genome Project, is attempting to record the entire script for a typical human being.(1) So massive is this text, however, that the job will take at least another decade: the length of the script is about three billion characters, enough to fill ten sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Microscopic chromosomes [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] serve the same function for our genetic text that volumes do for an encyclopedia. Further decades will be needed to decipher how the genes described in this treatise interact to determine our features, and how subtle differences in spelling between your plan and mine create the differences between our bodies. Eventually, we will learn which passages promote blond or black hair, perfect pitch, the ability to curl one's tongue, and every other human feature. Someday when the process has been perfected and automated, each of us may be able to preserve our own body plan on the equivalent of a compact disk.(2)

Such efforts need not be restricted to the living. Small DNA fragments have been recovered and read from preserved human remains many thousands of years old.(3) The successes included samples from several ancient Egyptian mummies [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].(4) If methodologies continue to improve, an attempt may be made in the future to reconstruct the total text of a preserved human body, perhaps even that of Tut.

The job would be enormous, of course. Imagine that the Great Pyramid of Cheops was entirely hollowed out, filled to the brim with copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that the structure was then thoroughly dynamited. The task of reassembling an intact copy of the encyclopedia from the pile of singed fragments gives some idea of the genetic work needed on a mummy. Tut, like any other human, had billions of copies of the plan in his body at birth. Despite this, some portions of his text might still have been lost if degradation of the message had been extensive over the years. Not only skill, but luck, will be needed in such work. Given the latter, we may be able to discover much: his blood type, many genetic strengths and malfunctions, and (by suitable comparisons) the identities of his closest living relatives.

In a sense the priests who planned his burial had succeeded. Mummification bridged the time between his death and the advent of DNA technology. The preservation task will have culminated when his genetic record is safely preserved in computer discs, secured in multiple copies, and sent to a number of sites for safekeeping and possible future use. His biological heritage, which for millennia had lagged behind his artistic one in preservation, will then become the more secure component. (As we shall see later, this gap may also be subject to remedy.) This new ability to represent and preserve the human form in text represents a cultural landmark and is bound to impact upon many parts of our consciousness, including our artistic sensibilities.

One historic function of art has been to capture the appearance of individual humans for posterity. With the invention of photography, this burden has been lightened, and such artists as Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning have sought through distortion and abstraction to catch some underlying truth concerning our physical selves. The emerging biological ability to render human forms in text will carry the process of dissection to an extreme, but also produce a new vantage point for artistic exploration of the human condition.

This possibility has been anticipated, for example, in the work of Agnes Denes, who has contributed to this issue of Art Journal (see "Models, Metaphors, and Matter"). In her "philosophical drawing" Introspection I. Evolution [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED], segments of text from many sources are juxtaposed with a comparison of human and ape body parts and complete figures.(5) This work evokes recent biological and cultural evolution, but also recalls the combination of hieroglyphics and the human figure in the tomb of Tut [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] and anticipates the essence of the Human Genome Project, with its connection of linear text to three-dimensional form.

For those of us alive today, unlike the case of our more distant ancestors, the chances for the preservation of our bodily record are quite good. At the moment only tiny portions of text are sampled from select individuals, for use in paternity suits and criminal investigations. Plans are already underway, however, to collect and preserve blood, hair or saliva samples (almost any body part will do) from diverse human populations for future genetic analysis.(6) A generation or two from now it should be possible and affordable for any of us to preserve our plan, if we choose to do so. For those of us who had passed on in the interval, our skeletons, frozen blood, or samples of preserved skin(7) should suffice (given the good will of our descendants or admirers).

The capture of our body plan would not describe our lives, however, or give us parity with Tut. My genetic text will reveal only the potential that was present at my conception, not the subsequent events. It could not tell whether I wore my hair long or had had my tonsils removed, let alone the impact of the course of my life on my personality. Yet, by taking a bit more space on the disk that held our plan, each of us could record for the future whom we had become and what we had done. We could include our autobiography, correspondence, and photographs and films in digital form. A memorial of this type for everyone alive today could be held, if stored efficiently, in a single large library. Our great-great grandchildren, or an interested browser a thousand years from now, would have the chance to learn who we were, how we felt, and what we did. Our tombs, though tiny and made of plastic and metal, would have a much better chance at survival than the ones that had been placed in pyramids of stone.

For artists, the inclusion of their life work in the memorial disk would have high priority. No problem should exist in the case of writers and musicians, whose work can already be preserved in this manner. Additional advances in technology are needed for the painters and sculptors. Could their works be stored in a string of characters and reconstituted with full aesthetic effect?

At the present time the answer would be no. I can view reproductions of all the paintings in the National Gallery of London on my home computer.(8) Viewings of this type were a useful prelude to a recent visit, but hardly a substitute for the originals. Currently, however, radar imaging and aerial photography can produce very accurate relief maps of the earth and the moon, and the scanning-tunneling microscope can image individual molecules on a surface.(9) It is not hard to believe that the future technologies will be able to reproduce accurately the surface of a painting, and that virtual reality will give us a realistic impression of walking around a sculpture. An artist of the future could then cap his career by designing his own memorial. His body plan and life history would be stored as preserved as described above, but included as well would be his work, the art that he bequeaths to posterity for a time as long as civilization perseveres.

For some of us, even that would not be enough. As Woody Allen once put it: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying."(10) For those who wish to match the full aspirations of Tut, a hope exists. If what we leave behind should please the future, restoration might be attempted. If biotechnology should advance and prosper, the re-creation might be extended to ourselves as well as our art. Our body plan would be recorded, and if our memoirs were insightful enough, perhaps our personalities could be inferred from them and instilled in the bodies.(11) Thus a being quite like us would walk the earth again, and perhaps resume the art where it had been interrupted. The ka of Tut would be jealous, unless of course he was there with us.

Notes

1. The history and consequences of the Human Genome Project are explained in Robert Shapiro, The Human Blueprint (New York: St. Martin's, 1991). For a recent progress report, see Thomas D. Yager, Thomas E. Zewart, and Leroy E. Hood, "The Human Genome Project," Accounts of Chemical Research 27 (1994): 94-100.

2. Shapiro, Human Blueprint, 271.

3. A number of efforts of this type are discussed in Bernd Herrmann and Susanne Hummel, eds., Ancient DNA (New York: Springer, 1994).

4. Svante Paabo, "Ancient DNA: Extraction, Characterization, Molecular Cloning, and Enzymatic Amplification," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 86 (1989): 1,939-43.

5. Jill Hartz, ed., Agnes Denes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1992), 14-16. Other works by this artist also anticipate themes of the Human Genome Project. In her lithograph Strength Analysis - A Dictionary of Strength (see pp. 4-6), Denes uses collections of words relating to strength essentially as a sculptural material to create a geometrical design and to provoke meditations on human culture and universal themes. This may anticipate our coming confrontation with our genetic text in which arrangements of characters in different contexts may signify very different human consequences. For example, haunting themes of three-character repeats have emerged recently as diagnostic of a group of genetic diseases that include Fragile X syndrome and Huntington's disease. Her work Morse Code Message (see pp. 24-25) translates into Morse code the Biblical passages with the words of God declaring the fate of man. The artist has written: "The peaceful dots and dashes conceal commandments and threats, words of doom, or promises of redemption" (p. 25). The equally quiet letters of our DNA offer much of the same: a chronicle of the past, promises of latent talents, warnings of impending genetic disease, and not the least, a chance at immortality a la Tut.

6. Patricia Kahn, "Genetic Diversity Project Tries Again," Science 266 (1994): 720-22.

7. A commercial service has already been established that will preserve a sample of DNA from your skin within a glass capsule for a fee of $35. See Nicholas Wade. "Immortality for Sale: The Price Is Only $35," New York Times, April 4, 1995, C6.

8. Microsoft Art Gallery (Richmond, Wash.: Microsoft, 1993).

9. See Diane L. Evans et al., "Earth from Sky," Scientific American 271 (December 1994): 70-75; and Helen G. Hansma, et al., "Atomic Force Microscopy of Single- and Double-Stranded DNA," Nucleic Acids Research 20 (1992): 3,585-90.

10. Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 446.

11. The scientific basis for this speculation is discussed in Shapiro, The Human Blueprint, 357-63. For a related point of view, see Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 225-27.

ROBERT SHAPIRO, professor of chemistry at New York University, has authored and co-authored ninety papers on DNA chemistry and three books on science intended for the general public.

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1996 College Art Association

Art Journal, Spring 1996 v55 n1 p75(4).

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