Sir

Martin Kemp, in his “Science in Culture” article on Mark Quinn's A Genomic Portrait: Sir John Sulston points out that rather than a portrait, the artist has generated something akin to a relic (Nature 413, 778; 2001).

In the artist's production of an artefact which may not be art, there is more than a hint of a parallel with Sulston's achievement. Here the scientist (and the Human Genome Project) has generated something which is not science, but a remarkable triumph of technology and organization — a catalogue of the human genome sequence. The interpretation of this triumph awaits the ingenuity of contemporary and future scientists.

Quinn has enlisted collaborators too; several million bacteria, some of which have been persuaded to take up fragments of Sulston's DNA. Like most representations, aspects of the subject will be missing from the finished work — unclonable portions of DNA which have not inserted into the bacteria. Artists consciously or unconsciously choose to emphasize certain features and downplay or omit others. In Quinn's case, he cannot direct the omission and lacks the means to decode the image for the observer.