For Hershman, mixing art and science came almost naturally, as the 77-year-old performance and media artist had tapped into scientific and technological findings since her early days as an artist.
“Artists want to be relevant to their time,” Hershman says about art in general. “So, I decided not to do painting and drawing, which I was trained in. Instead, I started to use interactive technology in the 1970s, which nobody was doing – and sound, which nobody had done.”
Later, she experimented with computer technology. In the 1990s, she was one of the first artists to tinker with artificial intelligence, creating Agent Ruby’s Dream Portal, a website on which users could type questions to a messaging bot that would readily answer them.
A few years later, after more than 16 years of work, she created DiNA. The artificial intelligence was equipped with a voice synthesizer and other top-notch technology, allowing DiNA to enter into real conversations with the public – political or otherwise.
Hershman’s love affair with science, in fact, has been running deep throughout her life. Coming from a family of scientists – she herself is a biology major – the artist had collaborated with some of the world’s greatest researchers and had produced films with Nobel Prize winners such as Elizabeth Blackburn, who discovered the effect of telomeres.
For her 2018 show in Basel’s House of Electronic Arts, Hershman wanted to work together with yet another scientist with whom she could develop an art object that revolves around the ideas of technology and identity, themes she had pursued for years.
The idea to work with Novartis came from her daughter. “When I knew I was going to do a project in Basel, I said I want to do something with a pharmaceutical company. But I didn’t know what was going on. So I asked my daughter, who’s the director of cancer research at Columbia, and she says, ‘Oh, it’s antibodies.’ And then she mentioned Novartis was doing a lot of the most advanced research. And so that’s how it all happened.”
A quirky idea
Over a cup of coffee, Hershman and Huber discussed a potential collaboration and finally hit upon the idea to produce an antibody that would carry the artist’s name, so to speak.
In a nutshell, Huber suggested redesigning the flexible part of an antibody, the so-called binding region. This relatively small part of the Y-shaped protein is responsible for connecting and neutralizing a disease-carrying molecule.
He wanted to code this region with a specific sequence of amino acids, which are standardly abbreviated with letters of the alphabet – such as L for leucine and H for histidine. This, so his reasoning, would allow him to produce an antibody with an amino acid sequence that would spell L Y N N H E R S H M A N.
Now it was the artist’s turn to be taken aback – and she excitedly accepted Huber’s proposal.
Wow, antibodies!
Huber, who had joined Novartis in 2007 from the University of Zurich, where he had completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry, was always fascinated with antibodies, which are naturally produced in the blood in response to an antigen.
“When I first learned about antibodies, this was really amazing to me,” he says. “How can our body fight pathogens which it has never seen before?”
“In our body,” he says, “there is a constant evolution going on and a huge number of diverse antibodies is constantly being generated. The few useful ones are selected for refinement and production. The others are discarded because they could harm us. This process of making the right antibody to fight only foreign intruders fascinated me a lot.”
Antibodies have been used in medicine since the 18th century. But only with the rise of genetic engineering in the 1970s and the growing understanding of the complex structure of proteins did the field really take off.
The mid-1980s saw the development of the first biologic drugs. These would work like natural antibodies. Yet, thanks to their design, these therapeutic proteins would be able to fight diseases such as cancer or inflammation.
Novartis, which was among the early adopters of antibody research more than 30 years ago, has since developed four large-molecule drugs, including anti-inflammatory medicine Ilaris®, psoriasis treatment Cosentyx® and asthma treatment Xolair®.
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A love affair with science![Thumbnail](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"/%3E)
