REGENERATIVE MEDICINE: EMBRYO DISSECTION & TISSUE CULTURE

Live tissues are taken from dead mice.

As an artist in residence in an animal facility, I am not allowed to kill mice. But after the licenced animal researchers gas, neck break or decapitate the mice, I am allowed to dissect the fresh dead mice to take still living parts, tissue or organ samples from their corpses. These samples are used in research, used for reproductive processes or primary sources for tissue culture. So, parts of the dead beings are kept alive, fed, protected from infection and stabilized in a media that is a home for wayward living dead liminal being. So this is not vivisection as the whole organism is dead. But it is near living dissection and zombie undead specific parts that retain life after death through well studied life support. This cutting into still warm, fresh dead organisms is not easy and not for the faint of heart.

Mouse Sinus Dissection for SARS-CoV-2 Study

My first test in the animal facility was to help a COVID Research study in progress, by removing the sinuses of a few mice. This was poised as a removal of the nasal turbinates of mice to study how COVID both effects the olfactory (smell) during infection. The sinuses are a point of contact for the virus. Due to the proximity to the brain, sinuses are also a point of access for viral infection beyond the blood-brain barrier (the dura), causing COVID brain infection and resultant brain damage. When working on art and science productions, I don’t usually do anything for science, data as knowledge production or progress in general.

I feel like my autodidactic mission is to explore what the processes are, beyond the hopes of silver bullets against disease or clarity in understanding the repeatable aspects of the living world. Art is often not about these trivial worldlinesses but instead about the heterogeneous, irreducible enigmas of being in the world, feeding off of life, decaying during life and the pusillanimous mortal hand we are dealt as yet another of those who, having been born, are now destined to become inanimate again, to die, to run out of negentropic desires and cease again to exist. But, my role in my first isolation was not merely to help discover an iota of how COVID infects the body and the mind. This first cadaver dissection was a rite of passage.

Preparing a fresh sinus specimen from the head of a just euthanized mouse is not pretty. Dalila was asked to sit down as an observer, in case she passed out. I have had some experience with isolating pineal gland from newborn rats, so I was called upon to perform an act of fresh dissection to show that I was capable of being engaged, implicated and a participant in the daily workings of the animal facility. I felt like the test was to see if I was an animal rights zealot, an anti vivisectionist, a complete theorist of subjective abstraction or just a pekid ninny in the face of operating on a morbid anatomical stage. So, there was a pairing and some directions but the tiny scissors and scalpel were mine to retool the body with.

There is some grotesque revulsion but there is also an art to these tiny, postmortem dissections. For nasal section removal you start with a skinning of the head, making a scissor cut through the fur at the nape of the neck, up over the skul and down the nose. After removing the furry skin, there is a literal cross sectioning done on either side of the sinuses. This is a diagonal section, not on the standard XYZ axis found in most anatomy body section maps. But, to get the sinuses you have to remove both the brain and the lower jaw. I think when I gripped the head in one gloved tweezer hand and scissor cut the bone between both eyes, I had secured my continued residency. I became in some small way, one with my tribe and included. I showed that I was not shy to go beyond my measured daily acts, to break protocol of the everyday and engage activley in a lifestyle that is somewhat taboo.

My actions had contributed to science.

None of this testing the artist was stated as such but it was the first day and I was watched for shortness of breath, retching disgust or other emotional signs or trauma or reaction. I was watched to see how our relational engagement would progress. I think I proved to be capable and skilled and serious. I isolated a research ready sinus from a fresh culled mouse. It was put in the tube with the other sinuses. Strangely, Isolating Nasal Turbinates for COVID Research was a larger problem for me. I do feel as if helping to understand a disease is a valid pastime. But, I am torn by the implications of science in terms of both protection and denigration on the human condition and as it effects the living planet. Empiricism is only so useful. Utilitarianism can cease to be pragmatic at times and some applications of logical analysis can lead to organized genocide, ethic-less toxic pollution and the medicalization of all intimacies. Besides that, like many others, I consider the lab leak theories of COVID-19’s origin to be probable, be it accidental release or intentional bioweapon. Working with live disease or even producing experimental diseases is part of bioweapons research.

It doesn’t matter how research is positioned, preventing future disease or studying infectious pathways, regardless of global agreements and conventions against biological warfare, the War Machine is always involved with germs, pestilence and viral potential for both prophylaxis, population control and preemptive strikes. No national government uses chemical or biological weapons in the name of evil. It is always to reach a preposterous higher bar. It is always couched in rhetoric of emancipation, freedom, god or other savior. But the collusion of the enlightenment community of mind concept with funding for actionable biowar agent production is beyond any concept of humanistic science.

When I aid COVID research, I don’t get that feeling of helping alleviate pain and suffering, helping stop brain damage or returning smell to those who have lost their scents. Instead I wonder, am I being suckered into helping one or another global faction gain a superior edge in an international arms race on the level of molecular biology? I decided to join in an act of hopeful benevolence, in potential collusion, to go ahead an assume that I was aiding research that took the hippocratic oath seriously and attempted to heal and preserve life even if the virus being studied was a cruel joke or silly mistake of human origin. I broke from my tradition of not engaging in life science as a data producer. I helped make a fact. This can be as jarring as fresh dead cadaver specimen acquisition. This is non-dada based anti-art, a nightmare of the creative industries, subversion of the arts into craft, perhaps gifting work to a military dreamlessness or even being a servant to the notion of infectious death head for outdated and inhibitional programs of violent invention, violent intention.

I was able to look above my COVIDnoia. I did supply some unknown and unnamed drug company with live sinuses for their research of the day. And, I was allowed to continue my research, which is presented to you here. I witnessed more gassings and decapitations. I isolated testicles and ovaries, sperm and eggs from prepared bodies. I witnessed fertilization outside of the body and zygote mutation with molecular infection for the creation of engineered genome-bent embryos. I even aided a little and observed deeply the implantation of those embryos into a mother, chemically and sexually prepared to to uptake and implant the transgenic beings. And, near the end of my residency, I received a very strange mission. I thought I might be able to witness live birth of transgenic mouse babies. If they were GFP+ maybe the newborns would glow green under ultra violet light and I cold get a mutant head emerging from a surrogate mother, glowing as it exited the mother’s mouse vagina… so cool, familiar and foreign at the same time. This was not to be.

Cesarean Section on a fresh dead donor female foster mother.

What I was tasked with was performing a Cesarean Section on a fresh dead donor female foster mother. The mother was decapitated and then the living embryos were aborted by me through removal and then dissection. This is not considered anmal research as the mother had been recently made dead and the embryos are not considered to be whole organisms, not considered to be animals yet. They are cells, early organs, ganglia and glands are consider to have extra strengths for miraculous health applications in terms of stem cell therapies due to the fact that they are ‘in derdevelopment’. So, these semi-living mouse fetuses (feotii), even as they become embryos, are both diminished in importance as pre-organisms while held up as a chalice of everlasting youth. Their cells are totipotent, pluripotent and sold as omnipotent. The primary cell lines or chunks of differentiating lumps are sold as Unborn Freshness, providing Surprising Beauty and, if you don’t mind being called an unborn vampire client, potentials for neuro-regenerative miraculousness.

Bioethics aside, I witnessed the killing of a pregnant surrogate mother mouse that had been implanted with mutant transgenic embryos and my role was to cut open the mouse belly and remove the research embryos from the dead mother’s womb. As usual when you are out of your habitual everyday routine, the complexity of the universe is revealed through absurd unpredictability. I did not expect that like developing chicken eggs inside Poached Unlaid Chicken Egg Yolk (Eyerlekh) Chicken Soup, there would be a string of embryos connected in an amniotic tube that just kept coming as I pulled with the tweezzers. It was surprisingly gross, curious and just plain obscure. Each embryo was in its own sack but also inside what looked like a sausage casing with a chain of embryos, a necklace pulled from an open abdomen, a caterpillar stuffed with a litter of pre-virginal, pre-organisms, aborted, frozen in timed lock step, an assembly line of kindred, tasty treats and blood drenched, unexpectedly long and fertile morass. It is these that we put in petri dishes and brought upstairs for removal of skeins, embryo isolation and then embryo dissection for the collection of early CNS neural ganglia primary source nodules.

Dissection of embryos for Primordial Embryonic Stem Cells is standard for much of tissue culture fitness testing and developmental biology in general. I can comment on beauty of embryo development. It is a process that is miraculous to observe. From a single cell to all the features of a newborn are morphing, non-intuitive growth and formations, including expansions and contractions, folds and intubations, monsterous phases and twisted convolutions not to mention fusions and blebbings, extrusions, involutions and resessions. All of the organs and systems of a developing embryo follow a sort of stage by stage yoga of anatomical becoming. Seemingly determined to make a version of a preset yet unique set, the body is a process based and decentralized with million year old tricks of the trade and rapturous beauty. Both sadly challenging and philosophically enriching, the study of the sculptural beginnings of a free living new organism are worthy of beholding even without science to lend that air of seriousness to a macabre investigation. Actually, the rituals of scientific investigation into the depths of reproductive origins which make up the process of whole organism autochthonic formativeness are also an aesthete’s wet dream, fascinatingly fertile with ideation and amazement.

I took the embryos upstairs to the lab. I was trained by two grad students on embryo dissection and how to isolate the CNS precursor nodes for culturing. I removed the embryos from their casing. There were so many that I piled the embryos up like some H.R. Giger meatscape: nightmarish, esoteric, gorey. They made quite a lovely tableau. I cut off their heads, arms and legs. I slit them down the middle and scraped/scooped out the insides. Then, spreading the core-body open, the inner spine in progress was revealed. My next step was to score and perforate on either side of the spine in order to make the ganglia that were meant to grow into Central Nervous System branches and offer these isolated ganglia to the researchers for study. The research is about how nerves grow and as in most biomedical engineering labs, how to coerce novel development in an artificial body-environment designed to push the parts into expressing their programming in emergent directions that reveal the essence, fine-points and esoteric options available to these particular differentiating lineages. What I saw, was actually a cartoon of the body, an acephalic quadruple amputee icon of the disembodied embryo. I saw a sign, a herald, a devoted simplicity of shape. It looked like this.

Again, I was allowed to take photos but the photos were not allowed to be published publicly. So I sourced photos from the internet, my own artworks that utilize embryo development and Dall-E AI explorations into stochastic emulation of versions (computer system subconscious analogical ‘thinking’) to bring you closer to an imagistic understanding of the experience. The following video was suggested by one of the graduate students as a training film for the dissection and preparation of the headless, armless, legless and flayed body to sample from:

The leglesss headless acephale icon of embryo flayed

With CNS precursor neural ganglia isolated, the cycle of my residency reached a satisfying crescendo. I had isolated sperm and eggs, become a mouse fertility clinician, engineered fertilized zygotes with mutant metabolic obscurities, witnessed reimplantation and stolen those mutant embryos before birth to abort, dissect and keep specific parts of those embryos in a state of animation. This is a sad mission which is generally undertaken under the shield of curing disease. I do these acts to understand, experience and convey the process. I don’t have the excuse of saving humanity from Parkinson’s or Alzheimers. I am just learning the motions of the technician’s methods.