The statistical analysis, published yesterday in The Lancet¹ by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, nearly doubles the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate of global malaria deaths in 2010, revising the figure upwards from 655,000 to 1.24 million.

But Bob Snow, of the Malaria Public Health & Epidemiology Group at the Centre for Geographic Medicine in Nairobi, Kenya, who was one of the paper’s peer reviewers, says that there are considerable weaknesses in the researchers’ methodology.

For example, because official cause-of-death reports in developing countries are often unreliable or nonexistent, the IHME team used ‘verbal autopsies’, conducted with friends and family of the deceased, to compile the death-toll estimate (see Verbal autopsy methods questioned).

“Verbal autopsy is a very blunt tool — in some cases it is about as good as flipping a coin for working out the cause of death,” says Snow. “It can be useful if somebody has died of an obvious cause, such as being run over by a bus, but it’s not very useful for the mixed bag of symptoms malaria is associated with. But in this study, they have essentially taken most deaths from fever and assumed they are due to malaria — that’s a fundamental problem.”

Kevin Marsh, chairman of the WHO’s Malaria Policy Advisory Committee, who works with Snow in Nairobi, shares his concerns. “They present these numbers as though they are ‘real’ numbers, making rather immodest statements such as ‘these data show’ rather than ‘we believe these indicate’ — it’s a language issue,” he says. “Overall, it’s always useful and stimulating to have new estimates of disease, but it can be a sterile argument over whose numbers are best.”

The authors acknowledge that there are problems with the use of verbal autopsies, but say that it is better than other methods. “Verbal autopsies are simply useful interim tools for where death registration doesn’t exist,” says Stephen Lim, professor of global health at IHME and a co-author on the paper.

“I don’t think either the IHME or the WHO know how many people die of malaria worldwide — the truth is that nobody really knows. But that’s not going to get the headline news,” says Snow.

The research did attract considerable attention in the media, and was hyped by Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, who wrote in a 27 January Twitter post that “a revolution is about to strike”.

Some of the authors’ conclusions are indeed revolutionary. They suggest that, contrary to mainstream medical wisdom, large numbers of adults die from malaria: the new figures indicate that 42% of malaria deaths worldwide were people over the age of five, eight times higher than the WHO’s figures. In areas where malaria is endemic, it is believed that children suffer infections frequently, and that those who do not die before the age of five will be highly immune for the rest of their lives.

“Our figures don’t mean that immunity in adults doesn’t exist — that is an important distinction. It simply means that the extent of immunity is lower than previously thought,” says Lim.

The IHME, the WHO and most researchers do agree on a few points: deaths from malaria are declining, following a peak in 2004 — which the IHME pegs at 1.8 million, double the WHO’s estimate. This is attributed to the boom in funding from organizations such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for prevention measures, such as bednets, targeting children and pregnant women. Such funding increased from US$250 million in 2001 to more than $2 billion in 2009, and deaths in Zambia and Tanzania, for example, fell by 30% between 2004 and 2010, according to the IHME.

Richard Feachem, founding executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and member of the IHME scientific oversight group, says that this work to reduce infections among children could explain the higher rate of malaria in adults: without frequent infection during childhood, many adults may not have the same degree of acquired immunity that previous generations had.

“There may be more malaria deaths than we thought, but we are still winning the battle — deaths are coming down dramatically,” says Feachem. “That should be taken as endorsement of the efforts that we’ve all been making, and this should be a clarion call to continue those investments.”

Yasuo Yoshikuni and his colleagues at the Bio Architecture Lab in Berkeley, California, engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli so that it could digest brown seaweed and produce ethanol. Their work is published in Science today¹.

Yoshikuni says that his group chose brown seaweed because it was both sustainable and scalable. “Seaweed is already produced in huge quantities around the world without taking up any fresh water or arable land.” Brown seaweed also grows faster than red or green seaweed, with varieties such as the giant kelp, found off the coast of California, growing by up to a metre a day.

Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn), and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land. In the case of maize, more energy is required for growing and harvesting the crop than can be gained from the ethanol produced.

But producing biofuels from seaweed has so far proved difficult for bioengineers. Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars — laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose. The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate, which is a complex polysaccharide and tricky for microbes to digest.

“The carbohydrates are rather exotic compared to traditional terrestrial sources like corn or sugar cane,” says Yoshikuni. “Alginate is the key to unlocking the potential of brown seaweed.”

Seaweed solution

So using Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that can digest brown seaweed, Yoshikuni and his team isolated a biochemical pathway that breaks down alginate. They inserted the genes responsible into a strain of E. coli, which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars. The team also engineered the strain so that it could convert those sugars into ethanol, enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed. This strain of E. coli could, in theory, be engineered to produce a variety of other useful chemicals and fuels.

“This is very impressive work — it really is a groundbreaking achievement,” says Yong-Su Jin of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who also studies biofuel production from seaweed. Jin works with red seaweed, which is less abundant in the world’s oceans than brown seaweed, but “relatively easy to ferment using yeast”, he says, because of its lower alginate content².

Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California San Diego, calls the work “a very sophisticated engineering feat”, but adds “so far this has almost nothing to do with bioenergy production”. The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars, he explains: “It’s the rest of the steps involved in the lifecycle of growing and transporting the biomass.”

Scalability remains the big problem: people have farmed seaweed for hundreds of years, but only produce several thousand tonnes a year for food. Biofuel production would require billions of tonnes. “We still face a huge technical gap for large-scale cultivation,” says Jin.

That’s the next step, says Yoshikuni: this year his team will demonstrate the feasibility of their ethanol-production process at a pilot plant being built in Chile.

And the bass would be very, very loud.

It’s an unusual event—and that’s exactly the point, says Ronald Ligtenberg, director of Skyway Foundation, which produces Sencity: a series of club nights for deaf people.

“I needed a new challenge, so I asked myself: What is impossible in the world of music?” The result: a lush, super-sensory evening, attended by both the hearing and the deaf. Roughly a third of the audience at Sencity’s first event in London, England, last month could hear normally. This is singular: the deaf and the hearing worlds seldom collide, and almost never outside a formalised, educational context.

Born in the Netherlands in 2003, Sencity has staged 36 nights around the globe, including Mexico, Brazil, Finland, Spain, and South Africa, and have 12 events planned for 2012, including one in Montreal. Crowds have reached more than 2,000. In this silent world, the audience explores music using all their senses: “See, hear, feel, taste, smell the music” runs the tagline. Translation: “aroma jockeys” waft clouds of essential oil infusions into the crowd while massage therapists provide free sessions.

“The main purpose is to inspire people by showing how you can make the impossible possible,” says Ligtenberg, noting that integration—of hearing and deaf worlds—is beside the point. “If you take a so-called disability as a source of inspiration, you may discover whole new areas for innovation.”

Take Signmark, who raps with his hands, headlined London’s Sencity, and is the first deaf person to be signed to a major record label. Or the prosthetic-legged athlete and activist Aimee Mullins, who opened her TED talk with an assault on the definition of “disabled.” Says Mullins: “The only true disability is a crushed spirit.”

Spirits are well in evidence at Sencity, where every corner bristles with animated, signed conversations, every exchange alive with visible emotion. “Body language, in a way, is a much more honest way of communicating than speech,” says Ligtenberg. “Deaf people are very expressive, so when they are having fun, it really shows.”

These unique properties of sign language – and deaf culture itself – are fading with the rise of cochlear implants, which allow congenitally deaf people to hear sound to a limited degree. They are one of the most lauded forms of prosthesis available, but are reviled by large portions of the deaf population; Tim Bonham-Carter, one of Sencity’s organisers, says there’s massive concern that cochlear implants will erode deaf cultural identity. Meanwhile, Sencity is flaunting it.

And these raves for the deaf are for more than the deaf. They make revelations about the nature of music itself, a nature not purely acoustic, but three-dimensional, multi-faceted, immersive.

“A lot of our understanding of music comes through the body,” says Dr Frank Russo, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University. “We can think of all music as movement, because all music requires movement. We all subconsciously move rhythmically when we hear music; we need to move our vocal chords to sing. Music is something we feel and see as well as hear; when all those modalities are combined, the sensation of music is richer, and our understanding of the emotional nuances is expanded.”

Russo is also a professional musician and the inventor of the Emoti-Chair, devised to enhance the experience of music for deaf people by creating vibrations along the back of the chair in descending frequencies, high notes by the neck, and bassy tones at the bottom of the spine. “It enriches the experience of music for everyone,” he says. “For the congenitally deaf, the chair can be more of an acquired taste. At first it feels simply like a jumble of sensations, but over time they can experience music.”

Once you have experienced music with your full body, at Sencity, or in an Emoti-Chair, will you ever hear it the same way again?

With every series the BBC’s Natural History Unit produces, one has to wonder what they could possibly do next; when Planet Earth came out several years ago, spanning tropical jungles, African deserts and also these frozen poles, it was hard to imagine what earthly material they could have left to astound us with. Yet, as the latest series proves, there is always more to bring to our screens, in huge part because technology grows more sophisticated every year.

Still, as stunning as the images are, one cannot help but notice a paucity of factual detail, huge gaps in the script, a lack of scientific elaboration and the occasional cringe-worthy line.

It is tempting to ask: Is the BBC dumbing things down?

For anyone who has followed the Life saga since the beginning, comparison with earlier series is striking. Get your hands on a copy of the very first series, 1979’s Life On Earth, and the contrast is absolutely jarring (not simply because the grandfatherly form of Attenborough as we know him today is replaced by a rosy-cheeked, lithe and dandyish young man).

It is impressive to see how far filmmaking has come in three decades: the monochrome, pallid, grainy tones of the old footage seemed so vivid with life and colour when we watched them a quarter century ago. Deep sea fishes, which dazzle with bioluminescence and astound under the high powered lights of today’s submersibles, are barely perceptible in the old footage – some of the rarest specimens are only shown with grainy, still photographs. Vast plains of coral reefs, which in real life would have been a brilliant rainbow of blues, reds and yellows, are rendered dull by the era’s primitive underwater equipment. Even birds of paradise and shimmering iridescent butterflies, which should make for effortlessly impressive filmmaking, appear to be cast in sepia.

Even the music strikes in different chords: the oboes, flutes and French horns of the orchestral scores play in minor harmonics, almost mournful in tone, a stark contrast to the gushing, rousing, celebratory scores of the modern series.

But get past the initial shock of the unimpressive imagery, overcome the shortness of our modern attention spans, and the complexity of the narration will begin to impress.

Attenborough – who, remember, is a classically educated biologist and should be addressed as “Sir” in accordance with his standing in the Order of the British Empire – bandies about words that seldom (if ever) would have passed his lips in the past decade on air: Trilobite. Polyp. Cilia. Nautilus. Paramecium. Bryophyte. Placoderm.

The structure of DNA, the workings of the genetic code and the nature of amino acids are explained. The practicalities of successful fossil hunting are laid bare. The relationships between comb jellies, sponges, amoebae and the other gooey denizens of our planet are teased apart. The importance of cyanobacteria – blue-green algae that produce much of the world’s oxygen – is celebrated. The restriction that diffusion imposes on the anatomy of butterflies is elucidated.

The contrast with the aerial shots of bear cubs trundling about the Arctic snow we meet in the first episode of Frozen Planet couldn’t be more striking. Obviously the camera crew cannot change what the cubs look like (nor our instinctive reaction to melt at the sight of them), but the anthropomorphized tone is undeniable – jaunty music and trilling flutes at times create a rather saccharine air. And several lines read by Attenborough – the driving force behind a series that began by attempting to explain natural selection and the detective work of evolutionary biologists – are enough to make old devotees flinch. “It’s the naughty corner for you,” he chirps over footage a chastised bear cub. The cuddly tone is particularly noticeable to those familiar with Attenborough’s history at the BBC (he is reputed to have been a legendary curmudgeon during his days as controller).

So why the drastic departure from the series’ unabashedly nerdy roots? It was only 15 years ago that 1995’s Private Life of Plants revealed the stunning, subtle workings of the unassuming green foliage of our world. Blue Planet still astounded with scientific detail.

Charitable apologists might surmise that the producers wished to expand the appeal of the program to as wide an audience as possible. Practically, they need to justify the enormous expense of their series’ (reputedly £16 million over four years). But perhaps they also wish to inspire awareness and concern for the future of the poles, which are one of the regions of this planet that will change the most in coming years with our warming atmosphere.

This week however the The Telegraph reported that the BBC has chosen not to include the seventh episode in the series, which deals with climate change, in the Frozen Planet package sold around the world. The newspaper reports that of 30 networks who have bought the series, a third have opted not to pay for the episode, bundled as an optional “extra” among out-takes and additional behind the scenes footage.

It will be clear to life-long Attenborough fans that the intellectual volume of the new series has been cranked down several notches. Is the BBC simply broadening the appeal in order to justify costs? Putting in a greater effort to make the content accessible to children, perhaps inspired by the success of March of the Penguins? Have the producers come to the pragmatic conclusion that not everyone is enamoured with the subtleties of cyanobacteria?

Or, is the simplest answer the most likely? Perhaps the images are just so powerful that they speak for themselves.

It is not exactly your average venue. The concrete cobblestones were cold, spare couch cushions served as chairs, winter winds wafted into the room. Police sirens blared. There were tents everywhere. And, every hour, loud bells would gong in the cathedral towering overhead.

But the small cinema at the Occupy London Stock Exchange, at the foot of St Paul’s Cathedral, has been screening films since the inception of the sit-in over a month ago.

“There is a lot of talk about the financial crisis, but we have to ask: how were we so uncritical about what was going on? Finance has been able to dominate our lives in part because we have stopped imagining that other worlds are possible. Tent City University, and Occupy in general, is about creating an open, participatory space where these possibilities can be explored,” says Christopher Fraser, who runs the cinema at the camp.

But the British début of the new US documentary Growthbusters at the camp might seem puzzling, counterintuitive and even offensive to anti-poverty campaigners at the camp and the millions of people worldwide who have lost their homes and jobs, hard-hit by the fallout from the global recession.

When the economy is in free fall, who would be against growth? Intuitively, growth symbolizes health and prosperity – the London camp is itself growing, spread now to Finsbury Square and an abandoned UBS building – surely a sign of its resilience, and potential longevity.

Supporting growth seems like a universal point of agreement: British Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to kickstart the economy by building 450,000 new affordable homes for first-time buyers, announced this weekend, seems hard to argue with.

Affordable homes for new families, jobs for labourers, more income in their pockets to spill in the rest of the economy – what could be more sensible?

A generation of ecologists, demographers, and a few unorthodox economists, however, have together built the case that growth is not the solution – it is part of the problem, and a core component of an economic model that needs to be changed.

“We need to learn to embrace the end of growth, or go down fighting,” says Dave Gardner, the film’s director.

His words might seem hyperbolic, coming from the mouth of a filmmaker from Colorado who unsuccessfully runs for local government in his community on a platform opposed to more growth (he exposes the whole amusing saga, including uncomfortable and cantankerous moments at City Hall, in the film). But to those familiar with the subject, it is notable that Gardner bagged interviews with all the heavyweight thinkers in this field, whose arguments are woven into the film to support his case.

The hitlist: Canadian scientist Professor William Rees, the very founder of the concept of the ‘ecological footprint’ who made popular the notion of the earth’s “carrying capacity” (which, by the way, we are already overshooting by 30 per cent); retired economist Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb, who first raised the alarm over human expansion back in 1968; Herman Daly, a former economist with the World Bank; Bill McKibben of 350.org; Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved; the list continues.

Essentially, they all argue that we need to de-link the connection in our economic and financial system between prosperity and the GDP growth, and achieve a sustainable economy (also called a ‘steady state’ system). But though the idea has been bandied about for decades, the system remains unchanged.

“There are individuals and companies who profit from growth – it is in their interest to keep us hooked on growth,” says Gardner. “These ‘growth-pushers’ [financial institutions, energy companies, and so on] profit, while society and future generations pay. They make easy short-term profits, dependent on us encouraging and even subsidizing them to plunder our communities.”

The term “subsidize” might jump out at most readers, having watched the banks deemed ‘too big to fail’ propped up with public funds.

“Documentaries can be an important source of evidence in challenging conventions, and Growthbusters is a fantastic example of this,” says Fraser. “The ‘growth-pushers’ it talks of help perpetuate the idea that growth will deliver prosperity. But perhaps the core myth of our time is that deliberation of these matters is pointless – or best left to experts. Neither is true.”

In a darkened hall in London, a 20-metre high eulogy plays to a hushed crowd. A giant egg spans the floor to the ceiling. A mountain stands in a foggy sea, it’s peak towering over us. Red dots hover over the steps of an escalator. A snail slides across a pile of leaves.

Suddenly, a child runs across the room, up to the screen, and pokes it. This is Film, a career-defining piece by artist Tacita Dean, which will flicker in silence on an 11-minute loop until the end of March, inside the great Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern gallery.

Since 2000, more than 26 million people have visited the gigantic showcase pieces of this hall, always with free admission. Invariably one of the UK’s most talked about annual exhibits, it takes centre stage at what is one of the world’s largest and most famous modern art galleries. Less than a dozen artists have been chosen to create a once-in-a-lifetime magnum opus here.

Often they’re spectacular: Rachel Whiteread, known for casting the interiors of buildings (such as her Holocaust Memorial in Vienna), filled the room with rabble dabble mountains of white boxes. Olafur Eliasson created an homage to the sun, using just a semi-circle of white fabric backed with orange neon lights, the entire ceiling lined with mirrors. Simple, but massively crowd-pleasing: visitors would lie on the floor basking in the sun’s warm light for hours, forming snowflakes with each other and watching their reflections on the ceiling.

Sometimes they’re more philosophical, or political: Columbian artist Doris Salcedo spanned the hall’s floor with a 160-metre long crack to, as the artist said, “represent borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred.” Outspoken Chinese dissident Al WeiWei (currently under investigation in China for “tax crimes” and more recently investigated for creating “pornographic” images) covered the floor with millions of hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds, a metaphor and commentary on the turbo-charged industrialisation of the country and the phenomenon of mass-produced commodities “Made In China”.

Dean’s film, like Whiteread’s sun, is a big draw: daily crowds of people huddle together in the dark, sitting quietly on the concrete floor, watching the flickering images. Spanning floor to ceiling in the empty, echoing cavern of what was once the main turbine hall of a  coal-fired power plant, the looped movie celebrates another vanishing technology: 35 mm photographic film.

“This beautiful medium, which we invented 125 years ago, is about to go,” she said. “How long have we got? I hope we’ve got a year left. It’s that critical,” she told the Guardian, which described her work as “an act of mourning and an argument for the future.”

So endangered is photographic film that the exhibit at the Tate almost didn’t happen. The staff at the Dutch studio that cut the film apparently introduced flaws into it, due to an erosion of the staff’s film-handling techniques; white flashes would have appeared throughout the film. A 52-year-old editor had to drive to the Netherlands in person to cut the film by hand with Dean and drive it back to London in time for the launch the next morning. Few professionals like him would have been up for the task, and there are fewer than a dozen labs worldwide which can print the medium. Manufacturing declines inexorably every year.

The virtues of working with film versus digital are debatable, but one thing isn’t: in an age when our lives are steeped in pixels, print media disappears from the shelves, and everyone gets a camera with their phone (and can bombard us with dimly-lit grainy images through Facebook), images created with traditional techniques can’t help but be striking. Photographers who never stopped using film have suddenly found found themselves back in vogue. For example, the 64-year old, Italian-born Parisian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, whose contrast-heavy, dramatic portraits shot on Polaroid 8×10” are back in high demand after years of being obscured by younger photographers wielding new cameras and the latest software. Same goes for American art photographer Sally Mann, whose stark, haunting black-and-white images of the naked body are more popular than ever. Some, such as Edward Burtynsky, never went out of style, and remain giants of their trade. The revelation that his epic landscapes of bright orange rivers and rusting ships in muddy wrecking yards, are shot on film renders them far more impressive.

“No matter how much you re-touch a digital image, when you see it printed you can see that it has no integrity, and you know it’s not real,” says London photographer and street artist Walter Hugo. For him, working with film is a natural choice, because each frame is a “one off” image that can never be replicated, making it more of a tangible object. This year he has taken his work a step back even further, working with 19th-century lenses, and more recently, silver nitrate solutions, “resurrecting” the almost forgotten photographic techniques of the Victorians.

His portraits, created by coating concrete walls with silver nitrate solution, and using a battery powered projector to cast the image, have popped up as street art on buildings throughout east London and stand in stark contrast to digital photography. Most recently he exhibited his “photographic frescoes” at the Cobb Gallery in Camden.

This is the second in a tryptic of work that celebrates lost photographic techniques – the first being a walk-in camera obscura built earlier this year and exhibited at the Showstudio in Soho. Other artists in that show included the works of American photographer T. R. Ericsson, who created photographic silkscreen portraits using cigarette smoke in honour his mother, who died from her addiction.

Ericsson’s previous images are equally tangible in their materiality – other collections have included photographic images using powdered graphite on paper.

“The surface of a photograph is somewhat changeless, whereas the nicotine and graphite images appear unstable: smoke shouldn’t produce an image; an image trapped in powder should blow or fall away,” he says. “That’s the point for me: images are in fact unstable, their meanings are not fixed. They are secretive things, their meanings are always manifold. The materials I choose are meant to emphasize the unreliability of photographic images.”

While the norm of modern digital photography has become flawless, crisp, linear, flat images, now new forms of software are spreading that mimic traditional photography techniques, such as the three colour gum process, cyanotype and hand tints. If good for nothing else, the ubiquity of vintage-lens-effect iPhone apps betrays our thirst for the real thing.

“I think more traditional photographic processes are more inline with the way we see, feel and think as human beings,” says Hugo. “The digital is just so flat, blatant, blunt and generally unmysterious and unromantic. All photo-based everything is pure nostalgia. The old film stuff just does nostalgia better: it is dreamier, more filled with desire.”

Japanese researchers have developed a probe for ovarian cancer that can be sprayed onto tissue during surgery, fluorescing where malignant cells are present — allowing surgeons to identify and remove scattered bits of tumour.

Ovarian cancer has a tendency to spread, leaving small tumours of less than a millimetre in diameter throughout the abdominal cavity, which can be hard for surgeons to spot and remove — being able to find all the malignant cells is crucial for a good survival outcome.

In September, I reported on a similar use of fluorescent labels to identify cancer cells during surgery (see Glowing cells guide cancer surgeons). Researchers at the Technical University of Munich in Germany used a probe for ovarian cancer in human patients, which targeted ovarian tumours by binding to a folate receptor expressed only on the surface of diseased cell.

But that probe was administered through injection — and can take hours to appear.

“Our probe is actuated in minutes or even seconds — that’s very important for the surgeon, who can’t necessarily wait 20 minutes,” says Hisataka Kobayashi of the University of Tokyo, author of the new study published in Science Translational Medicine.

‘Aroma jockeys’ at a Sencity night in the Netherlands. Photo Courtesy of Heikki Kynsijärvi.

Clouds of fragrant smoke wafted from the stage, crafted by the “aroma jockeys” with bubbling vessels of frozen nitrogen and futuristic fans, blasting the audience with heady mixtures of bergamot, lavender and sandalwood.

Hula hoops twirled round waists. Light shows twinkled. And the dance floor vibrated – literally –from an array of mechanised transducers synchronized with the (very) loud bass.

You’d easily mistake Sencity, held last month in London, for simply an opulent club night – until you saw the hands waving in the air. Everywhere the crowd bristled with conversations, fingers dancing as their owners looked expressively at each other, speaking with their eyes. Animated conversations were undisturbed by the music booming from the speakers.

Sencity, born in the Netherlands in 2003 – and which has since held nights in Brazil, Sydney, Spain, Jamaica, Finland, South Africa and Mexico – is a night tailored for the needs of the Deaf: around 35 per cent of the crowd is profoundly deaf, and another third are hearing impaired to some degree.

With music nights geared for those who cannot hear, Sencity claims to “make the impossible possible” – and challenges what the rest of us might think about the Deaf community. Most Deaf people can still perceive some level of sound, and all still have the capacity to appreciate music. But even those who live in a fully silent world can still experience the tactile qualities of sound (especially when the bass is cranked up).

But Sencity is not, its organizers stress, to be confused with a ‘Deaf rave,’ which is designed solely for the Deaf community. Those, say Sencity’s London promoter Timothy Bonham-Carter, simply reinforce divisions that exist between the Deaf and the hearing worlds.

“The idea is to bring the hearing and Deaf communities together but not in a way that is deemed exclusive,” says Bonham-Carter.

With the tagline ‘see, hear, feel, taste, smell the music’, the result is an event that caters to everyone’s senses – and which can hopefully break down perceived barriers not just between the Deaf and the hearing but also within the Deaf community itself.

“Sencity is about making the impossible possible: people often live in a protected environment and therefore do not look at what they can achieve with their talents,” says Bonham-Carter.

Take the night’s top-billed performer, Finnish rapper Signmark, the first Deaf person in the world to be signed to a major international record label. According to his website: “With his music Signmark wants to change attitudes towards the Deaf… he feels that the society should not treat the Deaf as handicapped, but as a linguistic minority with their own culture, community, history and heritage.”

Rapper Signmark at a Sencity night in the Netherlands. Photo Courtesy of Heikki Kynsijärvi

It was only several days later, in the middle of the night, when I was woken by piercing shrieks and death wails that I twigged it: cock fighting. In Leslieville. I never found the exact source of the noise, but all summer my weekend nights were plagued by unholy screeching, always preceded by several days of contented, unwitting clucking.

Leslieville was a very different place then. I spent the first 20 years of my life there (I now call London, England my home), and I return to it every four months or so for a stay at my brother’s house, just off Pape. (I can’t stay in England for more than four months at a time—otherwise I start to lose my mind a bit. All ex-pats agree.) Every time I return to Leslieville, there is a new bistro, another up-market recycled furniture store. It’s one of the city’s trendiest places to live, especially for young families—and for good reason. Stocked with gorgeous homes, many of them shaded by row after row of soaring maples, it’s picturesque, well-serviced by streetcars, and within walking distance of the lake.

But when I was growing up there, it definitely wasn’t chic. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The cock fighting incident was, though a bit alarming, mostly just amusing. There were other things I saw and heard things daily that were far from funny. Like the crack house bordering our backyard. I found pipes in the alleyway all the time. We could always tell what they were up to by the music they played. Rolling Stones? Smoking crack. Country music? Drinking.

They didn’t scare me, but it did freak me out a bit when the cops raided this old furniture store at the corner of Jones and Gerrard (across the street from my high school, Riverdale Collegiate) and found a pile of guns.

I often find it overwhelming to see the scale of change happening in Leslieville today. Walking down Queen East I barely feel at home.

Gone is the crumbling Bollywood theatre Gerrard Cinema—in its place stands the trendy, alt-cinema outfit the Projection Booth. Several doors down, where Gerrard meets Marjory, the crumbling Riverdale Cyber Café (an internet cafe without the coffee or working computers) has been replaced by the rustic Grinder Coffee, with mismatched wooden furniture and faux typewriter font emblazoned on the cups. Just south, Queen East now boasts an array of artisanal latté joints—Mercury Coffee, Te Aro (next to our Baby on the Hip), Dark Horse Coffee and Merchants of Green—all within blocks of each other.

Peckish? Get out early—Lady Marmalade, Bonjour Brioche, Hello Toast, Edward Levesque’s Kitchen all have mammoth lineups every weekend morning. Or a nighttime tipple? Queen between Broadview and Greenwood is thick with groovy cantinas, a vast departure from the days when the neighbourhood had little to wet your whistle save for or Jilly’s strip club. The Avro and Table 17 will have the ale for the discerning palate, while Rasputin and The Comrade can satisfy one’s cravings for Soviet chic.

Vestiges of the area’s working class roots remain. Across the street from Te Aro and the hip baby boutique, one can still divest oneself of unnecessary belongings at the Queen & Jones Pawn Brokers, and then pop next door with the newly acquired coin for a Molson’s at Queens Bar & Grill. Tasty Chicken House still reliably stands several storefronts down. Dangerous Dan’s—a cornerstone of east end coronary abuse—will hopefully never fall. No amount of retail face-lifts will ever render Gerrard Square anything less than the eye sore that it is.

Gentrification happens everywhere, all the time. But what’s happened to Leslieville makes me wonder if there is more to it. Is the shifting scene in this little corner of the city emblematic of the city’s increasing sophistication as a whole? It’s undeniable that Toronto’s roots can seem razor-sharp square—it was dubbed “The Good” for good reason. Only recently, really, could we rightfully claim to be considered a “world class city,” whatever that means. Before the Montreal exodus and the immigrant influx, Toronto was largely beholden to Presbyterian insipidness. But things are different now. We have Nuit Blanche and LED tennis. I’m oversimplifying, but you get my drift. And it’s not only cultural: When I was a child, I couldn’t even dip a toe in the polluted lake (my dog came out in blisters after every swim). Now I can enjoy a beer after a swim on the island’s nudist beach.

These changes to Leslieville were bound to happen. Stroll down Pape and you’ll see homes equal in beauty to anything you might find in the Annex. In retrospect, the neighbourhood was destined to turn into a modish enclave. Maybe the seeds were sown two decades ago with the arrival of Tango Palace (forever my chosen caffeine purveyor—I went on a date with my first boyfriend there when I was 15), Joy Bistro, Altitude Baking and a heady brew of antique shops, which all began to sprout in the early 1990s.

Gentrification has its annoying aspects, but it’s infinitely preferable to the crumbling deterioration the area suffered during my childhood. Or what I see happening in some parts of England now, where gorgeous Georgian terraced homes are left crumbling and squatted, and the unemployed, bored youth obliterate themselves with riots and horse tranquilizer, seemingly for lack of anything else to do.

The area is far more enjoyable now. There was something profoundly depressing about the east end 20 years ago. Riven by unemployment, it possessed the inescapable despair of a neighbourhood on the decline. Nothing looked on the up, everything seemed to have seen better days. The area couldn’t even support a Dairy Queen, formerly at Gerrard and Glenside (now it’s a Coffee Time).

Peaceful, leafy, turn-of-the-century neighbourhoods began to decay. Near my home was Blake Street, with one of the highest crime rates in the country. When I was 19, the only bars within walking distance were dimly lit, odd-smelling pits, like the Maple Leaf Tavern. Or the Ulster Arms Tavern.

“Leslieville” felt like a nowhere area, going nowhere. To the north was the Danforth—solidly middle class. To the south and the east, the Beaches—wealthy and perhaps a little too serene and relaxed. In between was our neighbourhood, branded “Leslieville” in what seemed like an attempt by city planners to lend character to what was only an interstitial filling, bisected by the unflinchingly gritty Coxwell.

My clearest memory illustrating the area’s deterioration is of a disused theatre. When my Dad, a rock promoter, walked me to school we’d pass by the unassuming building at 1298 Gerrard St. The storefront looked like any other, but empty.

“It’s a real shame,” he would say. “Inside there is a fantastic theatre. It hasn’t been used for years. Nobody seems to even remember it.”

Today, it’s the Centre of Gravity Vaudeville Circus, where children and adults can learn to juggle, fence and soar. And regularly home to adult circus content.

And that, unambiguously, is an improvement.

So, for that matter, is the transformation of a cinema into a haven for foreign films and documentaries. In fact it’s the oldest movie theatre in the city. Its conversion to a space devoted to classic films seems apt.

It’s far too easy to poke fun at cilantro garnished brekkies. But while gentrification may be irksome, it also represents an improvement in living standards. Is there actually anything objectionable about the sustainably sourced meat available at Rowe Farms or thoughtfully crafted furniture?

Still, concerns remain. I think, for example, of all the times my mother, an avid gardener, exchanged homegrown fruit and vegetables with an elderly Chinese woman from a few doors down who spoke no English. They kept up this wordless, friendly trading for years. My English teacher asked that I write a story about this, and I did. “That there is the very picture of what Toronto is supposed to be about,” he said.

So what will happen to the working class families, or the Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian communities, as property values are driven up? Is the neighborhood simply going to be homogenized?

On my most recent visit home, I saw a Starbucks on the corner across the street from my high school, Riverdale Collegiate, and I nearly lost my breath. It stood exactly where the sketchy burger shop Duk Shing once was, where you could get a chicken sandwich smothered in Kraft Italian dressing for $2, while downstairs piles of guns and cocaine were traded between the local mafia. That place was a part of my childhood.

I accept that nothing stays the same forever. And I like good coffee. But I will always miss something about Duk Shing.

Thanks to fluorescent labels that help them to spot cancerous tissue, surgeons have removed ovarian tumour cells that might otherwise have been left behind.

Most malignant ovarian tumours express high numbers of receptors for the molecule folate (also known as vitamin B9), so by attaching the fluorescent molecule fluorescein iso-thiocyanate to folate, researchers created a cancer-cell probe. After injecting this into patients, labelled cells were made to glow white with a special camera and light, allowing surgeons to spot cancerous tissue even when cells were otherwise indistinguishable from their healthy counterparts.

“This provides more accuracy and more certainty for clinicians to remove cancerous cells in real time during surgery,” says study leader Vasilis Ntziachristos of the Technical University of Munich in Germany. The results are published today in Nature Medicine¹.

Of all the gynaecological cancers — ovarian, vaginal and uterine — ovarian is the greatest killer of women in both the United States and Europe. Removing as much cancerous tissue as possible during surgery is crucial to giving post-operative chemotherapy the best possible chance to kill the remaining cancer cells.

“This advance represents a real paradigm shift in surgical imaging,” says Ntziachristos. “Until now we could only rely on the human eye to find carcinogenic tissue, or non-specific dyes that would colour the vascular tissue as well as particular cancer cells. Now we are going after precise molecular signals and not simply physiology.”

As a result, in this preliminary study, surgeons were able to remove tumours less than one millimetre in size. In principle, Ntziachristos says, the technique could locate spots of carcinogenic tissue as small as 50 micrometres.

Proof-of-principle

During the past decade, molecular-imaging techniques have been hailed as the “next big thing” Ntziachristos says. Although X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography and ultrasound can all be used to help surgeons determine the size and location of tumours, they cannot differentiate a cancerous cell from a healthy one, limiting the precision of surgical removal. So researchers have turned their attention to optical-imaging techniques and the development of tumour-specific fluorescent probes. This is the first time that such tools, originally developed in mice, have been tested in humans.

At this point, says Ntziachristos, this study only constitutes a proof-of-principle. The probes used apply only to ovarian cancer, and one patient’s tumour did not fluoresce after being injected with the label. This is to be expected, because folate receptors are only overexpressed by 90–95% of ovarian cancers. To tag 100% of cases might require the use of two different probes.

John Primrose, director of the scientific programme of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, welcomed the advance, but was doubtful of its wider applications. “This is a significant small step — it’s not a paradigm shift, but a significant step,” he says. “The problem in its use is that there are not many cancers in which this approach will be helpful.”

The next step is to demonstrate that the technique improves outcomes for patients after surgery, and the only way to do that is with a large, randomized clinical trial. “For now we shouldn’t celebrate this as an advance — it may not yet be,” says Primrose.

I did not expect to be deemed less attractive than an orangutan.

“You will never live this down,” my best friend grinned.

The things we do for science.

At the Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party this past July, we presented our audience with an array of human scents for them to sample, judge and rate: two boys, a woman (myself), and an ape (Hannah, a female orangutan, only revealed to be non-human after the judging).

More than 50 eager noses took turns sniffing our Smell Stations, plastic boxes containing ripped shreds of fabric from t-shirts worn by our four research subjects.

Taking it all in. Photo Credit: Mike Massaro

This was a Guerilla Science take on the famous t-shirt experiments, which investigate the molecular basis of attraction and by examining how humans preferentially rate the smells of other people.

“We humans usually think that we pick our mates according to how they look – we think of ‘love at first sight’ – we don’t appreciate the importance of smell,” says Dr Leslie Knapp, an immunogeneticist at the University of Cambridge and a global authority on the relationship between smell and attraction in primates. “But studies of primates and even studies of humans have shown that our ability to smell is very important, even in present day society – how we perceive the smell of someone has an influence on how we react to them, and there is good evidence to suggest that it has important influences on how we choose our mates.”

Anyone who has ever known the smell of a lover may be able to relate: the scent of that certain someone is utterly distinct, wholly individual, and – when it belongs to the right person – completely intoxicating. Once upon a time, it was the smell of someone that lay in the crease between his nose and his face that made me weak in the knees.

The mysterious charm and allure of a particular person’s scent is seemingly impossible to put into words, though a few have uttered some rather poignant phrases: Napoleon is reputed to have written to Josephine, “Will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”

Canadian gay gospel outfit The Hidden Cameras croon in The Smell of Happiness, from the album The Smell Of Our Own, “Happiness has a smell I inhale… I feed my own face when I soon crave a taste of the neck of a boy.” The rest, um, gets a bit dirty – read full lyrics here.

The influence of smell over our hearts and our bodies is undeniable, if you have ever felt that way, and yet exactly why seems mysterious: why should one person smell so sweet?

Scientific research, wielding the modern tools of genetic analysis, has uncovered some fascinating clues. Remarkably, studies have shown that our preferences for smells are partly determined by subconscious genetic cues. The same genes that determine how we smell – known as the “MHC cluster” in animals and the “HLA” in humans – also play a key role in programming how our immune systems operate by determining what innate and individual resiliences we all possess.

Lab animals as well as people will preferentially chose mates who possess MHC clusters that are different from their own, which most scientists believe acts as a subconscious mechanism that protects against inbreeding, as well as confers a greater spread of protection to their children.

Dr Knapp’s own research on mandrills has demonstrated that individuals will use smell to “identify potential partners with the appropriate genes,” as she puts it.

In humans, some fascinating studies (such as this one) have found that when women are shown photographs of men and given a selection of smell samples from the same men (though without knowing which smell belonged to which man), their choices frequently matched: the scents they deemed sexy often came from faces they declared handsome. Remarkable.

In the spirit of renegade research, we decided to conduct our own investigation into the relationship between smell and attraction, asking our audience to judge the smells of our contestants with a Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust as part of their Dirt season of events.

We gave things a twist, as we are wont to do. We threw a non-human – the orangutan Hannah – into the mix, without telling our unwitting judges.

The very attractrive Hannah - who wore a beige shirt, because she refuses to wear white.

To thicken the plot (or at least, their odours), we had our two male subjects go without washing for forty days and forty nights in the run-up to the festival, in a Smelly Tweeter competition.

For the chance to win a ticket to the Secret Garden Party, we asked contestants to attempt to last 40 days without soap and water, and tweet daily about their experience of being physically filthy, the reactions of those around them to their odiferous state, how being dirty makes them feel, and their reasons to quit the contest should they choose to drop out.

You can see all the tweets from contestants on Twitter under the hashtag #smellytweet. Daniel, the champion, kept a detailed blog on his experiences – you can see a choice selection of his posts here: “I am sitting less than three metres from a bathtub. This is torture. I will persevere. I WILL persevere.”

Daniel, enjoying a well deserved bath at the Feast of Stenches.

Beyond having a good chuckle at their expense, we hoped to enrich our understanding of the cultural implications of dirt: “This will be something that no-one has ever done before – this is a totally unique experiment,” says Dr Knapp. “Humans usually try to cover up their natural odours, so we will be interested in the results.”

The audience’s first task was to guess the gender of each of the four stations using coloured beads to indicate male (blue) or female (pink). The overwhelming majority vote in every case was correct – most people could tell that Daniel and Jim are male, and Hannah and myself are female. (Somewhat humiliatingly, more people thought Hannah was female than thought I was female.)

Next we asked the audience to rate the four smells on a sliding scale of attractiveness. Daniel was deemed least attractive, Jim somewhat less so, followed by myself – and then Hannah, the orangutan, was declared the most pleasing. My friends said this would keep them in jokes for weeks to come (and that afternoon called their team in the pub quiz “ORANG-

UTAN > ZOE”), but I query this conclusion: Hannah’s shirt smelled more like laundry detergent than any of ours, presumably because she did not have the patience to wear it for long. Had she kept it on her hairy form for as long as I did, I believe I would have won. But I digress.

Our last table featured strips from four shirts, all worn by Daniel, at various points during his 40 day soap fast. Unsurprisingly, the shirts worn at the later stages were deemed unbearably putrid.

But here’s where things get more interesting: Dr Knapp examined our DNA, extracted from mouth cheekswabs, and produced visual illustrations (in the form of gel electrophoresis assays, which display genetic variations in the form of lines) of our HLA genes. She also examined the DNA of Shamima, Daniel’s long-term girlfriend.

The HLA clusters, pictured using gel electrophoresis, of Hannah, Daniel, his girlfriend Sham, and the Guerilla Science team.

Unsurprisingly, Sham (who descends from both European and Asian parents) boasted diverse HLA genetics – Daniel, who’s lineage is largely Irish, possessed more homogenous genes, which would make him less immunologically robust and more vulnerable than Sham.

But, amusingly, Sham deemed the smell of the other boy, Jim, to be more attractive than Daniel – and his genetics looked to be a better match for her as well, said Dr Knapp.

Of course, being social creatures who rely so much on language, and whose beliefs, desires and behaviours are largely governed by the cultures in which we live, we use far more than just smell to pick our partners. It certainly makes life more interesting.

But the results are certainly fascinating, nonetheless. And even if Hannah was deemed more attractive than me, I do take pride in having defeated the boys – even if they hadn’t bathed in 40 days.

Imagine you haven’t slept more than two hours a night for three days because towering soundsystems in every direction send thundering bass lines through the ground towards your sleeping bag. You can see your breath, because in this part of the world, the temperature drops to the dew point at night in the height of summer. You are in a tent. The insides of the polyurethane single sheet are dripping onto your dirty face.

Your face is muddy and your hair grimy. The nearest toilet consists of a metal cube, ten metres long, with a row of seats floating above a swirling Sargasso Sea. Showers boast hour-long line-ups. Sleep is a laughable ambition.

On every side of your tent, sprawling several hundred metres towards the horizon, are tents. And tents. And tents. All filled with similarly exhausted people, who have opted to spurn snooze for whisky and loud, confused conversation.

Your phone is dead. Your friends are nowhere to be seen. The noise is getting louder. Suddenly you realize one of your rubber boots is missing—presumably lost amid the rivers of mud meandering through the area.

And you never, ever, want to go home.

Read the full story in the Toronto Standard about the strange experience of the English music festival, a five-day endurance test of rain, music, chemicals and costumes, and check out my photo gallery of snaps of drunk brits having fun.

The virus is described inPLoS Pathogens today. The team that discovered it might also have found the first human to be infected: the primary carer for a colony of titi monkeys (Callicebus cupreus) that suffered an outbreak.

The culprit is an adenovirus, one of a class of viruses that cause a range of illnesses in humans, including pneumonia. But this particular strain has never been seen before. It has been dubbed TMAdV, or titi-monkey adenovirus.

“It’s always been thought that adenoviruses are not likely to be causes of outbreaks or pandemics because they have never been known to cross between animals and humans,” says Charles Chiu, director of the UCSF–Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who led the study. Now that assumption needs to be re-examined.

In May 2009, a deadly outbreak of respiratory illness spread through a colony of titi monkeys at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Of the 65 monkeys housed in one building, 23 developed symptoms, including pneumonia. As a result, 19 died or were put down.

Chiu and his colleagues analysed tissue taken from the affected monkeys, and identified a previously unknown virus. Genetic sequencing revealed it to be an adenovirus, although its genome was substantially different to those of all known related viruses.

But what tipped the researchers off that there was something unusual about this virus, says Chiu, was what happened when they tried to culture it. “It was unusual to see it grow well in human cell lines, but not monkey” cells, he says. This suggested that the virus could infect humans as well as titi monkeys. “After we interviewed all of the staff, the only person who said they had been sick was one researcher — the one who had had the closest daily contact with the colony,” says Chiu.

That researcher experienced flu-like upper-respiratory-tract symptoms for four weeks. More crucially, a family member who had never visited the primate centre also became ill — demonstrating that TMAdV can spread between humans.

Unknown origins

The titi monkeys might not have been the original hosts of the virus. Of those that developed symptoms, 83% died — a fatality rate that would prevent the virus from circling in the population without wiping out the monkeys. In human-specific strains of adenovirus, death rates usually only reach 18%.

The original host species could be humans, who passed the virus to the monkeys, only for it to jump back to humans — or it could be another animal, such as a rodent. The researchers are collecting blood samples from monkeys and humans from all over the United States, Brazil and Africa to help them to discover the virus’ origins.

Chiu says that there is no reason to suspect that there will be a pandemic of TMAdV, as there has been with other viruses that spread to humans from animals. A survey of blood samples from 81 random, healthy blood donors from the western United States found that two people already had significant levels of antibody to TMAdV. “This virus then potentially crossed into the human population a long time ago and is now circulating at low levels,” says Chiu.

But the more we know about this and other new viruses, the better, says Eric Delwart, a virologist at the Blood Systems Research Institute at UCSF. “Characterizing animal viromes facilitates the detection of related viruses, and may shave a few precious days from identifying a new virus in the event of a future severe outbreak,” he says.

The discovery also raises the possibility of using adenoviruses as vectors in gene therapy, in which a virus is used to correct defects in a patient’s genes, says Chiu. “The fact that TMAdV appears to infect two or more different species but is not common in the human population also suggests this might be a therapy that could have broader applicability,” says Chiu, because it means the virus on a wider range of targets. Other labs are already investigating gene therapies using adenoviruses. “This could open up new and better treatment possibilities,” says Chiu.

It began at the entrance to a giant white cube, the Decontamination Unit, amid the muddy mess of Glastonbury. Bewildered guests – who thought it was a night club – were greeted by two guides in biohazard suits, who led them to a Microbial Zoo: an array of colourful Petri dishes bearing swirls and stripes and spots of rainbow-coloured bacteria.

Some of the strains produced these artful patterns all on their own.Proteus mirabilis, with to its whip-like tails, swims in circles at high speeds through the agar, producing concentric rings.

“Drawing people in like this helped them to learn that you really wouldn’t be able to live without these ‘dirty, disease-causing things’,” says Sarah Forbes, a microbiology PhD student at the University of Manchester, who grew the plates. She gives the example of Staphylococcus epidermidis, which lives on our skin and prevents other more virulent bacteria from taking hold.

The exercise was part of the latest experiment by Guerilla Science, which aims to introduce non-scientists to the beauty and relevance of our favourite subject by mixing it into arts and cultural events – places where people don’t expect to see science, and where we can reach more people who would probably avoid anything to do with it, perhaps after experiencing dull, rote exercises at school.

“We have strived to bring science in unconventional ways into unconventional places – and this was definitely the strangest project we’ve delivered at a music festival yet,” says Guerilla Science director Jen Wong.

Muddy punters, leaning forward to hear over the cacophonous grimecore coming from next door, were horrified to learn that our bodies are home to thousands of species of bacteria. A kilogram of bacteria reside in our guts alone, and overall we host 10 times as many bacterial cells as our own cells.

Perhaps most shocking of all for the muddy revelers was the fact that they encountered this display in Shangri La – the riotous after-hours “naughty corner” of Glastonbury. Next door was the Snake Pit, nightly filled with appropriately filthy electronic dance music; across the way was the Slumba Rave (featuring a caged arena for pillow fights); and all around the Decontamination Unit was a sprawling, slum-like collection of art installations and micro venues, populated with dead baby doll heads, neon lights, and mannequins placed in extremely compromising positions.

Bringing scientists into one of the most rebellious arenas in Glastonbury was the brainchild of Debs Armstrong, creative director of Shangri-La, in partnership with Dr Amy Sanders at the Wellcome Trust, which has been organising a series of events celebrating dirt. “Glastonbury seemed an obvious choice: organisers and visitors have to deal with copious mud and dust, limited showers and loos, and numerous humans (and their germs) in close proximity,” says Dr Sanders.

“This year I wanted to bring some scientific content to Shangri-La – give the narrative a bit more meat,” says Armstrong. “There are so many interactive artistic installations that are very creative, but to bring actual science into the fold is altogether different, and rarely done.”

Shangri-La revolves around the story of a city, born as a hedonistic dystopia in 2009, and this year stricken with a fantasy “virus” – in the form of UV reflective paint – contaminating everyone who wound through the city’s maze of venues.

With the support of the Wellcome Trust as part of its Dirt Season, Guerilla Science was brought in to cleanse citizens of the virus.

For eight hours daily for three days, we “decontaminated” the muddy revellers who wound their way through a network of hexagonal chambers inside our giant white cube.

As part of the narrative of the Decontamination Unit, following their lesson in microbiology, guests could opt for one of two kinds of disinfection: physical, which led to an undressing room (yes, many people opted to get completely naked) and then a smoky, strobe-lit shower; and moral, which led to a private session with bona fide psychiatrists: Dr Mark Salter, Dr Peter Macrae, Dr Priscilla Kent, and Dr Caroline Methuen.

Moral decontamination involved an intimate, personalised session lasting however long the patient needed, resting their tired legs on a couch while two shrinks sat in red-leather armchairs counselling them in preparation for the next room: the Shame Drain, where they could share a guilty secret with a microphone. Their words were broadcast anonymously through a row of speakers opposite the Decontamination Unit.

“Some people just lay on the couch straight away – I was surprised at how quickly people bought into the idea that confession in itself could be a cleansing experience,” says Dr Methuen. “Some really got into the idea of sending an idea out to the ether, sharing it anonymously with other people – a way of getting rid of the guilt you unnecessarily carry inside you. Even when they were off their heads, they got it.”

Some were too off their heads (it was Glastonbury after all) to remember their own initials. But for most the psych chamber was useful, says Methuen. Some joked. Others basked in the attention. A few cried. One wept about how much he missed his mum.

“There are still negative stereotypes about psychotherapy, so it was useful to show what a flexible thing it is – you don’t fit into a conveyor belt,” she says. “We were all nice, friendly and non-threatening. We were just having a chat – and in the chaos of Glastonbury, the normality of sitting down and being asked how they were was quite therapeutic in itself.”

Guerilla Science would be lying if we said it wasn’t all a bit trying at times: the combination of mud, sleep deprivation and occasionally addled revellers were challenging. But it was worth it to introduce a scientific note to one of the world’s most popular music festivals.

The Scatalog. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

On the outside: a sleek and smooth white briefcase, sporting a bright silver handle, cheerfully labeled “E. chromi” in a cursive font, each letter a different colour of the rainbow. On the inside: an assortment of stool samples, each also brightly spotted in a different colour of the rainbow, cushioned neatly into white pockets for easy examination. Dubbed “The Scatalog”, this is the spectrum of fecal matter that could be produced through the ingestion of the “E. chromi” bacterial strain, depending on your internal conditions.

The Scatalog itself remains speculative — but the bacteria already exist. Developed at Cambridge University and winner of the grand prize at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM). E. chromi is a modified strain of the harmless stomach bacterium E. coli and comes in six strains, each capable of secreting a separate colour: red, yellow, green, blue, brown or violet. E. coli is a normal bacterial species that lives throughout the human gut; E. chromi is a new, multi-coloured version that can produce pigments visible to the naked eye if set off by certain chemical triggers (like a pregnancy test strip changes colour when the hCG hormone is present).

Theoretically, you could populate the human intestines with E. chromi (with a yogurt drink, for example), where they could live harmlessly perpetually, just as E. coli do. But if they were to detect something unusual — such as the chemical signals from colitis or intestinal worms — they would produce their signature colours, giving you a quick, visible sign that something is wrong. Think of them as colourful microbial sentinels.

Rainbow excrement was just one of many applications that James King and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg devised for E. chromi (others included bacteria programmed to indicate whether drinking water is safe or to detect elevated carbon dioxide levels).

“We are actually being quite mischievous with the Scatalog,” King says. “Most synthetic biologists would rather promote medical applications that are more sexy. We thought this was one of the more logical outputs.”

But King and Ginsberg are not scientists, they’re artists. Or, to be more precise, “speculative designers” (King’s phrase) who specialize in fashioning uses for emerging technologies (or sometimes, technologies that don’t quite exist). While some speculative designers are imagining uses for information technology or space exploration, King and Ginsberg have, for the past few years, focused on synthetic biology. While genetic engineers modify existing species — rice crops that come packed with vitamin A, for example — synthetic biologists seek to invent new life forms altogether. Nobody has yet to create a bona fide “artificial” form of life, though the most famous proponent of synthetic biology, Craig Venter, aims to do just that.

Already biologists are stitching together assemblies of genes into new kinds of organisms — usually single-celled — so they can do useful things for us: vats of modified E. coli bacteria that produce insulin, for example, are already sitting in laboratories around the world, saving the lives of diabetics. Designer microbes could produce clean energy, decontaminate polluted air and water, and give birth to a new universe of outlandish consumer products. Synthetic biology is poised, so its supporters believe, to revolutionize the 21st century, just as computers did in the 20th.

Hoping to influence this supposed revolution, artists and designers around the world are working in laboratories, partnering with scientists, and collaborating on projects that imagine how these innovations in genetic engineering could be applied. King’s latest project, Cellularity, envisions how medicine could change as pharmaceutical developers begin to deliver drugs inside chemical cells rather than via compressed chemical tablets. The chemical cells would adapt to the environment inside their host and evolve — jut as living cells do. Dressing The Meat of Tomorrow fashioned palatable designs for in-vitro meat (lab-grown animal tissue, sometimes termed “victimless steaks”), a possible staple of future meals. Ginsberg’s latest project, The Synthetic Kingdom, features an array of imagined oddities like bioluminescent kidney stones extracted from factory employees of the future who work in bio-electronics manufacturing facilities.

"Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow"

Bringing an artist’s eye and an outsider’s viewpoint, designers who work in synthetic biology can influence how we perceive a field that’s riddled with negative connotations. Genetic changes, after all, are challenging for even the most educated to grasp: they take place on a scale we cannot see and have intricate molecular effects none of us can absolutely comprehend.

“Watching people’s reactions to a suitcase full of poo is interesting,” Ginsberg says. “The normal horror of genetic modification goes right out the window. People are suddenly challenged to think more carefully about a technology they normally oppose.”

“Whenever there’s a debate about synthetic biology, one side will claim it will open up a new utopia and the other will say it is untested and unsafe,” King says. “The truth I think lies in the middle. Our work presents a more subtle argument, it depolarizes it.”

Though the colourful and crowd-pleasing nature of their work may have the capacity to challenge mainstream perceptions, King says he in fact is far more interested in influencing the researchers who practice synthetic biology: “If you can make a researcher think more deeply about their work and its implications, that’s worth more than changing the minds of thousands of people who don’t engage with genetic technology at all.”

SOFTENING SYNTHETICS

Tinted turds are just one idea among many in synthetic biology that have been inspired by artists and designers. Cambridge researchers have harnessed the genes of fireflies to “model the feasibility of using bioluminescent trees as a replacement for street lamps.” There have also been petri dish cultures of E. coli capable of producing photographic images — dubbed “Coliroid” — and microbial strains engineered to produce “the smell of rain.” Last year saw the inception of the International Genetically Engineered Art Competition (to mirror iGEM).

At the crest of the movement is Synthetic Aesthetics, an initiative jointly run by Stanford University in California and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which supports long-term collaborations between scientists and designers (Ginsberg is a design fellow). “The aim is to explore rather than to advocate,” says Pablo Schyfter, a sociologist and a postdoctoral scholar with Synthetic Aesthetics. “We wanted to know, what could artists and designers bring to the field?” The process of researching requires scientists to be very focused on the particulars of their field. They can become too focused “on the Petri dish” as Ginsberg puts it, and insulated from thinking about the broader implications of their work.

“It’s fair to say that before this project, considering the public’s reactions wasn’t really at the forefront of my mind,” says Dr. Alistair Elfick, Director of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. “Meeting designers who were imagining possible scenarios for how our technologies could be applied gave me new insights. It was almost a wake-up call that forced me to consider how the public may perceive what I was trying to do.”

Those perceptions, of course, are highly coloured by the ways that genetic technologies were introduced in the 1990s; tight controls over patents and laws, opposition to labelling, and widespread fear of unknown risks have left their mark. Claims to have the public’s best interests in mind were widely perceived with skepticism. Acrimonious legal disputes over crop ownership, say — most famously with Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser — seemed to confirm suspicions that corporate motivations solely concerned profit.

“We’re all very conscious that the way genetic modification was initially presented to the public has left us with baggage,” Dr Elfick says. “We don’t want to make those same mistakes again; we want to be very open about what we do.”

BIOBRICKS AND BIOHACKS

These new vanguards of synthetic biology seek to make their technology, information and ideas available to all. Organizations such as OpenWetWare and Hackteria provide vast databases of information free online, often in wiki format. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based BioBricks Foundation, which supports the development of so-called “standard biological parts, devices and systems,” states that it “works to ensure that the engineering of biology is conducted in an open and ethical manner to benefit all people and the planet.” Though they are a for-profit organization, their lack of emphasis on genetic patents strikingly distinguishes them from the behaviour of biotech firms in the ’90s, which came under heavy criticism for attempting to patent even naturally existing genes, such as those that predispose certain women to breast cancer. (Last year in US courts, this practice was deemed invalid.)

Taking things a step further is the “DIY Biology” movement, which aims to put biotech tools into the hands of amateur scientists. The BioFab project, a spin-off from BioBricks, aims to eventually produce a kit with all the tools and parts necessary to perform basic genetic modifications. The made-in-Canada Genomikon is a similar kit aimed at high-school students, and should be available next year. “You could sit a teenager down with this and within an hour they’d be designing bacteria,” says Andrew Hessel. “It’s pretty cool.” Hessel’s the Bioinformatics and Biotechnology Co-Chair at the Singularity University and one of synthetic biology’s main proponents in Canada. He’s also the co-founder of the Pink Army Cooperative, which claims to be the world’s first cooperative biotechnology company, focused on breast cancer drug development. “I believe in transparency,” he says. “You cannot see into giant drug companies and government laboratories.”

As genetic modulation equipment continues to become cheaper and more accessible, he predicts the involvement of artists, designers and other non-biologists will only grow. “We’ll end up seeing a lot of new artists coming into this field and showcasing products that push the boundaries in ways that can be quite stylish and even playful, without scaring people,” he says.

“WHERE IS THE WHY?”

Skeptics might think that artists are using their aesthetic flair and sensitive touch to give genetically modified life forms a more friendly appearance. But many of the designers working on synthetic biology are suspicious of the technology themselves.

One of the biggest misconceptions of their work, say Ginsberg and King, is that they aim to popularize, or even condone synthetic biology. “We are definitely not trying to promote its use,” Ginsberg says. “We’re trying to promote debate. I wanted to understand why I myself felt so strangely about it. The more I learned, the more seductive the technology becomes.”

Dr. Schyfter goes even farther to say that he is still “unconvinced” by the technology. “I am rather skeptical of synthetic biology,” he says, “but that’s precisely the reason I find it so interesting.” One of his main critiques is the fact that that synthetic biologists seek to model their field on electrical engineering – practitioners speak of biological “circuits,” seek to build “oscillators” and “switches” and the capacity to “store memory.” Some of the flashiest and most publicized innovations in synthetic biology have aimed to replicate electronic devices, such as the bacterial photographs and glowing trees. “This focus is misplaced, “ he argues. “There are qualitative differences between living and electrical systems that just can’t be ignored.”

Indeed, many scientists who work in the field of synthetic biology will make the same breathless statements about the revolutionary, world-changing potential for this new field — much as the disciples of Silicon Valley have spoken about web technology and the idealized “information commons.” Self-styled “biohackers” see themselves as democratizing information, liberating data and undermining power just as web pirates do. “Synthetic biologists should instead be focusing on what biological systems already do very well,” Schyfter says, “which is produce chemicals. Innovations that allow us to produce chemicals like fuel, water, and medicines will be more likely to succeed.”

Though these are certainly among the goals of many biologists working in the nascent field of synthetic biology – as mentioned, we’ve produced insulin this way for years – Schyfter feels they still have a long way to go to defining their true aims. “Where is the why? Not enough people in this field are actually asking this question, why do synthetic biology in the first place?”

In fact, we cannot even agree in the first instance on a clear definition for “synthetic biology,” he points out. Designers like Ginsberg call it “a new approach to genetic engineering,” while Hessel calls it “genetic engineering with computer-aided design combined with DNA synthesis.” Most people tend to think of synthetic biology in terms of Craig Venter’s ambition: to create a new form of life from scratch.

The Pandora’s Box metaphor has been applied to modified genes (usually with nefarious implications) with such great frequency that it’s beyond cliché. But it does remain true that the technology has developed to such an extent, and its application found such wide use, that the place of synthetic biology in our future is absolutely guaranteed. We will undoubtedly see more forays by artists, amateur enthusiasts and democratic mavericks. “That’s part of the beauty of synthetic biology: everything becomes so cheap, it becomes playful,” says Hessel. “And playfulness should come into the genetic realm. It’s been far too serious for far too long.”

A year on from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP’s Annual General Meeting struck a far different tone compared to the 2010 congregation, held just a week before the explosion in the gulf, which released over five million barrels of oil and destroyed the fisheries, coastal estuaries and fishing economies of the Gulf of Mexico.

Last year’s AGM: quiet and uneventful, save for a formal resolution supported by Fair Pensions and campaigners from Canada regarding the risks of potential tar sands extractions, which seemed to go largely unnoticed by most of the shareholders.

This year: the board unsurprisingly found itself at the receiving end of impassioned criticism. “This AGM is the last chance to hold the company accountable,” said Kuhns.

She and other representatives from gulf coast communities staged a protest at the entrance of the meeting – Diane Wilson, a shrimp farmer from Texas, was arrested by police after covering herself in black goo, “the only thing they understand,” she told the television cameras. Though they were entitled to enter as proxy shareholders, BP security barred them from the conference on the grounds that they could cause a disturbance in the proceedings.

Activists from Climate Rush, the UK Tar Sands Network and Rising Tide were dragged out of the building, after attempting to create a human banner spelling “No Tar Sands”.

Members of the Ethecon foundation entreated the board to let the barred Gulf representatives into the building, and attempted to present the board with the “Black Planet” award – a planet-coloured beach ball covered in black ink.

Risky investment

Anti-tar sands campaigners from First Nations communities in Canada – Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Jasmine Thomas and Clayton Thomas-Muller – spoke to the board about the impacts of tar sands extraction projects in Alberta, and questioned the board’s decision to enter into the region, the world’s largest industrial project and a “risky investment”, as Thomas-Muller described it.

Many long-term shareholders of a more conventional stripe asked difficult questions regarding the spill, as well as the company’s future plans: “You assert to us that you can plan for climate change by asserting that you are good at drilling in deep waters,” one white-haired shareholder asked. “I would caution you to watch that hubris does not overtake you,” said another.

And, more to the sentiment shared by all shareholders who hold stake in the company, which lost £40 billion due to the spill, “Quite frankly, you have cost me money.”

With so many dissenting voices, the tone was markedly different from the previous year’s unexceptional meeting. Though some shareholders present denounced the “harassment” and “intolerable treatment” of former CEO Tony Hayward by “the Americans” last year, the overall sentiment in the room this year appeared undoubtedly to be one of anger regarding the accident and a degree of sympathy for the Gulf residents, including those who had travelled from the US for the AGM and had been barred entry.

When chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg tried to interrupt author Antonia Juhasz (who like many dissenters had bought a BP share for the opportunity to question the board at their meeting), the crowd came to her defence, the crowd came to her defence – in this video on Sky News you can hear cries supporting her to read the statement (about 1:40 in) from Keith Jones, father of Gordon Jones, one of the 11 men who died in the explosion:

“You had to make more money faster, and if that put those who were on the rig at risk, well sometimes one has to take a few chances, right? Well none of you were on that rig, and none of you were rolling the dice with the lives of your sons or daughters – but you were rolling the dice with my son’s life, and you lost.”

Though the explosion is largely regarded by the public as an accident, and perhaps one that could have happened in any industry, Juhasz explained two days previous to a gathering of dissenting BP shareholders, activists and campaigners that the catastrophe was not “a fluke”.

“This was an expected outcome of an industry that has extended beyond its technological capacity,” said Juhasz, author of Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. ‘They were using shallow water technology, the same used back in 1989. And yet their documentation said they could handle a spill of 300,000 barrels per day – the Deepwater Horizon only leaked 80,000 barrels per day.”

Winners and losers

There are 148 other deep wells around the world, she said, and Juhasz is not alone in thinking the Deepwater Horizon spill could just be the first of many such environmental disasters as oil and gas exploration heads into more extreme environments, from the deep ocean to polar waters to oil shale and tar sands.

Questions regarding the tar sands in fact garnered a huge amount of attention – a stark change from the previous year, when few shareholders seemed to be aware of any controversy. The Financial Times blog even declared tar sands campaigners to be among the few “winners” of the AGM, for “attracting maximum attention to their cause”.

But one is left wondering how many shareholders would give the green light to operations in Alberta, in particular because the board sold them the idea of a “lower impact” form of tar sands extraction, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Also known as ‘in situ mining’, this process injects steam into deep fissures underground, melting the oil and piping it to the surface. Svanberg proudly proclaimed that the process, which will be utilized at the Sunrise project (operated by BP with Husky Energy in Canada), due to its subterranean nature, leaves no tailings ponds and only affects “five per cent” of the surface area.

But these figures are extremely misleading, says Greenpeace’s Laboucan-Massimo, who published a report last week showing that the energy and water needs of SAGD operations are in most cases just as bad as open pit tar sands mining operations – and in many cases worse.

But like the spill in the gulf of Mexico, these effects will not be readily seen by board members in London or energy consumers around the world – only those on the front lines will be able to see the true impacts, unaffected by the glossy PR campaigns. BP may claim that the cleanup operation in the Gulf is complete, but coastal communities and local scientists know that the oil is still there, just lingering on the bottom of the ocean. Oysters, shrimp and fish have not returned, dolphins continue to wash up dead on the shores, and the rivers continue to stink. “We still have oil coating the bottom of the ocean, we still have dispersant coating the bottom of the ocean, what we don’t have is the life that is supposed to be there,” says Juhasz.

The impacts of SAGD too could be as intense and expansive – yet remain out of sight and out of mind for BP’s board, shareholders, and everyone worldwide who consumes their oil. Svanberg soothingly claimed that BP had become “a wiser company”, yet history may be committed to repeat itself.

A Laphroaig jelly breast, with gold leaf nipple. Photo Credit: Mike Massaro

“Please put your genitals on the table.” Epidemiologist and author Elizabeth Pisani was speaking to a crowd of 60 diners sitting beneath the gilded iron arches of a Victorian sewage pumping station. “No, you cannot trade your genitals with your neighbour — you have to take the genitals you are given.”

A few chastised guests eyed their neighbours penises and vaginas with envy. “I have a penis,” announced Pisani, holding up a yellow banana flavoured phallic marshmallow. “Will anyone give me an orifice in which to insert my penis?”

“I have a cunt,” a woman shouted, holding up a concentric circled sweet.

“I have a bum hole,” another offered.

“I’ll see your bum hole and raise you money,” Pisani countered. “Now, the game begins: if somebody at your table wants a pairing with your genitals, see what you will readily accept — a cock with a cunt? — or what you might want to be paid for.” Many pairings were made, including the sale of a bum hole by a New Scientist reporter for two Euros.

This very serious scientific experiment precluded the dessert course at “Dirt Banquet,” held in Crossness Pumping Station and hosted by Guerilla Science (of which I’m a member, more on this later) and food artisans Bompas and Parr. Our goal: to challenge our guests to think more critically about what they consider to be dirty, and why, by combining talks by scientists — anthropologist Val Curtis on the evolution of disgust, and Pisani, the author of The Wisdom of Whores, on sex — with a five-course meal of “dirty” food inside the antique sewage facility.

We were inspired by a genuine public health concern supported by decades of research: many scientists increasingly believe that allergies, asthma and many other auto-immune disorders and illnesses are at least partly attributable to a lack of dirt in our lives. Known as the “hygiene hypothesis,” this posits that our developing bodies are exposed to unnaturally low levels of bacteria, mould and other infectious agents as we mature, leading to hyper-reactive and maladjusted immune systems.

“We are using the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ as a wake-up call for people to welcome dirt back into their lives — and in the case of our banquet, into their stomachs and minds,” explains Guerilla Science director Jen Wong. (The banquet was funded by the British biomedical research charity the Wellcome Trust, which has supported a host of other events and publications this year under the simple banner “Dirt”.)

Crossness — the first sewage pumping station in the world, left to disrepair for 50 years — is being restored with Wellcome grants. The Victorian-era hanging fruits, climbing ivy and soaring buttresses glisten red, white and green once more, having emerged from more than a century of grime. For the evening, we were able to turn on one of the four 52-tonne pumps; guests entered the building as the massive wheel slowly spun, filling the giant cathedral-like hall with grumbling shakes and billowing steam. “I’ve waited years to get inside this building,” Bompas said, light mottling the ironwork floor up to the ceiling.

Feast of Filth

With radioactive cheese serum appetizers, bacterial jellies, blue cheeses, Papua New Guinean mud cakes, charcoal cleansed Thames water, durian chocolates and civet coffee (recovered from the feces of wild cats), the meal was “inspired by the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt,” says Sam Bompas, one of the menu’s creators and a rising star on London’s gastro scene. “We wanted people to engage with the concept of ‘dirt’ on many different levels.”

Some of the ingredients, topics and settings were provocative — and intended to be so. “We designed this banquet to visceral and instinctive responses of disgust, whilst inspiring our guests to overcome those responses and in so doing reconsider their relationship to dirt,” says Wong.

The most contentious dish: the fermentation platter, featuring netto beans (aptly described as “vomit beans”), served as a garnish to fermented fish with pickled ginger. These, says Bompas, were sourced in the wild west markets of London. “We had to trawl through many Chinese supermarkets to find them,” he says. The sticky tendrils of the hard-won beans, sadly, were “too horrifying for many people.”

Before the netto was served, Val Curtis gave her lecture on the evolution of disgust. “I hope you all have strong stomachs,” she said, taking her place above the crowd like a preacher in a pulpit. “But you must do or else you wouldn’t be here.”

Disgust is actually “the hygiene instinct,” she says. “It keeps us from eating what might make us sick.” Surveying cards that all the guests had previously filled out, listing three things they find disgusting, she spoke for twenty minutes on maggots, feces, and fetishes, before inviting guests to dine on ingredients resembling some of the offending items.

The main course — roast pork with barbeque sauce vegetables — was refreshingly familiar, but came served inside clay pots teeming with earth. Guests were required to dig for their dinner, and the tables (and plates) wound up covered in soil.

“No genitals in mouths, please”

Laphroaig jelly breasts with gold leaf nipples drizzled in posset of ambergris (a kind of whale expectorant) preceded Pisani’s short talk on sex. These were instantly devoured before she could even take the stage, standing on a balcony next to a towering steam engine. “I can’t believe everyone ate their genitals right away,” she later said.

Her opening line was an apt quote from Woody Allen: “Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.” Joining her, a sexual expert of considerable knowledge: Catherine Stephens, a sex worker who’s slept with more than 4,000 clients. With the genital pairing game, Pisani and Stephens hoped to illustrate that what people will pay for and why provides insights into what we value — and what we consider dirty. And “dirty”, of course, varies widely. “What constitutes dirty sex is what crosses your personal boundaries as transgressive,” she later said via phone. “For example, anal sex to some is just sex with a different orifice, but to others it’s ‘dirty’ — and therefore, to some, much more fun.”

A journalist turned academic, Pisani has spent many years in anthropological surveys of prostitutes, johns, and other individuals whose sexual behaviours are often narrowly understood by traditionally minded public health professionals. She’s perhaps best known for surveys of the attitudes and behaviours of transgendered prostitutes in Indonesia (she speaks Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia).

“I try and ask questions that have potential relevance to people’s actual lives — the challenges, joys and pleasures that people actually experience in real life, rather than the narrow boxes that public health nerds define,” she says. For example, if men complain of disliking condoms widely, simply insisting that they are the best and only means of preventing new STD infections will not help. “If we don’t try and think of the problems that people are working with, we won’t identify solutions.”

The genital dessert game was intended to inspire guests to consider the diversity of ways that we can have sex – a topic many find threatening — through the use of a decidedly non-threatening unit of exchange: candy. Her impression? “I was surprised nobody at the table tried to pair a mouth with an anus.”

Science by Stealth

Guerilla Science did not find itself staging banquets of filth inside sewage pumping stations with professional sex workers overnight — four years of experimentation brought us here. “Science Camp” began in 2007 as a small tent in a field at the Secret Garden Party, one of England’s most riotous music festivals, with eight lectures on topics such as quantum mechanics and the structure of DNA. Several of us joined the following summer, all with a shared philosophy: science belongs at festivals, alongside music, theatre, comedy and other entertainment. Far from boring, science is about discovering how remarkable the universe is — truth genuinely is stranger than fiction.

We’ve since grown to six team members — most of whom work full-time jobs at museums in London — and now stage events far more experimental than standalone lectures. Our most recent: a life drawing class inside the iconic Battersea Power Station (perhaps the most famous Art Deco building in the world), with the anatomy of the models painted on their skin. Prior to that, we held workshops inside an abandoned hospital on lobotomy techniques and electroconvulsive treatment as part of the Secret Cinema’s homage to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Taking science, and scientists, into ever more unusual settings, our mantra has become “to set science free,” as Wong puts it.

The Dirt Banquet, pairing food artisans with scientists, exemplifies our strap-line: “We mix science with art, music and play.” Unconventional cross-disciplinary collaborations between artists, musicians and performers have become our stock-in-trade – such as a game exploring the condition synaesthesia that paired neuroscientists with the professional agency of play Coney, featuring a giant brain covered in flowers and cogs.

Such cooperative projects — sculptures incorporating new forms of technology, or genetically modified bacterial paintings — are broadly known in some circles as “sci-art,” and generally aim to break down perceived barriers between the arts and the sciences. “But the whole ‘sci-art’ label isn’t really helpful,” says Wong. “In the past, it’s simply been linked to a lot of funding schemes, and merely placed science alongside art. We’re trying to offer something more rich, actually blending disciplines seamlessly together, to showcase not just science and art but all the things in between.”

A diner unearths a course in the Dirt Banquet organised by Guerilla Science. Photograph: Mike Massaro

Under the soaring arches of one of Britain’s most remarkable buildings, a gilded iron cathedral of sewage, 60 diners dug into clay pots of earth to get at their main course of roast pork and vegetables. The meal on Saturday had started with bacterial jelly canapes and the earth was followed by prosecco jelly breast desserts.

The UK, once gastronomically uneventful, is today home to some of the worlds’ most extraordinarily experimental culinary experiences, but Guerilla Science is confident that there has never been one quite like the Dirt Banquet, which we hosted with food artisans Bompas & Parr inside the spectacular Crossness Pumping Station. Completed in 1865, this Victorian masterpiece was the ideal venue for a feast of filth, designed “to explore the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political and temporal dimensions of dirt” explains Sam Bompas.

The banquet at the Crossness Pumping Station in London. Photograph: Mike Massaro

“Dirt is seen in most cultures as something undesirable,” says Jenny Wong, a director of Guerilla Science. “We designed this banquet to provoke visceral reactions of disgust – through the smell of the building, the menu, and the subject matter.

“The context of the banquet – with its majestic architecture, tasty food and engaging speakers – then provoked people’s curiosity to reconsider their relationship to dirt and overcome their disgust responses, so that they could eat and enjoy.”

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, this is one of many events that the biomedical research charity is sponsoring as part of its Dirt Season, a celebration of all things sordid and unhygienic from the history of cholera to sculptures fashioned from faeces (the latter on display in the Welcome Trust’s exhibit hall at its Euston HQ). The aim is to challenge us all to reflect more deeply on just what exactly is “dirt” (once described by anthropologist Mary Douglas as simply “matter out of place”), and its profound implications for human health.

Research suggests that our contemporary obsession with ridding our lives of “dirt” has played a significant role in the rise of allergies and other autoimmune disorders. The “hygiene hypothesis” postulates that many of us become sick because we are, in fact, too clean. Without our daily dose of bacteria, fungal spores and other noxious agents, our immune systems become unbalanced, over-reactive and ill-equipped to cope with ambient levels of “dirt”.

The Wellcome Trust wants you to “welcome dirt back into your lives”. Guerilla Science decided to invite our dinner guests to welcome dirt directly into their bodies. Master chefs Bompas & Parr served an array of delectably filthy food, including mouldy cheeses, bacterial jellies, savoury haggis, Papua New Guinean mud cakes, fermented fish, roast pork (pigs of course being the “dirtiest” of animals), and a dash of posset made with ambergris – whale expectorant once widely used for perfumes and Victorian garnishes.

The mud cakes were “quite tricky” to make, says Bompas. “We had to use mud that was clean – we ended up sterilising the topsoil pellets that went into the geophagy course.”

We fed the minds of our guests as well as their bellies. Anthropologist Val Curtis of the University of London spoke before the second course – fermented fish with pickled vegetables – on her speciality, the evolution of disgust. She encouraged our diners to ponder what they might find revolting, and why.

Before dinner, we had asked our guests to list three things they find disgusting on anonymous slips of paper, which Curtis perused for discussion. The most common offenders were vomit, faeces and maggots – things we all instinctively avoid thanks to evolution.

“Disgust is the voices of our ancestors telling us to stay away from the things that make us sick,” she said. “If we didn’t listen to those voices we wouldn’t be here – if your great-great-great-great grandmother had thought poo was yummy, she would not have survived and you would not be here today.

Also common on the list of disgusting things: bad habits, from picking one’s nose to farting in public. “We are disgusted by bad manners as a kind of moral outrage with people who threaten us with disease,” she explained. “Torture”, “cheating” and “paedophilia” were also listed.

Disgust may be an emotion we wish to avoid experiencing, or even contemplating, but Curtis argued that it’s an important exercise to consider its origins and functions: “I am interested in disgust because it keeps us healthy – it is the hygiene instinct.”

What would you be prepared to pop in your mouth? Photograph: Mike Massaro

If the first course of conversation was sobering, dessert was anything but: epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores, asked our guests to pair their genitals – marshmallow vulvas, rectums and penises – with those of another guest. To make things more interesting, she asked everyone to consider what pairings they might give freely, such as heterosexual sex, and for which pairings they would ask for payment, such as receptive anal sex.

When some diners attempted to swap genitals, she reprimanded them: “Stop that – you get the genitals you are given, you do not get a choice.”

Joining her was Catherine Stephens, a professional sex worker with many years’ experience of clients with unusual tastes. As they played with their genitals, our giggling guests had become like a class of giggling schoolchildren. But as soon as Stephens announced that she had slept with over 4,000 men, the building instantly fell quiet.

“It’s not every day that vomit is spoken about as a prelude to a fermented starter, or that someone announces in all seriousness that they’ve had 4,000 sexual partners over dessert, or that you are asked to ‘put your genitals on the table,’” says Wong.

Though we may blush to discuss anything but “vanilla” heterosexual sex, Pisani argues, the full spectrum of sexual behaviour deserves deeper consideration from an empirical point of view, even if couched in fairly colloquial terms.

“It is considered dirty to have sex with a woman who is menstruating, so many men would prefer to have intercourse with her anus, somehow considered less dirty. You figure that one out,” she said.

Pairing challenging speakers with the most unusual food, in the most sublime setting, Guerilla Science aimed to inspire all our guests to reflect a bit more critically on what they think of as dirty and why. What we may subjectively consider dirty may not actually be so in the harsh light of scientific objectivity.

To that end, Pisani left us with this: “Is sex dirty? We only seem to call it dirty if it’s done right.”

The Syncrude upgrader and tailings pond in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, courtesy of Greenpeace.

But director niobe Thompson’s documentary Tipping Point: The End of Oil has taken on more than the standard hand-wringing anti-big-business stance of other non-fiction features about the Alberta tar sands. in environmental contexts, the phrase “tipping point” usually refers to ecological thresholds beyond which there is no return — such as the potential for “runaway climate change.” But the film’s title goes further: it refers instead to a turning point for civilization.

“We want the audience to understand: we are at the end of the age of oil, and this is what it looks like,” says Thompson. “The subtitle ‘The End of Oil’ may make one think our film is about solar panels and electric cars, but really this is about what our oil-driven society is doing.”

“Oil invades every part of our lives. We go to enormous lengths to extract it, and we will go to war to get it,” writes David suzuki, the film’s narrator, in an e-mail interview. “Then when people say we have to shift our energy sources, the immediate response is to say that is crazy. Of course, it’s easy to say it’s crazy when you look at the world through the perceptual lenses of our vested interests.”

But through the lens of a camera, the sheer scale of the tar sands project never fails to impress. It’s a “provincial sacrifice zone,” as Thompson puts it, created through “a Faustian pact” Canada has made in the pursuit of economic growth. Deep toxic tailing ponds, larger than any man-made structure on earth. Vast scourges in the earth, forged by what Stephen Harper once aptly described as “Brobdingnagian technology.” And rare, fatal liver, blood and brain tumours afflicting the people who live downstream in the community of Fort Chipewyan.

The saga is not necessarily easy to tell, for the very same reasons that make it so gripping: so unprecedented in scope, it is difficult to truly capture. And so dramatic, the story has already been told many times before.

The sands and Fort Chipewyan have already featured in half a dozen documentaries: Crude Sacrifice, an independent 2009 film by Vancouver filmmaker Lawrence Carota; H2Oil, a feature-length 2009 doc by Montreal director Shannon Walsh; Greenpeace’s Petropolis, more a work of art by Toronto’s Peter Mettler, 45 minutes of spanning aerial shots of the operations; and Downstream, a 30-minute film by U.S. filmmaker Leslie Iwerks shortlisted for a 2008 Oscar, expanded into the feature film Dirty Oil in 2010.

“With the exception of Petropolis, these are all essentially David and Goliath stories — people facing down a massive project run by the world’s richest oil companies,” says Thompson. “We wanted to do something different to give the audience an idea of what is really at stake by combining a conventional survey of the issues with a narrative built on strong story lines.”

What is at stake? not only the lives of the people downstream, the forests and rivers in Canada, or even the global climate. The fate of all human civilization hangs in the balance.

“The tar sands are telling us that everything about fossil fuel–based economies has changed. This is the tipping point,” says Andrew Nikiforuk, journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, interviewed for the film. “If we can get off of fossil fuels in 30 years in response to this wake-up call that would be great, but if we don’t, then as a society we will collapse because you cannot sustain a civilization on a resource as dirty as bitumen.”

The End Of Oil

Most of the other tar sands documentaries hardly travel outside of Fort Chipewyan. The Oscar-nominated Downstream, for example, focuses on Dr. John O’Connor, the family physician put under investigation by Alberta Health, Health Canada and the Alberta College of physicians and surgeons for causing “undue alarm” when he raised concerns about cancers in Fort Chipewyan. His tale also features largely in Crude Sacrifice and H2Oil.

By now most Canadians are very familiar with this story, says Thompson, so he does not dwell on it. Instead, Tipping Point tells the story of how the people with the most at stake — the community of Fort

Chip — brought their story to the world stage. “This is about people with no voice who reached out beyond Canada to find their voice,” says Thompson.

Of central importance are Francois Paulette, a former chief of the Fort Smith Chipewyan who fought for native land claims in the 1960s with the Canadian government and is now fighting again on the world stage in Copenhagen, New York and Norway; David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta whose research brought the truth about the toxic impacts of the industry to the global press; and James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of the film Avatar (widely seen as an allegory for northern Alberta).

Added to this, a who’s-who of climate and oil-sands experts: Andrew Nikiforuk; Andrew Weaver, Canada’s pre-eminent climate change scientist; Tim Flannery, Australian scientist and author of The Weather Makers; Bill McKibben, journalist and founder of 350.org; George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and author of Heat; Ronald Wright, author, academic and civilization theorist; and rob renner, Alberta’s minister of environment.

Even the interviews lying on the cutting-room floor could have produced a documentary; they include the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra Pachuri, and Jim Hansen, a NASA physicist and unquestionably the world’s most famous climate change expert (best known as the scientist who revealed that the American government tried to squash evidence of climate change in the 1980s, as immortalised in An Inconvenient Truth).

“There is always the frustration when you work on a film for this long that you will never have enough space,” says Thompson. The film touches on the contribution of the oil sands to climate change — epitomized in Canada’s notorious obstruction at negotiations in Copenhagen last year — but lacked the scope to explore the issue to its fullest. For his part, Suzuki would have liked to have said more.

“My message, I’m afraid, is drearily repetitive, and has been for decades: human beings have very suddenly become a geological force, but people just don’t realize it,” he says. “We have reached the moment when humanity is altering the chemical, physical and biological makeup of the planet on a geological scale.

“If I were to put a concluding message to the film, it would be to remind people that we are animals, and our most fundamental needs are not dictated by economics, but biology. It is completely mystifying to me how we continue to place the economy, a human construct, above the very fundamental things we need to survive: clean air, water, energy and soil.”

A Global Warning

Filming took Thompson and the crew out to Copenhagen for the 2009 UN climate conference, to new York and Norway following paulette on his diplomatic missions, and many other locations that did not make it to the final cut. I myself signed a release form in London, England, in November 2009, when Thompson followed First Nations activists to parliament to argue their treaty rights.

And of course, filming took the team out to the sands and Fort McMurray a total of  29 times. “It’s impossible to get a sense of the sheer scale of the operations without aerial shots,” says Thompson. “In a sense, they really are a character themselves in the film.”

They brought the Cineflex helicopter-bound high-definition camera from Los Angeles, the same machine used in the BBC Planet Earth series. “You can zoom up the nose of somebody driving a truck with this thing — it costs a lot of money, so it requires a project of this magnitude,” says Thompson.

Greenpeace used the same camera for Petropolis. They, however, were only able to use the Cineflex for two hours in total — Thompson and his team had it for a full week. They now have a library of footage, which they hope to make available to other projects.

The sands have an added meaning for Thompson — he grew up in Wabasca, Alberta. “I had no conception as a child that this land was part of the oil sands,” he says. Nor did he know during the eight summers he spent as a forest fire fighter. “I put out a lot of fires on land that is now a pit — it is absolutely bizarre to think about it.”

Photo by Jiri Rezac, courtesy of Greenpeace.

After all these years, and having flown over them more than 20 times, has the sight of the tar sands ceased to impress?

“Yes, they do stop being shocking after your 20th flight — and that really was a challenge. Any filmmaker is always battling the loss of distance,” he says. “You always need to be conscious of the process of estrangement. You constantly need to distance yourself from the subject matter so you can look at it with fresh eyes — the eyes of the audience. But this becomes hard when you live the subject for years.”

Sound & Fury

Another challenge for any filmmaker covering the sands—and for anyone trying to come to an informed opinion — is the public clash of rhetoric.

On the one hand we see the oil companies and the government, who have always maintained that the environmental impact is minimized.

“We have large industrial projects that to the uninformed eye appear to be out of control, but the fact is that this is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world — this is anything but the Wild West,” premiere Ed stelmach says soothingly at a press conference.

On the other side: activists and environmental NGOs, most infamously the Rethink Alberta campaign, widely broadcast in early 2010 throughout the U.S. to discourage tourism to the province. “Alberta’s greed threatens to keep America, Europe and Asia addicted to oil for many more decades,” the ad’s narrator warned, against a backdrop of oil-covered ducks, to the beat of harsh piano chords. “Thinking of visiting Alberta? Think again.”

“Let’s face it: there is a great deal of distrust aimed at professional environmental campaigners,” says Thompson. “I think ordinary Canadians who are mildly interested in this issue are just as distrustful of the ENGOs as they are of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The message of the Rethink Alberta campaign came across as spin — people got the sense that they were being manipulated.”

The only solution, he says, is to base one’s opinion on science.

A Scientific Vacuum

But until very recently, there was no science for the public to see. The only monitoring of the river was conducted not by the province of Alberta but by an industry-funded organization, the regional Aquatics

Monitoring program [RAMP], which did not release its data to the public.

“We monitor water quality carefully, and to date all the data shows no long-term effects on water quality from oil sands development,” Stelmach maintained consistently for years.

But few were convinced. “In the absence of transparency, it looked like a conspiracy,” says Thompson.

The government always conceded that there were chemicals in the Athabasca River, but have long contended that they were “natural,” leaking from the river banks. Inputs from the tailings ponds were said to be negligible, and nobody could disprove them.

“I think industry likes it this way — as long as there is confusion, there won’t be any regulation,” responds Schindler. “We’ve seen this with acid rain, tobacco, and right now with climate change — [manufacturing doubt] is a standard industry tactic. After 40 years, I am tired of seeing this fool people time after time.”

The crux of the confusion lies in the sources: though simple water testing shows high levels of arsenic, mercury, lead, other heavy metals and carcinogenic byproducts of petroleum refining, it was difficult to prove that these derived from the tailings ponds and the smokestacks. A small study released in December 2007 and profiled in detail in H2Oil found extremely high levels of heavy metals in the water and in the wildlife. Nonetheless, despite high cancer rates and deformed fish, it remained difficult to prove industry as the source until recently.

Manufacturing Doubt

One of the keys to industry’s defence has been a deficiency in their monitoring program: they did not measure airborne inputs, a glaring omission in a region dotted with giant smokestacks so impressive they were once dubbed “dark satanic mills” by National Geographic.

To provide the necessary evidence, Schinder sampled the contaminants in winter snow, which would have to have come from man-made pollution falling from the sky. Samples collected near the stacks are grim and black. Calculations reveal that within a 50-kilometre radius, 11,000 metric tonnes of particulate would have been deposited during four months of snowfall — the equivalent of a major oil spill. The findings were reported around the world.

Its hand forced by the global spotlight, Ottawa appointed a panel to review Alberta’s monitoring program. The result, announced this December: a unanimous decree that RAMp is inadequate, and a new one will be created.

Of course, reliable monitoring is still a long way from actually changing the way the oil sands operate. But one thing, at least, has been accomplished: the story of Fort Chipewyan has reached the world.

“When the early films like H2Oil were made, this community had no voice,” says Thompson. Years later, the arrival of James Cameron in Fort Chipewyan was covered by The New York Times, the Oprah Winfrey Show and Time magazine. “Now they feel they have been heard.”

The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point will go on from its high-profile launch on CBC’s Nature of Things to international distribution in markets ranging from Al Jazeera to broadcasters in Norway, Japan, Greece and Sweden. When the film reaches a global audience, ideally, more people around the world will understand the consequences of our oil-driven society.

“To me the issue is that we have gotten very used to the convenience of oil — when we pull up at the pump, we can’t see (and don’t care to see) the enormous ecological, social and economic factors at play,” observes Suzuki. “I hope this film helps show some of those costs to people around the world.”

But, at the end of the day, will anything in the sands change? global oil demand goes up by two per cent a year, reserves go down by seven per cent a year, and Alberta’s 176 billion proven barrels remain slated for development for 150 years. Production is set to triple by 2020. Some may adhere to the belief that we can “shut down the tar sands,” but most people think that is impossible.

Even if America turns its back on Canada’s oil, there are plenty more that will take it: China, Thailand and India are all fuelling their conversion to western-style economies with our dirty oil. And there are resources like this all over the world—tar sands in the Congo, Madagascar and Venezuela, oil shale in the U.S., Australia and China, just to name a few. “As a civilization of oil consumers, we are standing at a crossroads,” says Thompson. “We are at a tipping point—the tar sands may just be the beginning.”

But as dreary as this could sound, there are still reasons not to despair, says Suzuki.

“The enormous success of our species is attributable to our foresight — our ability to look ahead and imagine a world as it would be, avoiding dangers and exploiting opportunities,” he contends. “No other animal has the ability to invent a future and then work to achieve it. Though now we are turning our backs on the very survival strategy of our species, i don’t think anyone can say it is too late. If we work hard to give nature some room and some time, she might be far more forgiving than we deserve.”

‘We felt the best thing was to give these victims the chance to appeal to the Quebec government as human beings, face to face,’ says Laurie Kazan-Allen, founder of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat based in London, one of a number of advocacy groups that provided financial support to help the delegation make the trip to Canada.

Among those victims was Jeong-Rim Lee, suffering from mesothelioma, an incurable and fatal cancer of the lining of the lungs which she developed after living near a factory which used the material in South Korea. You can listen to an interview with her and another delegate, Anup Srivasta, on CBC radio here.

As Asian delegates met with Canadian officials and journalists in Quebec and Ottawa, the IBASheld a small protest in front of the Canadian High Commission in London, England, while anti-asbestos groups held their own protests in Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, London, Mumbai, Delhi, and outside Canadian diplomatic offices around the world.

There is now barely a week remaining before the Quebec government decides whether or not to guarantee a $58 million loan to the Jeffrey Mine – the announcement is set to be made between 20 and 30 December. This would occur during the annual low point in media activity – hardly a coincidence, say critics.

The possible reviving of the mine – one of the last remaining in Canada – has incited anger and controversy all year. Demonstrations like last week’s were seen in front of Canadian consulates worldwide on Canada day, 1 July, in the hopes that the country would finally cease exporting the mineral and funding the ‘scientific’ studies that support its use. In August this year it seemed that the mine was certain to close, but then in September the owner was given a $3.5 million line of credit by the Quebec government to allow the mine to operate long enough to court new investors.

Investors were found, and if the Quebec government matches their financing with a $58 million loan, the mine will expand and increase its output ten-fold up to 250,000 tonnes a year – roughly a tenth of all global trade. For the next quarter century Canada would continue to export asbestos to China, India, and other fast-growing economies in the Global South.

The key word is ‘export’: the Canadian government does not allow the mineral to be used in construction projects in its own country. Though Canada (and other developed nations) once used various forms of the mineral in thousands of applications, almost every white fibre is now exported.

The World Health Organization estimates that asbestos is responsible for one in three work-related cancers worldwide – a sad truth that is unlikely to change, given that more than 120 million people are still exposed every single day at work around the globe. All forms of asbestos are carcinogenic, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and there is no ‘safe limit’ for exposure.

Yet the Chrysotile Institute, based in Montreal, promotes white asbestos as ‘safe for use under controlled circumstances’ – a claim ridiculed by all medical experts, including the Canadian Medical Association, which describes this as a ‘shameful political manipulation of science’. The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet drew attention to Canadian ‘hypocrisy’ last week.

Just days now remain before the announcement is made. ‘This really is the last stand,’ says Kazan-Allen.