“The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures”*…
Dublin MtDNA Haplogroup: H2a+152 (Likely ancestry 25% European) SRY Gene: absent Gender: Female rs12913832: AG Eye Color: 56% chance of brown eyes; 37% chance of green eyes; 7% chance of blue eyes. rs4648379: CC Typical nose size rs6548238: CC Typical odds for obesity
In Stranger Visions artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of biological surveillance. Designed as an exploratory project based on emerging science, the forecast of Stranger Visions has proved prescient. For an example of DNA phenotyping at work in forensics check out the companies Parabon NanoLabs and Identitas and read about their collaboration with the Toronto police. Also see Mark Shriver’s research at Penn State on predicting faces from DNA…
New York City MtDNA Haplogroup: L2a1 (Likely ancestry 25% African) SRY Gene: present Gender: Male rs12913832: AA Eye Color: Brown rs4648379: CC Typical nose size rs6548238: CC Typical odds for obesity
More at “Artist Recreates Strangers’ Faces From Discarded DNA.”
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As we strike a pose, we might send twisted birthday greetings to Francis Harry Compton Crick; he was born on this date in 1916. A biochemist and biophysicist, Crick shared (with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins– but not, surely unjustly, with Rosalind Franklin) the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the determination of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical substance ultimately responsible for hereditary control of life functions– a cornerstone of genetics, widely regarded as one of the most important discoveries of 20th-century biology.
