RPC: Transformation
2022
When I saw Rosa transforming bacteria wearing green gloves, I realized that she could be portrayed "as is," without inventing anything: the colors, lighting, reflections, and reflected light from the red floor all added up to an interesting portrait. But as I approached completion, I realized that apart from the aesthetic image, I didn't see any meaning in it comparable to what I had put into the previous works in this series. But maybe it's just enough if it is pretty? Here, RPC performs bacterial transformation. The ability of bacteria to uptake foreign DNA, i.e. be transformed, was first shown by Griffith in 1928 and interpreted by Avery, McLeod, and McCarty in 1944. Frederick Griffith's experiment was elegant: he had two pneumococcal strains, one was rough and harmless, but the other smooth one was virulent. He injected them in mice and obviously, the mice infected with the virulent one died of pneumonia, but not those injected with the nonvirulent strain. If he killed the virulent bacteria with heat, they could not infect the mice. However, when he injected mice with a mixture of living nonvirulent bacteria and killed virulent bacteria, the mice died. Griffith could isolate both strains from the blood of the dead mice. He concluded that the harmless strain acquired something, the "transforming principle", from the corpses of the virulent bacteria and became virulent itself. This something was later identified as DNA. Molecular biologists further adapted bacterial transformation as an easy tool to amplify DNA sequences of interest. In nature, it is a form of horizontal gene transfer between microorganisms, contributing to their diversity and evolution. And their ability to kill us, of course.
Watercolor, 32x46 cm.