Compiled by George Gessert, November 1996, Updated January 2005 and changed by Anje Roosjen (Dutch publications are added)

Lori Andrews, The Clone Age. (New York: Holt and Co., 1999) Exact figures aren't available, but probably more than a million people living today were conceived in petri dishes. Some of these people were carried by surrogate mothers. Some have as many as five parents (a genetic father and mother, a birth mother, and a social mother and father). A few may have been conceived by sperm from dead men. What are the social and legal implications? Lori Andrews, who is a professor of law, and advisor on genetic and reproductive technology to Congress and the World Health Organization, surveys the terrain in this lively book sprinkled with real-life stories.

Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin, The Molecular Gaze (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004). A handsomely produced book on contemporary art that engages genetics. The text explores the cultural meanings that DNA, genes, chomosomes, birth, and the manipulation of life have acquired. The book is strong on representational work done in traditional media, but weak on live art. A valuable book for its numerous illustrations, most in color.

Rosa Beddington, "Cloning" online available

Henriette Bout (Rathenau Instituut), 'Allemaal klonen: feiten, meningen en vragen over klonen" 1998, uitgeverij Boom

Annick Bureaud, "The Ethics and Aesthetics of Biological Art", Art Press, 276, February, 2002. Paris, France. Biological art is bewilderingly diverse. Bureaud discusses shared characteristics of biological art, and observes that this art "generates two main types of discourse ... technical discourse ... and [more frequently] social, political and ethical" discourse. The essay appears in "Art bio(techno)logique", a special section of Art Press devoted to biological and genetic art.

Critical Art Ensemble, "Flesh Machine", 1998. About Cyborgs, designer babies and new eugenetic consiousness. online available

Ernestine Daubner, "Manipulating Genetic Identities: The creation of Chimeras, Cyborgs, and (Cyber-)Golems " Parachute 105, Winter 2002, Montreal, Canada. pp. 84--91. Jargonless discussion of Eduardo Kac's work and Sonya Rapoport's response to "Genesis " in "Redeeming the Gene, Molding the Golem, Folding the Protein".

José van Dijck, "Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent. Debating the New Reproductive Technologies". New York: New York University Press, 1995

José van Dijck, "ImagEnation. Popular Images of Genetics". New York: New York University Press, 1998.

José van Dijck, "Het Transparante Lichaam. Medische Visualisering in Media en Cultuur". Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001.

Eric Drexler, "Engines of creation, the coming era of nanotechnology", 1986 Oxford University Press (ISBN 9780192861498)

Vilem Flusser, "Curie's Children," Art Forum Vol. 26, No. 7 (1988) and Vol. 27, No. 2 (1988). Speculation about possible uses of biotechnology by artists.

Francis Fukuyama, Posthuman Society, 2002

Jens Hauser, ed. L'Art Biotech. Catalog. (Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France, 2003). Catalog to the first show of biotechnological art that consisted predominately of living work. This catalog has 31 pages of illustrations, and essays by Jens Hauser, Vilem Flusser, Symbiotica, Eduardo Kac, George Gessert, Marion Laval-Jeantet, Joe Davis, Marta de Menezes, Yves Michaud, and Richard Hoppe-Sailer. 94 pp. In French.

Eve Hoffman, The Secret. (New York: Public Affairs, 2002.) In Hoffman's novel, a young woman named Iris discovers that she is a clone. She reacts by leaving her mother and embarking on a journey of discovery. She visits the laboratory where she was created, confronts the scientist who cloned her, reconnects with her grandparents (who are genetically her parents), and discovers the uses of sex. All this takes place in a near-future that is very much like the present.
Iris feels that she is unnatural, a "ludicrous joke. All in all, Iris presents powerful evidence against human cloning: it won't produce baby Hitlers or perfect soldiers, just emotional cripples. Hoffman suggests that the social agreements and belief systems that will allow human beings to create themselves in laboratories will cause people to see themselves as matter embedded in matter, as highly complex expressions of an unliving universe. This is hardly a new vision, but one that has been around since Descartes was humanized by lingering Judeo-Christian culture.

Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles. (Original in French. English translation by Frank Wynne, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.) A genetic engineer and his brother are the two main characters in this story about what happens when nuclear families break down into their components. None of the human particles that result have strong obligations to anyone else, least of all to parents or children. There is abundant, blackly humorous sex, most of which is masturbatory, which is appropriate since masturbation is the sexual mode of individualism carried to its extreme. The genetic engineer's longterm solution to his and society's problems is as shocking as the solution in Russ's The Female Male.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. This is the only work from the preWorld War II culture of genetics that is well-known today. Huxley’s dystopia is eerily attractive. Elimination of inheritable disease, prolonged youth, end to class war, disappearance of sexual repression, freedom from pregnancy and childbirth, pornography as the highest art, the road to biological totalitarianism may be through fulfilled desires.

Bill Joy, "Why the future doensn't need us", Wired April 2000, online available

Eduardo Kac. "GPF Bunny" in Leonardo, vol. 36, no. 2, 2003. Alba, the rabbit that fluoresces green in blue light, is the best known work of transgenic art in the world - even though only a few people have seen her. Before passing judgment on this project, read what the artist has to say.

Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics. (New York, Knopf, 1985) Probably the best history of eugenics, especially as it developed in the the United States and Britain. Kevles covers the origins of eugenics, and traces the rise of what he calls the "mainline" movement, which mixed racism and class biases with weak science, championed sterilization laws in the US, and inspired the Nazis. Kevles also discusses why eugenics was taken up by many women and some socialists, and how dissenting eugenicists, such as Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane and Hermann Muller, attempted to rescue eugenics from the mainline movement. The final sections of the book follow post-World War II developments.

Tran T. Kim-Trang and Karl Mihail, "Gene Genies Worldwide." Leonardo, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2003. A statement about the artists' projects that explore the "conjunction of genetic engineering and consumer culture."

Ellen Levy, ed., "Contemporary Art and the Genetic Code," special issue of Art Journal Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring 1996). Texts by Ellen Levy, Suzanne Anker, Kevin Clarke, Agnes Denes, David Kremers, Stephen J. Gould, Dorothy Nelkin, Joe Davis, and others.

Ellen Levy, “The Genome and Art: Finding Potential in Unlikely Places,” Leonardo, Vol 34, No.2, 2001. Reflections on repetitive sequences of DNA, “junk” DNA, and its resonance with art.

Bill McKibben, "Enough",New York, Henry Holt, 2003. America has never had much of a public discussion about biotechnology. For this to happen we would need good critics of biotechnology, among other things. With this book McKibben replaced Jeremy Rifkin as biotechnology's best-known US critic. Unfortunately, like Rifkin's books on biotechnology, Enough is simplistic. It is written in soundbites and is full of dubious assumptions, for example that germline engineering will turn people into meaningless robots. However, Enough is worth reading anyway, partly because McKibben does provide some reminders of why we should look before we leap (or rather, why we shouldn't passively allow industry and science to determine our fates), and partly because Enough's failings sketch the contours of common ignorance.

Daniel Pinchbeck, "Genetic Aesthetics," in World Art No. 2 (1995). Response to "Gene Culture" show organized by Suzanne Anker at Fordham University.

Jeremy Rifkin, "The Biotech Century" (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1998). Rifkin is one of the best-known critics of biotechnology in the United States. Of particular interest to artists is Rifkin's concern that living art may be used to promote less attractive aspects of biotechnology. David Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984).

Joanna Russ, "The Female Man". (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975 ). In literature and myth there is a long history of all-female worlds, but even in Valerie Solanas's original The Scum Manifesto, men were always necessary, if only as sperm donors. Russ was the first writer to explore the possibility, presented by the biological revolution, that male humans could be dispensed with altogether. She imagines a way to deliberately exterminate half of the human race, and good riddance, since male Homo sapiens (including children) in The Female Man have no redeeming qualities. Russ takes the war of the sexes to a new low. This masterwork of genocidal hatred is an important example of how the biological revolution can change imagination, and could change everything else.

Huub Schellekens en R.P.W. Visser, "De genetische manipulatie", 1987 Meulenhoff.

Paul Shepard, "The Others" (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996). Argues that humans cannot breed animals with sufficient subtlety to compete esthetically, or in most other ways, with nature. Powerful statement of cultural and spiritual issues in animal breeding.

Lee M. Silver, "Remaking Eden". (New York: Avon, 1997) Granted, Lee Silver can be offensive. He indulges in social Darwinism, seems incapable of imagining any alternatives to corporate America, and has a weakness for grandiose pronouncements like "We, as human beings, have tamed the fire of life." Still, Remaking Eden is essential reading for anyone interested in how genetic engineering is likely to be applied to humans. Silver, who teaches molecular biology at Princeton, gives concise, lucid accounts of cloning, IVF, and other new techniques of reproduction. His discussion of ethical and social considerations is wide-ranging, but at times insufficiently nuanced to do full justice to the issues. He skewers the gobbledegook at the heart of Catholic, Evangelical, and other major religious perspectives on what it is to be human. And he soars when he envisions the distant future. After several centuries of corporate struggles for profits from the human genome, he sees our species splitting into two, then four, and finally millions of species. Silver looks hard at the technological and social implications of the human drive to reproduce, but he is weaker on other human drives.

Olaf Stapleton, Last and First Men (Originally published in 1931; reissued by Dover, 1968). A vision of extraordinary scope, reaching a billion years into the future. At one point humans turn the biosphere into a gigantic art-driven evolutionary experiment. More relevant than most of today's science fiction.

Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf, eds., LifeScience, Ars Electronica 99 (Vienna and New York: Springer, 1999). Proceedings of a major conference on the cultural implications of biotechnology. Scientists and academicians predominate in the proceedings, but artists are well represented. Articles by Jeremy Rifkin, Lori Andrews, Herbert Gottweis, Manuel DeLanda, Dorothy Nelkin, Charles Mudebe and many others, and a range of art, including works by Gail Wight, Eduardo Kac, Tran. T. Kim-Trang and Karl Mihail. In German and English.

Tijdschrift voor Humanistiek nr 18, 05.09.04 "Genomics en Democratie".

Time archive on cloning: included in issues 17.05.04, 23.02.04, 13.01.03, 25.02.02, 19.02.01, 25.03.00, 11.01.99, 03.08.98, 09.02.98, 10.03.97, 08.11.93.

H.G.Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Nightmare vision, written in 1896, but contemporary fears are much the same.

E.O. Wilson "Biophilia "(Cambridge, MA; Harvard Univ. Press, 1984). Biophilia suggests that there is a genetic basis for at least some kinds of esthetic perception. A very important theoretical work for artists, especially those working on biological issues.

Stephen Wilson, Information Arts. (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass. and London England, 2002) Wilson presents a valuable summary of genetic art and related work in this 945-page survey of art on the frontier between art and science. Information Art contains sections titled “Artists Working with Microbiology”, “Plants and Animals”, “Ecological Art”, and “Body and Medicine”. The book also includes a wealth of material on artificial life.

Amy M. Youngs, "The Fine Art of Creating Life," Leonardo Vol. 33, No. 5 (2000). Youngs makes connections between artificial life and biological networks.

Adam Zaretsky, "Viva Vivo! Living Art is Dead" Leonardo, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2004. Much needed comic relief.

Updated 12 January 2005

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