Notes from the Studio: Jewelry Experiments and the Intersection of Science and Design

I’m feeling a little stressed right now, so I’m using my blog as a pacifier. It’s just that I had so many plans this weekend but apparently my body needed to rest, so I slept most of the weekend. Now it’s Sunday, and I have internal and external deadlines to meet, so off I go.

Sometimes it feels like my art studio is more of a laboratory. I say to myself, I wonder what would happen if I used this avocado pit in jewelry rather than throw it away. Then I say to myself, hey what’s inside that avocado pit? I wonder what would happen if I sawed it in half. Hey! What if I drilled holes in half? At times, being an artist provides me with all the benefits and wonder of childhood.

So, last week I picked up the new issue of Seed Magazine. Apparently SEED is a science magazine. But in this particular issue they are exploring the collaboration of scientists and designers. Right now I’m reading an article about Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art and Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry. In the article, Design and the Elastic Mind Antonelli posits that the “emerging dialogue between design and science…play[s] a fundamental role” in the advancement of society. More specifically, discoveries in science and technology provide opportunities for advancement of the human species and designers make those discoveries understandable and palatable to the world. (I would add that journalists and the media also play a significant role in contextualizing these discoveries in ways that helps the global society adapt to change).

But the article I am most stoked about is Peter Ward’s Big Idea that the production of hydrogen sulfide, H₂S, in our bodies is a possible biological scar that provides evidence on how our proto-mammal ancestors survived periods of extreme environmental changes that resulted in the mass extinction of other species. It’s a fascinating read especially the part where [this part is not suitable for Vegans...please start humming until it's over] Ward’s theory builds upon Mark Roth’s experiments in which Roth exposed lab mice to small doses of H₂S. The hydrogen sulfide puts the mice in a state of suspended animation with very slow or no heartbeats, enabling the mice to survive cool temperatures that would normally kill them.

Last September the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote a story on Roth’s $500,000 award of the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur genius grant for Roth’s H₂S research. It was back in 2005 that Roth’s work came to international attention, and since then he’s been working with Ikaria, a private firm that developed from the research at Fred Hutch, as well as the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

What this means is Mark Roth has found a way to cheat death, and for the past three years he’s been duplicating his experiments on other mammals. His work is being produced in the context of advancing trauma medicine but you have to know that eventually, if he conducts successful human experiments, death, as we know it will become a thing of the past. I wonder what Juan Ponce de León is thinking right about now.

(Media credits: Design and the Elastic Mind video, courtesy of Coolhunting at Youtube, Dr. Mark Roth courtesy of MSNBC).