Retro 7 Cannes

Day Seven Tuesday May 31

I am on another train between Vienna and Linz. I have just received the interview material from the two girls who have been hanging around room 50 in the Natural History Museum at the Synth-Ethic exhibition.

It is my second trip from Vienna to Linz since Saturday. The first trip was my return journey from Cannes Mandelieu in southern France, where I had attended at an ESF meeting of the EUROSYNBIO projects. My boss and I had arranged a World Café on societal issues and the communication of the synthetic biology projects.

My favourite presentation at the meeting was Cees Dekker’s investigations on cell division of bacteria under physical stress. 

In addition to nice scientific lectures and poster presentations I enjoyed the local atmosphere very much. On the first day I managed to visit the castle of Mary and Henry Clews at La Napoule. He did things like this.

More interestingly, there were several exhibits at the castle that showed hybrids of humans and animals. Mister Clews seemed to be a rather eccentric artist, a monarchist and a clear opponent of scientists, the establishment and of feminism. However his artwork, especially his later period is rather interesting.

From science to art let us get back to my ideas. When I studied Bartletts “Remembering” I came upon his serial reproduction of drawings of an owl that after several generations turned into a cat, which is the animal we are much more familiar with. The most fascinating stages of this process are the ones in the middle, where people draw some sort of proto-animal. This leads to the question of the core of information, similar to the core of social representations. Is there some kind of minimal information that transports the fact that it is the drawing of an animal and not just a spot of paint on a sheet of paper?

Could there be an analogy in other forms of communication?

Up to what stage does this proto information persist before it is turned into something new, more detailed or entirely different?

Maybe a closer look at the data of serial reproduction studies can shed light on these questions. 

While I travel peacefully between the capital of Austria and the capital of Upper Austria, some E.Coli strains haunt Germany and even more so they haunt the international media. The big advantage of all this seems to be that you can get fresh tomatoes, cucumber and other vegetables rather cheap.

The war in Libya rages on and I prepare to leave Europe for the first time in my life to go to Stanford for the Synthetic Biology 5.0 conference. Tomorrow I will need some meditation.