The man in the bow tie says he can transform you into anyone you want. At the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, California, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats is applying his ‘experimental philosophy’ to epigenetics, one of the hottest and most rapidly advancing fields in biology. The art exhibit opened this weekend. Billing himself as a ‘dispensing epigeneticist’, Keats explained the logic behind his services: organisms are similar genetically. It’s epigenetics — control over how genes are turned on and off — that matters, and gene expression is determined by the environment. Therefore, by simulating key environmental factors, one can perform what Keats calls epigenetic cloning, a transformation without handling any DNA.
View the original article here: Epigenetics inspires philosophical experiments – Nature.com (blog)