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The lives of Berlin
DISSECTING ROOM
The scientist’s new clothes A Genomic Portrait: Sir John Shulston by Marc Quinn A portrait on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, showing until Feb 10, 2002.
T
need to see what the subject looks like, the physical features and characteristics that define a sitter’s personality, not only an idea that requires explanation.
National Portrait Gallery
he National Portrait Gallery has unveiled its first conceptual portrait, a work by Marc Quinn using the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of Sir John Shulston, former Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre, Cambridge, who led the UK effort to produce a working draft of the human genome. The size of an upright postcard, the portrait was made with standard laboratory methods for cloning DNA. Shulston’s DNA was broken randomly into segments, which were treated so that they could be replicated in bacteria. The portrait is composed of many spots, each of which is a colony grown from a single bacterial cell containing a segment of DNA. It is framed in highly reflective metal, which the still photographers and television camera crews at the press view used to capture a reflection of Shulston, looking at his genomic portrait. This was strong evidence that picture and news editors wanted their readers and viewers to be able to see Shulston himself, as well as segments of his DNA amplified in the laboratory. When it comes to portraiture, we
Marc Quinn DNA Portrait of Sir John Shulston (with Sir John Shulston reflected in frame)
The lives of Berlin Berlin: a Modern History David Clay Large. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2001. Pp 736. £25.00. ISBN 0713994045. eople keep mislaying things in Berlin, even the city itself. Every European city offers the historian a biography, but the history of Berlin since 1870—as recounted in David Clay Large’s compendium of a book— extends into the realm of sometimes nightmarish archaeology too. Scene 1. A couple of weeks ago I stood with my son flying his kite on the top of a large sandy hill in the Grunewald area, between Berlin and Potsdam. The hill is called Teufelsberg. The only incline for miles, it offers a superb vantage point across the city. But Devil’s Mountain is no ordinary hill: pipes, bricks, tiles, and other detritus can be seen poking out from beneath its sand and scrub. This 120-metre-high heap is in fact all that remains of prewar Berlin; this is the city carted away brick by brick at war’s end by the famous “rubble women”.
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1560
Scene 2. In Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire (1987), an old man potters across a desert in the heart of the city. He can be heard to mutter, “It must be here somewhere. I can’t find the Potsdamer Platz”. He was meandering over what had once been the city’s commercial hub. Hitler, who had big plans for Berlin once he had conquered Europe, ended his life in this spot: as a troglodyte. In 1953, East German workers confronted Soviet tanks on the same stretch of ground, and Brecht wrote (but did not publish) his famous poem about the government that ought to dissolve the people and consider electing another. By the time Wenders came with his camera, the presence of the Wall nearby had turned the Potsdamer Platz back to what it had been before Bismarck made the city the capital of his united empire in 1871: sandy prairie.
Quinn argues that, although his portrait of Shulston seems abstract, it is the most “realist” in the gallery, because it carries the genetic instructions that created the sitter. “It is a portrait of his parents, and every ancestor he ever had back to the beginning of life in the universe”, he claims. Shulston’s comments are more measured: “The portrait contains a small fraction of my DNA, so it’s only a detail of the whole, though there is ample information to identify me”. He acknowledges that, although the source DNA for the portrait contains all his genes, it “is not me: it’s my starting point. If we were able to make another human being from this DNA we would have someone who looked a lot like me, but would be a different person because he would have his own experiences and thoughts as he grew up”. For a vivid depiction of scientists, visitors to the National Portrait Gallery need look no further than Antony Barrington Brown’s evocative 1953 photograph of Francis Crick and James Watson with their three-dimensional model of the DNA double helix, taken in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK. Quinn’s conceptual work cannot match the sheer human exuberance captured in Brown’s photographic portrait. Colin Martin 32 Woodstock Road, London W4 1UF, UK
The New Berlin. This stretch of waste ground is now Europe’s biggest construction site. The offices of multinationals like Sony and Daimler-Benz are now landmarks. The government complex slowly being erected around Norman Foster’s glass-domed Reichstag is flanked by new embassies built on the same imposing scale. Inside, graffiti from the Russian soldiers who occupied the building in 1945 have been preserved, recalling the violence of the past more effectively than any purposebuilt monument. Much of the new Berlin is now an “edge city”, one of those confections in steel and glass found the world over. Hitler’s Berlin. Hitler didn’t like Berlin, but he needed its bigness. With the help of Speer, his general inspector of buildings, he intended to transform it into a cultic city which, by 1950, would be able to hold the crowds whose arousal was the secret of his power. Germania was to have a new northsouth axis, a triumphal arch four times bigger than the one at the top of the Champs-Elysées and a central dome, the Kuppelberg, 16 times bigger than
THE LANCET • Vol 358 • November 3, 2001
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.
DISSECTING ROOM
St Peter’s. Other European West Berlin. After a collapse cities would become lilliputian so total it ended up as a hill, by comparison. Visiting the half its population dead or ruins of the Chancellery in dispersed, Berlin became late 1945, Stephen Spender extraterritorial. This was its noted the reams of building heroic age. The sense of going manuals above the Führer’s it alone was assisted by the bed. Hitler did not believe famous airlift (which was so in much, but he certainly successful some Berliners believed in architecture. started putting on weight), Hauptstadt Berlin. Many the visit of the young Augustus Germans have never liked of the new American age Berlin, finding it culturally (“I am a doughnut” he told parvenu and architecturally them, though nobody seemed preposterous—an attitude to mind), and the overnight that has never entirely disapconstruction in 1961 of the Hendrik Wittkopf Jadavpur peared. Seafaring Hamburgers 13-foot high “anti-fascist promocked it as an outpost on tection barrier”. Berlin never the pampas; ecclesiastically regained its industries, but it conservative Bavarians hated it for worship and urban modernity, knew became the free world’s vitrine. While being northern and Protestant. that the 20th century would be the communist east was grey, virtuous, Berliners responded with their famous dominated by technology. and drab, the other was subsidised blunt cheek, the Berliner Schnautze Weimar Berlin. After the chaos of by Bonn and rather self-conscious in (hence place-names such as Devil’s capitulation in 1918 came the Great its decadence. Draft-dodgers flocked Mountain). Disorder of 1922. Life in Berlin’s there, and it was an antiestablishment Wilhelmine Berlin. Even within streets began to dominate Fritz Lang’s cauldron. Being bohemian meant years of its inauguration in 1871, films, Brecht’s dramas of the “jungle dressing in black. Here was all the dark Berlin was an urban laboratory: it of the cities”, and the articles of Egon glamour of the 20th century, risk-free. was the world’s newspaper capital Erwin Kisch, the first journalist to But free Berlin won out in the end; an and home to its first fast-food chain turn the reporter into an entertaining ideology imploded, and an undefeated (Aschinger’s). It stood at the cutting crusader. Berlin could claim to be the army withdrew. edge of scientific progress: Koch, most artistically progressive city in Berlin Redux. Now Berlin has a Ehrlich, Planck, and Einstein made the world. Stresemann, Germany’s chance to be a normal city. Will it important scientific advances in Berlin, conciliatory foreign minister, son of be? David Clay Large thinks so, and despite their misgivings about the a Berlin innkeeper, was the first politiI would agree with him. What is a military’s grip on the academy. Indeed, cian to like the city: his death in normal city anyway? One whose heart Elektropolis, as it was known in the 1929 deprived the Republic of the one doesn’t need looking for. early 1900s, was a vanguard for the person who might have held it through Iain Bamforth ascension of the sciences over the older the terrible year of the Wall Street 86 rue Kempf, 67000 Strasbourg, humanistic disciplines; even the Kaiser, crash, which allowed the Nazis to France arbiter of Berlin’s odd blend of uniform make their bid for power.
Websites in brief Herbal therapies in focus Lancet reader Lorraine Anderson, a student at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Medical School in London, UK, wrote to tell us about her site, Herbal Triangle, which aims to document adverse reactions associated with herbal therapies. For each therapy, Anderson gives information on suggested uses and interactions reported to the site (using an online reporting system), along with Medline references. She hopes “to provide empirical evidence of which reactions may be anticipated” for specific herbals, similar to the British National Formulary yellow card system for pharmaceuticals (www.mca.gov.uk/ourwork/monitorsafequalmed/yellowcard/how.htm) . www.herbaltriangle.com
THE LANCET • Vol 358 • November 3, 2001
Biological agents alert The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took the unprecedented step of including an alert to health-care providers in the Oct 19, 2001, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The alert, “Recognition of illness associated with the intentional release of a biologic agent”, provides clinical features of illnesses caused by anthrax, plague, botulism, smallpox, inhalation tularaemia, and haemorrhagic fever. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ mm5041a2.htm Labour pain study launches Ohio University (Athens, OH, USA) researchers have launched a web-based study that aims to recruit thousands of women worldwide who have given birth or are pregnant. An online survey queries mothers and mothers-to-be about various pain-control techniques, including breathing exercises, epidurals, and other pain medications, meditation, and methods used to control
pain during labour and delivery. Findings on the extent of pain experienced and the perceived effectiveness of various pain-control techniques are expected to be released late next year. www.labourpain.org Cardiac pacing journal online Lancet reader Johnson Francis, assistant professor of cardiology at Calicut Medical College in Kerala, India, wrote to tell us about the online peer-reviewed journal, Indian Pacing and Electrophysiology. Francis and co-workers have put together an expert editorial advisory board on a subspecialty that, says Francis, has “very few” journals devoted to it. The site provides full-text articles from the current issue free of charge and guidelines for authors; submissions are encouraged. www.ipej.org Marilynn Larkin [email protected]
1561
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.
The scientist’s new clothes A Genomic Portrait: Sir John Shulston by Marc Quinn A portrait on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, UK, showing until Feb 10, 2002.
T
need to see what the subject looks like, the physical features and characteristics that define a sitter’s personality, not only an idea that requires explanation.
National Portrait Gallery
he National Portrait Gallery has unveiled its first conceptual portrait, a work by Marc Quinn using the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of Sir John Shulston, former Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre, Cambridge, who led the UK effort to produce a working draft of the human genome. The size of an upright postcard, the portrait was made with standard laboratory methods for cloning DNA. Shulston’s DNA was broken randomly into segments, which were treated so that they could be replicated in bacteria. The portrait is composed of many spots, each of which is a colony grown from a single bacterial cell containing a segment of DNA. It is framed in highly reflective metal, which the still photographers and television camera crews at the press view used to capture a reflection of Shulston, looking at his genomic portrait. This was strong evidence that picture and news editors wanted their readers and viewers to be able to see Shulston himself, as well as segments of his DNA amplified in the laboratory. When it comes to portraiture, we
Marc Quinn DNA Portrait of Sir John Shulston (with Sir John Shulston reflected in frame)
The lives of Berlin Berlin: a Modern History David Clay Large. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2001. Pp 736. £25.00. ISBN 0713994045. eople keep mislaying things in Berlin, even the city itself. Every European city offers the historian a biography, but the history of Berlin since 1870—as recounted in David Clay Large’s compendium of a book— extends into the realm of sometimes nightmarish archaeology too. Scene 1. A couple of weeks ago I stood with my son flying his kite on the top of a large sandy hill in the Grunewald area, between Berlin and Potsdam. The hill is called Teufelsberg. The only incline for miles, it offers a superb vantage point across the city. But Devil’s Mountain is no ordinary hill: pipes, bricks, tiles, and other detritus can be seen poking out from beneath its sand and scrub. This 120-metre-high heap is in fact all that remains of prewar Berlin; this is the city carted away brick by brick at war’s end by the famous “rubble women”.
P
1560
Scene 2. In Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire (1987), an old man potters across a desert in the heart of the city. He can be heard to mutter, “It must be here somewhere. I can’t find the Potsdamer Platz”. He was meandering over what had once been the city’s commercial hub. Hitler, who had big plans for Berlin once he had conquered Europe, ended his life in this spot: as a troglodyte. In 1953, East German workers confronted Soviet tanks on the same stretch of ground, and Brecht wrote (but did not publish) his famous poem about the government that ought to dissolve the people and consider electing another. By the time Wenders came with his camera, the presence of the Wall nearby had turned the Potsdamer Platz back to what it had been before Bismarck made the city the capital of his united empire in 1871: sandy prairie.
Quinn argues that, although his portrait of Shulston seems abstract, it is the most “realist” in the gallery, because it carries the genetic instructions that created the sitter. “It is a portrait of his parents, and every ancestor he ever had back to the beginning of life in the universe”, he claims. Shulston’s comments are more measured: “The portrait contains a small fraction of my DNA, so it’s only a detail of the whole, though there is ample information to identify me”. He acknowledges that, although the source DNA for the portrait contains all his genes, it “is not me: it’s my starting point. If we were able to make another human being from this DNA we would have someone who looked a lot like me, but would be a different person because he would have his own experiences and thoughts as he grew up”. For a vivid depiction of scientists, visitors to the National Portrait Gallery need look no further than Antony Barrington Brown’s evocative 1953 photograph of Francis Crick and James Watson with their three-dimensional model of the DNA double helix, taken in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK. Quinn’s conceptual work cannot match the sheer human exuberance captured in Brown’s photographic portrait. Colin Martin 32 Woodstock Road, London W4 1UF, UK
The New Berlin. This stretch of waste ground is now Europe’s biggest construction site. The offices of multinationals like Sony and Daimler-Benz are now landmarks. The government complex slowly being erected around Norman Foster’s glass-domed Reichstag is flanked by new embassies built on the same imposing scale. Inside, graffiti from the Russian soldiers who occupied the building in 1945 have been preserved, recalling the violence of the past more effectively than any purposebuilt monument. Much of the new Berlin is now an “edge city”, one of those confections in steel and glass found the world over. Hitler’s Berlin. Hitler didn’t like Berlin, but he needed its bigness. With the help of Speer, his general inspector of buildings, he intended to transform it into a cultic city which, by 1950, would be able to hold the crowds whose arousal was the secret of his power. Germania was to have a new northsouth axis, a triumphal arch four times bigger than the one at the top of the Champs-Elysées and a central dome, the Kuppelberg, 16 times bigger than
THE LANCET • Vol 358 • November 3, 2001
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.
DISSECTING ROOM
St Peter’s. Other European West Berlin. After a collapse cities would become lilliputian so total it ended up as a hill, by comparison. Visiting the half its population dead or ruins of the Chancellery in dispersed, Berlin became late 1945, Stephen Spender extraterritorial. This was its noted the reams of building heroic age. The sense of going manuals above the Führer’s it alone was assisted by the bed. Hitler did not believe famous airlift (which was so in much, but he certainly successful some Berliners believed in architecture. started putting on weight), Hauptstadt Berlin. Many the visit of the young Augustus Germans have never liked of the new American age Berlin, finding it culturally (“I am a doughnut” he told parvenu and architecturally them, though nobody seemed preposterous—an attitude to mind), and the overnight that has never entirely disapconstruction in 1961 of the Hendrik Wittkopf Jadavpur peared. Seafaring Hamburgers 13-foot high “anti-fascist promocked it as an outpost on tection barrier”. Berlin never the pampas; ecclesiastically regained its industries, but it conservative Bavarians hated it for worship and urban modernity, knew became the free world’s vitrine. While being northern and Protestant. that the 20th century would be the communist east was grey, virtuous, Berliners responded with their famous dominated by technology. and drab, the other was subsidised blunt cheek, the Berliner Schnautze Weimar Berlin. After the chaos of by Bonn and rather self-conscious in (hence place-names such as Devil’s capitulation in 1918 came the Great its decadence. Draft-dodgers flocked Mountain). Disorder of 1922. Life in Berlin’s there, and it was an antiestablishment Wilhelmine Berlin. Even within streets began to dominate Fritz Lang’s cauldron. Being bohemian meant years of its inauguration in 1871, films, Brecht’s dramas of the “jungle dressing in black. Here was all the dark Berlin was an urban laboratory: it of the cities”, and the articles of Egon glamour of the 20th century, risk-free. was the world’s newspaper capital Erwin Kisch, the first journalist to But free Berlin won out in the end; an and home to its first fast-food chain turn the reporter into an entertaining ideology imploded, and an undefeated (Aschinger’s). It stood at the cutting crusader. Berlin could claim to be the army withdrew. edge of scientific progress: Koch, most artistically progressive city in Berlin Redux. Now Berlin has a Ehrlich, Planck, and Einstein made the world. Stresemann, Germany’s chance to be a normal city. Will it important scientific advances in Berlin, conciliatory foreign minister, son of be? David Clay Large thinks so, and despite their misgivings about the a Berlin innkeeper, was the first politiI would agree with him. What is a military’s grip on the academy. Indeed, cian to like the city: his death in normal city anyway? One whose heart Elektropolis, as it was known in the 1929 deprived the Republic of the one doesn’t need looking for. early 1900s, was a vanguard for the person who might have held it through Iain Bamforth ascension of the sciences over the older the terrible year of the Wall Street 86 rue Kempf, 67000 Strasbourg, humanistic disciplines; even the Kaiser, crash, which allowed the Nazis to France arbiter of Berlin’s odd blend of uniform make their bid for power.
Websites in brief Herbal therapies in focus Lancet reader Lorraine Anderson, a student at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Medical School in London, UK, wrote to tell us about her site, Herbal Triangle, which aims to document adverse reactions associated with herbal therapies. For each therapy, Anderson gives information on suggested uses and interactions reported to the site (using an online reporting system), along with Medline references. She hopes “to provide empirical evidence of which reactions may be anticipated” for specific herbals, similar to the British National Formulary yellow card system for pharmaceuticals (www.mca.gov.uk/ourwork/monitorsafequalmed/yellowcard/how.htm) . www.herbaltriangle.com
THE LANCET • Vol 358 • November 3, 2001
Biological agents alert The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took the unprecedented step of including an alert to health-care providers in the Oct 19, 2001, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The alert, “Recognition of illness associated with the intentional release of a biologic agent”, provides clinical features of illnesses caused by anthrax, plague, botulism, smallpox, inhalation tularaemia, and haemorrhagic fever. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ mm5041a2.htm Labour pain study launches Ohio University (Athens, OH, USA) researchers have launched a web-based study that aims to recruit thousands of women worldwide who have given birth or are pregnant. An online survey queries mothers and mothers-to-be about various pain-control techniques, including breathing exercises, epidurals, and other pain medications, meditation, and methods used to control
pain during labour and delivery. Findings on the extent of pain experienced and the perceived effectiveness of various pain-control techniques are expected to be released late next year. www.labourpain.org Cardiac pacing journal online Lancet reader Johnson Francis, assistant professor of cardiology at Calicut Medical College in Kerala, India, wrote to tell us about the online peer-reviewed journal, Indian Pacing and Electrophysiology. Francis and co-workers have put together an expert editorial advisory board on a subspecialty that, says Francis, has “very few” journals devoted to it. The site provides full-text articles from the current issue free of charge and guidelines for authors; submissions are encouraged. www.ipej.org Marilynn Larkin [email protected]
1561
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.