[LINK] "The Quest for Drosophila Titanus or astrobiologatus"

[rfmcdonald]

I can't help but think that hobbyists' breeding of extremophile life for extraterrestrial environments--like Titan, with its cryogenic atmosphere and water cycle with water substituted for by hydrocarbons--would do best to wait a couple of decades for biotechnology to advance. Still, why not start now? The New Scientist's CultureLab blog interviews British artist Andy Gracie, whose project The Quest for Drosophila Titanus or astrobiologatus--part of the touring exhibition Republic of the Moon, sadly touring only the United Kingdom--seeks to selectively breed a fly capable of surviving on Titan.

Why breed a fly that can survive on Titan?

Although Titan is hostile to life, until last week - with the discovery of a potentially habitable exoplanet - it was the most Earth-like place that we know of. And in about three to four billion years, the Sun will expand so much that Earth will become uninhabitable, but perhaps then it might warm up Titan sufficiently to make it an environment in which extreme forms of life could survive.

The fruit fly, or Drosophila , is an iconic organism in biology. It is the field’s model organism - it’s had its genome sequenced and countless other experiments done on it so it is an organism we know almost as well as a machine. Humans share a huge percentage of our genome with the fruit fly so experiments on them give us clues to how humans might respond.

How did you recreate the conditions on Titan?

The air pressure on Titan is fifty percent higher than on Earth so I used a bicycle pump and pressure gauge to increase the pressure in the chamber to 21.2 bar. That was probably the most authentic recreation of the conditions. Titan is a frosty -190 degrees but it would have been pointless exposing flies to that temperature as they would all die. Instead the idea is to use freezer elements to take down the temperature a few degrees at a time and try to selectively breed for resistance to low temperatures. The radioactive element from a smoke alarm simulated the radiation found on the moon and a series of UV LEDs represented the harsh UV rays that rain down.

There were a couple of constants - Titan has a deep orange sky so I used orange LEDs to recreate the spectral qualities. Low frequency radiowaves also seem to emanate from Titan, so I used audio from Jupiter and Saturn radio emissions to represent this.

How did you select the flies to survive?

The flies were kept in a cylindrical experimentation chamber and exposed to these different conditions sequentially for half an hour at a time. The males and females were separated and both went through the entire sequence of experiments. Afterwards if there was only one left, I choose that one to breed from. If there were several then I chose the ones that seemed to be the most active or the most unaffected by the experiments.

I am also interested in process of selection itself, not only in terms of choosing which fly to breed from but also the politics and social science behind how we choose who goes into space. I was influenced by Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff, and subsequent film. The idea is that the astronaut should be the perfect physical and political specimen. You had to be the right kind of person, have the right attitude - be a good family man, citizen, American - as well as having had a distinguished military career to be chosen. I wanted to play on the idea of a fly having the “right stuff”. In a way, the fruit flies become the potential astronauts that we can’t, they are our proxies.

Gracie acknowledges that using vodka as a substitute for methane is a stop-gap. Still, wouldn't it be funny if this line of flies actually left descendants which saw the Titanian surface?