I think I’ve always been an artist, since I was maybe two years old; it was the language that I knew, that I could communicate, though not to many people. But my mother was a biologist and my family are all scientists—my daughter is a scientist, my brother is a scientist. So, to me, science is magic, and of course it has changed enormously, particularly in the past 15 years, so it’s like a completely new language. But I think there’s been a fascination for me in what’s happening to our species and particularly since CRISPR [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a bacterial defence system at the heart of a form of genome editing technology] and since the genome was programmed, and the choices that we have now, it seemed like this was one of the more important elements of our human condition, and really the condition of all living things. So that’s what interested me in it…
The Brooklyn Rail