Truth, Beauty and the Double Helix.(DNA-related art)

Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles is author of the forthcoming "Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space." Daniel J. Kevles is Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.

It's pitch black and framed in gold, but it's undoubtedly a mirror. When you stand in front of it, you expect to see what you'd see in any mirror: an image that conforms more or less to what you think you are. In recent years, though, our ideas about what we are have changed dramatically, in no small part because of our awareness of DNA. The average museum goer, for instance, probably knows that humans and chimpanzees differ by only a handful of genes. It still comes as a surprise to realize that the creature staring back at you has your face superimposed on a chimpanzee's body. But the shock is mild. After a momentary giddiness, you see the joke: the chimp is sitting, chin in hand, in the pose of Rodin's "The Thinker."

Artist Justen Ladda's chimp mirror is part of "How Human: Life in the Post-Genome Era," an exhibit at the International Center of Photography in New York. It is one of several similar exhibits opening in the next few weeks in New York and London that celebrate the 50th anniversary, on Feb. 28, of the discovery of the DNA double helix. Artists aren't often called upon to commemorate a scientific event, but this was something extraordinary. When James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins discovered that DNA is shaped like a twisted ladder (the double helix), they took the first big step toward deciphering the blueprint for life's mechanism. Since then DNA has become the core of a technology that has profoundly changed how we think about ourselves, our culture and our power over nature. And the double helix has become a cultural icon.

A 2000 show of DNA-related art was largely polemical--paintings condemning genetically modified foods--and about as subtle as a baseball bat. The art in these current exhibits shows how ambivalent, but also nuanced, our attitudes toward genetics have become. The current work, which involves dozens of artists from Japan, China, Brazil, Germany, Britain, Switzerland and Canada, as well as the United States, reflects a greater appreciation of the advantages of the DNA revolution--DNA testing, for instance, which has exonerated innocent people on death row. Almost all the work is understated, yet startling, in its social and moral content. Much of it will provide a sobering counterpoint to the proclamations of benefits sure to accompany the anniversary festivals. Some of the work displays simply the beauty of form and color.

DNA is, in a sense, a modernist molecule. Relying on just two pairs of chemical letters to encode and convey all of an organism's hereditary information, it exquisitely matches form to function. The information is encrypted by the sequence of the base pairs, which form the rungs of the twisted ladder. When a cell divides, the double helix's strands separate from each other, each taking one base in each pair; the strands then form two new double helixes with the same sequence of letter pairs and thus the same hereditary information.

A number of the current works comment on this beauty through familiar images. Swiss artist Hans Danuser, for instance, uses a silver-gelatin print to capture a human embryo, immensely magnified, in deep freeze. It is tiny yet vital amid swirling clouds reminiscent ...