Reflection on London trip...

From the trip to the Wellcome venue, I took a good amount of pictures to help me with my ideas for my F.M.P. I tired to take pictures that covered quite a few concepts on DNA, and not cornering just one topic. On the floor above from the 8 rooms was another exhibit to do with DNA.

There was a section about obesity, and this model above was what blew me away the most in that section. It was very disgusting to look at, with the over grown body and the red spots that covered it. It was titled, 'I can't help the way I feel', explaining that the '...work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface.' The body acts as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. By John Isaacs.

Different installments were added in the exhibition, including 3D sculptures to an animation about evolution, consisting of the stages of a monkey transforming into a man. This installment of a basic DNA structure was very interesting to look at, as it glowed with a florescent red light.

The Library of the Human Genome

These volumes contained a complete copy of the human genetic sequence and as you can see for yourself, that's a LOT of data. The text in the books was just made up of four letters. The letters represent the four chemical building blocks of DNA that make up the 'recipe' to build and operate a person. The DNA in every cell is spilt into pieces called chromosomes. These are numbered in size from 1 to 22, except the sex chromosomes, called X and Y. The sequence is a composite, sampled from a few people. If your DNA is compared with the 3000 million letters in the volumes, there will be about ten million differences!

Some pages in those volumes contain the letter 'n'. where the DNA has structures or sequences that make it impossible for modern tech. to read it properly, which means the full sequence hasn't even been decoded yet.

There was also information about cloning, where there was showcased some poop from Dolly the Sheep, and a big section on DNA testing. That was interesting and very education, as I learned how people can take a DNA sample of themselves and decode their DNA to tell them what their background consists of. We learned how DNA can be helpful in things like crime solving, and also being able to tell if two people are related or not by DNA comparison.