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- Thank you for joining us for tonight's "After Dark Online" program, "Hacking the Human Genome." While we're taping tonight's program from different locations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I would like to begin the introduction by acknowledging that the home for this program, the Exploratorium, is on the traditional lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, and pay our respect to elders both past and present. My name is Kirstin Bach, and I'm interim director of arts at the Exploratorium. Art plays a very important role in all that we do at the museum. In our educational institution, the arts can provide an additional entry point to learning. Art can provoke, introduce a new language or way of investigation, leading the way to deep insight and greater understanding. In 1974, the Exploratorium established its Artist-in-Residence Program. Over the years, this program has provided a steady stream of artists, brought in to engage with Exploratorium staff and audiences to develop new projects. In the course of their work with us, artists lend their expertise and creativity to expand our thinking and our offerings to our audiences. Our Artists-in-Residence are often interdisciplinary thinkers working at the crossroads of art and science. This describes one of our speakers tonight, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who is a current Artist-in-Residence with us. In addition to being an artist, she's an educator and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. She was brought to the Exploratorium to participate as a thinking partner with a team of scientists, educators, and exhibit developers working on a new suite of permanent exhibits for our museum floor called "Cells to Self." These exhibits, featured in our Living Systems galleries, explore the nature and function of cells and how genetics and environment combine to create our amazing selves. A version of Heather Dewey's artwork, Heather Dewey-Hagborg's artwork, entitled "Probably Chelsea," made in collaboration with Chelsea Manning, is included in the Exploratorium "Cells to Self" collection. This work presents 20 diverse sculptural portraits based on one person's DNA information. Tonight, Heather is in conversation with Elizabeth Joh. Dr. Joh is a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. She has written widely about policing technology and surveillance. Her scholarship has appeared in the "Stanford Law Review," the "California Law Review," the "Northwestern University Law Review," the "Harvard Law Review Forum," and the "University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online." She's also provided commentary for the "Los Angeles Times," "Slate," and the "New York Times." In the conversation tonight you'll hear about Heather Dewey-Hagborg's art practice, and together, she and Elizabeth Joh will discuss the broader implications of our increasingly easy access to our genomic information. We hope you stick around after the conversation for the latest installment of our series "Resonance: Unheard Sounds, Undiscovered Music." This series is about music and sound created or captured in interesting and unusual ways by innovative artists in a variety of fields. Tonight's segment features artist and inventor Bryan Day who hacks common and found materials to fabricate one-of-a-kind sound sculptures. Playing these sculptural instruments, Bryan performs in a number of ensembles in the Bay Area and around the world. Tonight, he invites you into his studio for an intimate sound experience, but first, here's "Hacking the Human Genome" with Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Elizabeth Joh. "Probably Chelsea" shows us 30 different portraits that are all derived from Chelsea Manning's DNA, so it's 30 different interpretations of the same DNA data. In 2014, I was contacted by "PAPER" magazine. They were conducting an interview with Chelsea Manning through the mail, and so at this point, Chelsea could not be visited and could not be photographed, and this is why they had to have an interview through the mail and they were doing this interview, but they wanted some kind of picture to accompany it, and they contacted me because they'd seen my work working with strangers' DNA and creating these portraits from the profiles of strangers' DNA, and they thought, so could I take Chelsea's DNA and kind of sneak her image out of the prison? Chelsea took two Q-tips, and swabbed the inside of her mouth, and sent me hair clippings, and I walked through the same process I'd walked through with "Strangers" to create a genetic profile from these items, and then used that to algorithmically predict different possible portraits of what you might look like based on that extracted DNA data. Chelsea Manning is the U.S. whistleblower, who is known for making public the information that showed the prevalence and scope of civilian deaths and torture in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. I learned how to extract DNA in a community laboratory called Genspace in Brooklyn. What I usually do is go through this process of extraction, and then you choose which parts of the DNA you wanna look at and perform, it's called a polymerase chain reaction, so you amplify these subsections of DNA that you're interested in and then send those for sequencing, and then you get back basically a text file that tells you the A, T, C's and G's that are around this gene or region of interest, and from that, you can create a kind of genetic profile of what this person's DNA looks like at these different regions that you're interested in. The DNA profile is fed into this custom software that I wrote. The custom software predicts different possible faces, and then it's 3-D printed at the full life-size human scale in full color, so genomics is a predictive field. It's an attempt to make guesses about what kind of phenotype someone might have based on DNA. It's not ever a certainty, or really almost never at all a certainty. It creates this very open space and you might be able, for example, to predict that someone has a 70% chance of having blue eyes, but then they also have a 20% chance of having brown eyes, a 10% chance of having green eyes, and so in "Probably Chelsea", you can see that space kind of made physical, across many different traits. Profiling data is always subjective, so whether it's genetic data or some other kind of data, when you build up a data profile of someone, it's always this kind of act of shaping the data. When Obama commuted Chelsea's sentence, we had an exhibition to celebrate her release from prison, and that's where "Probably Chelsea" premiered. She came, and was able to see her portraits in person for the first time. It was really an amazing moment, so "Probably Chelsea" will be kind of front and center when you enter the "Cells to Self" exhibition. The faces will greet you, in a way, and invite you in, and hopefully, invite you into thinking deeply about genetics and your own identity. I hope that you'll walk up to these faces and identify with one of them, that there will be a face that you connect to and are drawn into, and that leads you to think, "That could be my DNA, "and how many different people are there in my DNA?" as well.

- Hello, I'm Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Thanks so much for having me today in conversation. I'll just start out by introducing myself a bit and sharing a very brief overview of my art practice with you, so my relationship with biotechnology as an artist began in about 2012, when I started collecting discarded cigarette butts, and bits of chewed up gum, and shed hairs from the streets, and public bathrooms, and waiting rooms of New York City. You might wonder why I was doing this, and it's because some years earlier I had had this kind of revelation where I was sitting in a therapy session, and I was looking at this print across from me on the wall, and I noticed that the glass covering the print was cracked, and so this hair stuck in the crack of the class, and I sat there for the therapeutic hour, and just started wondering about the person who'd left the hair behind, and started imagining what if I was this forensic scientist, and I took the hair, and brought it to a lab, and extracted DNA? What could I learn about this person? And that ended up becoming the project that is known as "Stranger Visions," where I really went around the city, and collected these forensic artifacts, and extracted DNA from them, and attempted to learn about the people who had left those things behind, and I did this as a way of calling attention to new modes of surveillance, to a kind of new availability of data about the body, about the most personal intimate parts of what makes you you in your DNA, so you can see in this picture, an image of what this looks like installed in a gallery, so these are several portraits derived from stranger's DNA, and are usually exhibited along with a kind of sample box that shows the original sample, and some data around what I learned about that person, and what I've inferred, and it's really a way of gaining a kind of intimacy with a stranger. I didn't think about it that way at the time, but now, when I look back on it, I realize that this was a very intimate process that I went through with these, with these kind of panels of strangers, and at the time, I was mostly interested in this idea of surveillance, of this new form of biological or DNA surveillance, and then something very surprising happened, so then, at the end of 2014, actually, a friend's mother sent me this picture that you see here, that she snapped from her local newspaper. This is a picture of a DNA mugshot, so this is actually published police work in a public newspaper, and if you take a close look at this phenotype report from the company, Parabon NanoLabs, kind of zoom into that, what you'll see is that they've created a picture of a white man and put that in the newspaper as the so-called DNA mugshot, and so suddenly, when this happened, I realized that I needed to kind of go into a self-critical mode with my own work, so I needed to take my work and use it to try to also critique some of the authority of this method of DNA phenotyping, this prediction of a face from nothing more than DNA, so I started writing, and talking about this in artist talks, and trying to get people to think more critically about what it means to predict a face from DNA, and kind of what you can and what you can't do from that, but I was struggling with figuring out how to make that visible, so going beyond just talking or writing, how to make it clear to people in the art itself, that there were limitations to the process of phenotyping, and then I just happened to receive this e-mail from "PAPER" magazine, and they were doing an interview with Chelsea Manning, the U.S. whistleblower, who was well-known for the information she made public exposing the civilian deaths and torture in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and they were conducting an interview with Chelsea through the mail because she couldn't be visited and she couldn't be photographed in prison, and they wrote to me, ad asked if I would make a DNA portrait of her, if I would, in a sense, smuggle her face out of prison, and I realized that this could be a very interesting opportunity to show, also, some of the limitations of DNA phenotyping because Chelsea is transgender, so this provided a kind of jumping-off point for thinking about the reductionism around biological sex, and so the next time that Chelsea was getting her hair cut, she picked up a few of the clippings, and then she took two Q-tips, and swabbed the insides of her mouth, and mailed those to me from the prison, and I took those items, and I went through the same DNA extraction protocols that I'd gone through with "Stranger Visions," with one crucial difference, which is that I left the category of biological sex out of the examination, and instead, what we decided was to create two portraits to represent Chelsea. One portrait would be androgynous, or gender neutral, and the other would be female, and if you look at these two faces, you can make a guess about which is which, but what I think you can see when you see the two faces side-by-side is, in a way, how creepy this kind of stereotyped ideal of what the female face is supposed to look like really is, and indeed, how much of a stereotype that is, so this was kind of the first attempt at questioning DNA phenotyping through the process of doing it, and to make a long story short, a couple of years later, we had the opportunity to take that even further, so two years later, to celebrate Chelsea Manning's release from prison, her commuted sentence by Barack Obama, we had an exhibition in New York City at the Fridman Gallery and created this collaborative work where I generated 30 different portraits of Chelsea Manning from the same DNA, and suspended them, as you can see here, in this array of faces hanging at different human heights within the gallery space, so you walk into the gallery, and you basically confront this crowd that are all different possible Chelsea Mannings, so they're all 30 of the different possibilities of what Chelsea might look like through different interpretations of her DNA, and this is the work that's on exhibition in the Exploratorium right now, and you might ask, "How is it possible "that there can be so many different reads "of this singular kind of data?" But it's because we're taught to think that DNA is very deterministic, but actually, most of what we don't know about DNA is probabilistic, so there's a lot of information about kind of correlations within DNA, statistical information, but it's not causal, so even if you look at something that's as well-established as eye color, as one of the best-established visible characteristics you still might have, for example, a 60% chance of having blue eyes, like Chelsea, and then a 30% chance of having brown eyes, and a 10% chance of having green eyes, so what the "Probably Chelsea" installation does is it gives space to these different, or kind of minor interpretations of the same data, and it brings home that it's always a form of creativity. It's almost always a form of storytelling, how you arrange and interpret the data and put it out there, so what I realized after working with Chelsea Manning's DNA and spending so much time looking at just this one person's data was that this was extremely intimate, and that was something I hadn't been thinking about before in my process. I'd been thinking about kind of the politics, and I'd been thinking about genetic determinism, but I hadn't been thinking about this new kind of very personal relationship that can form, for example, between a scientist and their subject, or between one person and another person through a distant kind of social media, medium, like a DNA social network, and I started probing into that more deeply with a project called "T3511," so in this project, I obtained a five-milliliter bottle of human saliva over the Internet. I sent it to 23andMe, and I got back a profile about this person, and then I used that as a kind of jumping-off point to envision what they might be like, so to look at all of these different kinds of traits that you get through 23andMe, things like whether you like cilantro or not, but also, of course, these traits around what you might look like, and whether you toss and turn in your sleep, and things like that, and I took that, and kind of turned it into a kind of poem, and made a film about a biohacker that falls in love with an anonymous saliva donor, so the story is kind of half true and half fiction, so it's based on real experiments that I did to see how possible it is to kind of hack samples that are fairly easily available over the Internet, and find out about a stranger that way, and then, it's also this kind of love story, so it's also kind of reading into that more, and interpreting more into the act, the everyday activities that happen inside of a laboratory as well, so here you can see some stills from "T3511," so you can see me in the lab working with the saliva and then, eventually, also growing the subject cells, so I extract the cells from the saliva, and grow them in a Petri dish using the warmth of my body to keep them alive, and this is an image of the installation, so if you went to see this in a gallery, you would see it as a four-channel installation with the four channels sometimes doing the same and sometimes doing different things, and this particular scene is one in which you are inside of a biobank, so you, inside the installation, are inside of this deep freezer with a giant robotic arm that grabs the samples from different cells, and just to wrap that up, I'll just share with you one of my most recent projects, which is called "Lovesick," so in "Lovesick," I was thinking about the kind of disaffectation that has come through digital culture, so the ways in which we've been pushed apart from each other, even if we seem more connected than ever, and I was imagining a kind of magical remedy that could bring us, as people, back together in a way, like "Stranger Visions," so as "Stranger Visions" is about remembering that we have these physical bodies, "Lovesick" is also about kind of reminding us that we have these physical bodies, and that we should use them to connect with each other, and I started working on "Lovesick" 1 1/2 years ago over the winter, which was long before, of course, coronavirus happened, and now, in the wake of coronavirus, it puts the project in a new light, so Lovesick is a literal love virus. It's a retrovirus that's engineered to infect human cells with the gene for oxytocin, so it infects the human cells and inserts an extra copy of the oxytocin gene, and here you can see experiments that we did in the lab, so I worked with a company in Philadelphia that does vaccine and drug development, and vaccine development, and here you can see the virus infecting cells, and the red glow shows that they've been infected with the Lovesick virus, and it's kind of part of this fantasy that I had imagining what would the future be in a Lovesick world where we have these oxytocin-shaped vials that are kind of like charms, and break them open, and swallow the virus, and infect ourselves forever, and it's a retrovirus, so that can never be cured, that can never go away, so we just decide culturally that we're going to infect ourselves with love, and then we kind of come together, so we end up much more closer, much more intimate. We throw out all of our devices, and we just have this kind of biological connection instead, and here you can see the growing red glow of the cells that become infected over time, and I think I'll leave it at that in the interest of time. Thank you.

- I'm really thrilled to be here to talk to Heather. We've known each other virtually for a long time now, and what I love about Heather's work is she focuses on something that I have looked at in an academic way, but we've both kind of raised similar kinds of questions, so my name's Elizabeth Joh. I'm a law professor at the University of California at Davis, and I'm interested in all kinds of surveillance and the way new technologies are changing our ideas about what the law should do or say about collecting all of the different kinds of digital biological data that are out there about all of us, and of course, this particular conversation that we're having together today is about genetic information and genetic identity, and we both are kind of interested, I think, in this idea that there is this very deep sense that genetic identity is becoming more and more important, but it raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions in a way that other kinds of identity maybe doesn't, or it's less important, so I thought I'd begin by asking Heather a little bit about, one theme that I see in your work in a number of different projects that I find so interesting is there seems to be a deep sense of anxiety is the way I would put it. Anxiety about information that feels so intimate, and yet is so easily separated from ourselves. I wonder what you thought about that.

- Thank you, Elizabeth, and yes, it's really a pleasure to have this conversation, and I've been following your work for many years also, and it's really so nice to meet even if it is over Zoom. Yeah, I think anxiety is definitely true. It is maybe even more than anxiety. I mean, maybe it is... I described it once in something I wrote for an exhibition catalog as a kind of panic, a genetic panic. You could think of it that way. I have deep concerns about the profiling of human information from DNA and in particular, how that leads us to these kind of neo-eugenic possible futures and what it means to try to infer things about people from their DNA that are, in particular things like behavioral traits, so that's an area that I'm deeply concerned about because there is so much history showing how deeply wrong it is to categorize people based on their biology and classify them.

- I think that's right. I mean, there are all of these questions, and I think what your work makes so perfectly clear is that there's a huge disconnect, right? So in the project, "Probably Chelsea", of course, Chelsea voluntarily provided the biological samples to you so you could analyze them, but we could easily imagine a very realistic scenario in which her genetic information was not voluntarily handed over, someone simply followed her until they collected a saliva sample from a soda can or a water bottle, and you could have gone through the same experiment, and that's what's striking to me, in that you use the language of intimacy about knowing personal information of that kind about someone, and yet that person may never have voluntarily provided it or given anything like what we would call consent from a legal or a normative point of view, and I think that's what's so disturbing. I think to write about it in an academic sense is one thing, but the work that you've been doing over the past several years makes all of this so real, and I wonder what thoughts you had about this idea of genetic identity and control over that identity.

- Mm-hmm, yes, definitely, so just thinking, just riffing a little bit on what you say, just thinking about what might happen in those contexts, so one of the things that I'm concerned about is how DNA analysis can become a kind of, can be, in a way, weaponized, can be used by the police as a pretext for racial profiling, so if you imagine you have a crime scene and take DNA from the scene of the crime and then supposedly analyze the ancestry of the person who's left that behind, you can then use it and say, "Oh, okay, well, this person is X race," and then harass a whole category of people on the basis of this. Meanwhile, the actual science behind predicting ancestry from DNA, which is a separate thing from race, which is another conversation, but that science is not well-established, and so I have a lot of concerns seeing that we are increasingly seeing these kinds of techniques rolled out and in law enforcement, in the United States, and not only in the United States, to predict things that are considered to be these externally visible characteristics when they aren't good science, and how that can, how that could be used to further harass people, minorities in the United States, for example, who are already subject to disproportionate harm from law enforcement, so that's just one example of something that I'm quite concerned about in this realm.

- Yeah, and I think what you've just touched on is so interesting, right? This idea that we have this drive, not just in law enforcement, but certainly in law enforcement, but also in the consumer DNA world, to strive for certainty, that everybody wants to know something that feels tangible and 100% certain, and maybe that's been informed by fictionalized accounts of what it's like to have a criminal investigation, but in fact, as you point out in your work, a lot of this is quite probabilistic, and it rubs against this idea that we can be 100% certain about some kinds of identification, and particularly in the phenotyping you're talking about, and that's a kind of, that's been a longstanding struggle about identity in general, but here, I think, what you bring out, in your work you have these photos of you in the lab, and working on things in a way that most ordinary people don't know how to do or don't quite understand very well, and so it seems it has this aura of scientific certainty, but as you're showing in your work, it's not quite that clear-cut, right?

- Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the interesting thing, also, is that I didn't know, going into, for example, when I started with "Stranger Visions," I didn't know how certain it was, so I had just this kind of flash of inspiration, probably because I watch too many crime shows or something, and I took that, and went into the lab, and then I learned. I learned through this kind of hands-on process, well, how certain are these things? And what can we know? And what will we maybe never know? And everything in between, and I think that you can maybe see that in the work, also, that it is very genuine. It's not meant to be just just a political provocation. It is also meant to show a genuine process of interest in research itself and kind of, in a way, a tenderness to the medium, but through that, that you discover the problematics that are there, so for me, the deeper I got into looking at DNA analysis, the more it became clear to me that it was extremely limited, and that it should be used in a very limited way, then, and that the ways that I could see, I could see by looking at the research, I could see these things coming, as I know that you have done, also, in your research, so you could see these things are coming down the road, these new kinds of research around predicting faces, for example, but you see that also around predicting anything you can think of, basically, from DNA, and once you have this hands-on experience and see, really, how limited that is, it is a bit scary.

- It's scary, too, but it's also so fascinating, right? Because we've just talked about law enforcement. I mean, you've talked about relying on easily accessible consumer service, like 23andMe, but in fact, in "Probably Chelsea", you are the sleuth here. I mean, you are the person who is divining this information, and what it shows us is that, well, maybe it's not just a danger from people who are in the process of trying to identify suspects or doing long-term medical research. Maybe what you're doing could one day be any of us, right? Could be any of us trying to, for fun or for our own exploration, try to learn things about other people, and that, to me, is so, it's both disturbing and so fascinating because I know another aspect of all of this, of course, is that when you are looking at someone's genetic sample, whether it's Chelsea Manning's or someone else's, you're also taking a peek into their entire sort of genetic family tree, if you like, and you have access to that, potentially, and that also seems like a very different way of thinking about identity than we used to think when it comes to personal digitized information, whether it's our Social Security numbers, or banking information, or fingerprints. This is very, very different, right?

- Definitely, definitely, and so I totally agree, and I think this is, this is really one of the things that "Stranger Visions," in particular, made public was that it was increasingly possible for anyone to come along and analyze your DNA because we had the beginnings of these community laboratories, and we had the beginnings of these direct-to-consumer services, like 23andMe, or Ancestry.com where you can just swab a cheek or spit in a tube, and send it, and get a whole, you know, hundreds of thousands of variants in your DNA analyzed very cheaply and relatively quickly, and so, as these things become increasingly available to the public, and as our DNA becomes increasingly legible, like you can read it faster, you can read it more cheaply, and everyone begins to have access to that, there is this question of what we will do with that information, especially given that it is so contested, that you have, in particular, this total fascination with looking at things like ancestry, but when we talk about ancestry, what we're really talking about is correlations in DNA to other living populations in the world today, so if you have, if I look at my DNA ancestry report, and it says that I'm X percent European, that's not because some ancient Europeans had their DNA analyzed, and I share that with them. It's because people alive in Europe now have that DNA, and I share that with them, so it's kind of, there's a kind of misconception about what ancestry analysis actually means. I think it's really a misnomer that should be gotten rid of, and it should really be correlations with living populations around the world today, but nobody would buy that.

- And so what happens in this world of the near future? We've just touched on this idea that maybe anybody could start to have access to these kinds of things. I'm thinking specifically of another project that you've done, "Invisible," in which we think about what about a world where you had to deliberately cloak your genetic identity? Not because you were involved, necessarily, in criminal wrongdoing, but because you wanted to protect yourself, and I wonder, does that seem like a realistic sense of how society should move forward? In a sense , would that be as normal as locking our doors, or having passwords, or anything like that? What do you think?

- That used to seem far-fetched, like in 2014, I think, when I worked on "Invisible," so just to, for the audience, "Invisible" is a set of two sprays that I also open-sourced, so one is Erase, where you can erase traces of DNA left behind, and another is Replace, where you can kind of obscure them or cover them up, and I did that as a kind of followup to "Stranger Visions," and some, in the news, said that I made that to protect people from me, which I thought was really funny, but so when I worked on "Invisible" in 2014, it seemed really far-fetched like this distant future where you might go to a job interview and they would swab the coffee cup that you drank out of, and see if you have a predisposition for depression, something like this, but now, I mean, in this time of COVID, it doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore. When we all, I mean, in so many countries around the world have to undergo mandatory testing for so many different things, so it's seemingly just a small step from collecting a nasal swab and analyzing whether someone might be infected with COVID or whether someone might have COVID antibodies to gathering a bit more information from that same sample. I mean, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't analyze a hundred other things from the same sample that you give. If you think of, also, these different kinds of checkpoints that we've developed, so whether it's a checkpoint around being infected or a checkpoint around having a low temperature or wearing a mask, wearing gloves, these different kinds of bodily things that have now become part of our everyday experience, it seems really close that that could kind of creep in to an evolving analysis of much more information and much more predictive information in the near future because the technologies will be basically already there, so once you have this kind of massive testing for COVID everywhere, it's totally easy to test, just tack on another test or two.

- I think that's right, and I wonder what you think, as we live in this age of a pandemic, some of these questions about genetic identity, and what can be divined from them, and particularly phenotyping, which is of great interest in law enforcement, maybe people feel disconnected from that, right? Because they think this is about other people, suspect populations, migrants, people that have nothing to do with me. I'm sort of imagining a generic audience, but within a pandemic, as you point out, if there's mass testing, people sort of become accustomed to this idea of bio-surveillance, and do you think that that for me, it raises questions about this sort of eases our way into more broader forms of surveillance because the population has already learned that part of surveillance is for the common good, which we know can certainly is a legitimate aim of government, but of course, with surveillance, there are always multiple uses, as you point out. You could swab for COVID. You could have that sample used for other kinds of things, and in this moment of emergency, we feel like, well, of course, we've got to do this kind of mass testing, but then that raises questions of something that becomes normalized, that people have become very used to.

- Exactly, if you can swab for COVID, why couldn't you just swab people all the time and test that against forensic evidence left at crime scenes? It makes it so much easier than to roll out this kind of DNA dragnet of police testing.

- Yeah, but it's hard, right? It's a difficult question because in a time of COVID we'd want people to be tested in a mass since we don't want them to be suspicious, and yet it's hard to make that appropriate balance between talking about the public good and the public health, but then also say, "Look, you've gotta be attendant "to these possible privacy dangers "with people misusing your DNA "or government entities misusing your DNA "or private companies misusing your DNA." Imagine some near future in which your DNA is used for advertising to target advertising to you because someone has discovered that with a particular kind of characteristic, you're a likely audience for a particular kind of drug advertising or something like that. I, myself, am struggling to think about how should people think about that? And, and I don't know how have thoughts on it.

- I definitely am struggling with that too, and in particular, the way in which the kind of stance around public health and COVID, it almost breaks down around different party lines in a way than you would imagine, so for example, that you have this right-wing resistance against wearing masks, and testing, and all of these kinds of things, and that you have the left promoting this kind of, I mean, it is biological surveillance, so it is, in a way, I mean, this interesting reversal where, for so many years, the left has been pushing back against electronic surveillance, and now the left is the side that's saying, "We want more biological surveillance," and of course, the public health interest is real, and that must be a tremendous priority. On the other hand, is it ethical to make people take a test, a biological test, a virus test before allowing them to cross a border?

- Sure, and of course we get into really difficult questions about the powers of nation-states. We always think about the ability to protect borders. We now have really hard borders because of COVID, where people cannot go. even within the United States, where I am, is there are states that are asking people to self-quarantine if they've come from other states. These are sort of things that are novel to most people, so those things seem to be appropriate uses of government power when you think about we don't want a pandemic to spread, but maybe the larger point here, that we're sort of talking around, is that biosurveillance, as a term, is kind of neutral, right? It's normally neutral. Biosurveillance can be an important power for making sure an epidemic doesn't spread, but it can also be used in ways that make people fearful about their misuse of their personal identity, and I think part of the problem here is that, again, speaking from the academic world, it's hard to launch into the public conversation a lot of details about, well, here are the things to be concerned about, and what I love about the fact that you've been a leading voice here for so long, and thinking about biosurveillance, is that you make physically real this idea that people ought to think about, well, what could happen to my genetic information? I mean, what misinterpretations or true interpretations could happen? And maybe those aren't even meaningful , and that's what I see in the "Probably Chelsea" work, and so I think we can talk about things like, well, in biosurveillance, there's a big difference between collection regulations and use regulations, but that's when you sort of get a blank stare from people thinking about, well, what does that mean? First we have to attend to the questions of what should people be aware of? And what do you, sort of, what are some of the big themes you want people to take away from your work when they look at a piece like "Probably Chelsea"?

- So I think, I just want to mention that I think one of the things that we often forget about in discourses around surveillance in general is the importance of caring for people who are at the margins, so people who are kind of the weakest in society, and that includes the sick, and that's something that I think, I mean, just in terms of thinking about basic kind of ethics and human rights issues that we have to take that very seriously, that we don't discriminate against the sick just because we're in the middle of a pandemic, so how to kind of, how to balance the genuine interest in public health with, and also, a policy of antidiscrimination against people that are ill, I think is really important, and an unsettled issue, and then, in terms of "Probably Chelsea", what I really want people to do is basically walk into this room in person, or I guess, online. Look at these faces. Maybe you find a face that resonates with you. Maybe you find a face that reminds you of someone you know. Maybe you find a face that looks like you, and you think, "Oh, that could be me. "That could be my DNA," and you have a kind of connection to Chelsea. You have a kind of connection to a stranger, and also a kind of realization of the multiplicity of DNA data and of the subjectivity, really, of reading any data, that all data is like this, all data is open for interpretation and open for multiple readings, so I just hope that it invites people to think about genetics in a slightly different way, and that I love that it's positioned as this kind of entry point to the biology section of the Exploratorium, so it's this kind of place where young people become introduced to the ideas of biology and genetics, and that you will be introduced to that first through thinking, not that it's perfect, not that it's totally exact, but actually, that it's variable, that it's multiple, that it's probabilistic, that it's imperfect, and that's exactly what's so interesting about it.

- So what I love about your work is that it disorients us, and by disorienting us makes us ask some very basic questions about our genetic identities, our relationships with one another, and really questioning what we ought to say is absolute and what is less than certain, even in the rhetoric of science and genetic individualism, so I know we need to wrap up here. It's been really a great privilege to talk with you, Heather. This is wonderful, wonderful work, and I look forward to seeing more of what you'll be doing in the future. Thanks so much.

- Thanks, Elizabeth. Wish we had more time to keep talking.

- Same.

- Looking forward to talking in another day soon. Thank you.

- Okay. Be well.

- My name is Bryan Day. I build sound sculptures and musical instruments from found objects, plywood, and mechanical assemblies fabricated at home and at the Exploratorium shop. I perform using these instruments in a number of different ensembles, some based here in the Bay Area. I also run a small record label called Public Eyesore that still puts out physical experimental music releases on audio cassette, compact disc, and vinyl.