Multicellular Media: Visual Practice in Developmental Biology, 1860-present

Abstract

To animate–derived from the Latin animāre–is to give life. Since the emergence of cinema in the last decades of the nineteenth century, animation has also referred to a media practice in which the motion of objects or bodies is produced through the synthesis of a sequence of images. This dissertation draws on the history of biology, science and technology studies, contemporary experimental practice, and media and feminist theory to trace how developmental biologists have crafted narratives about multicellular life through animation since the end of the nineteenth century. In Chapters 1 and 2, I argue that animation, a practice historically rooted in drawing, has been shared across art and biology and that the embodied and media-based synthesis of images have given rise to explanations of morphogenesis, the emergence of form during development. Chapter 3, a demonstration of contemporary animation, describes how cell-lineage domains and tensile cytoskeletal cables organize a grid of square cells as well as the segmentation gene engrailed in the embryo of the amphipod Parhyale hawaiensis. Chapter 4 synthesizes historical and recent literature that provide evidence for cell and tissue mechanics being instructive for morphogenetic processes, including genetic regulation. It proposes that more systematic studies of morphogenesis based in the making and synthesis of images are needed to understand how mechanics can be a substrate for evolutionary change.