A close-up offers a better look at the jacket, which was grown using a combination of 3T3 mouse cells and human bone cells. View Slideshow 
Fancy a partially alive jacket, possibly grown out of your own skin? In reality, it may not be that far away.
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr at the Tissue Culture & Art Project are attempting to grow a semi-living jacket in an effort to create "victimless leather." Hoping to highlight the possibility of wearing leather without killing an animal, the duo is presently focused on growing living tissue into a leather-like material and having it mature in the form of a miniature, stitchless, coat-like shape.
"It started from our research into living surfaces," said Catts. "In a sense we wanted to ask: How are we going to perceive something which from the outside seems to be alive but which is something you recognize as inanimate?"
Grown using a combination of mouse and human cells, the jacket is currently quite tiny (about 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide) and would just fit a mouse. Using a biodegradable polymer as a base, the team coated it with 3T3 mouse cells to form connective tissue and topped it up with human bone cells in the hope of creating a stronger layer of skin. The jacket is being grown inside a specially designed bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. The group hopes that once the polymer degrades, a whole jacket that maintains its shape and integrity will be left behind.
The group's members plan to grow a larger jacket as part of developing what they term the "technoscientific body" -- an artificial environment where semi-living entities are grown and cared for with the ultimate aim of creating a victimless utopia. And the stress here is on the "victimless." Cells used in the project so far have come from so-called immortalized cell lines, or cells that divide and multiply forever once they are removed from an animal or human host, essentially forming a renewable resource.
"The interesting thing about cell lines is that in most cases once a cell line has been developed there is much more of that than the original organism from which it was taken," said Catts. "For example, the 3T3 mouse cells which are very common in scientific research centers around the globe can be weighed in tons or even tens of tons and they all came from one mouse in the 1970s."
Research and development of the victimless leather has been conducted at SymbioticA: The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at the University of Western Australia in consultation with Verigen, a company that specializes in tissue-engineered cartilage for clinical applications. The jacket was shown to the public earlier this year as part of an exhibition in western Australia called the space between. It drew some unanticipated feedback.
"One of the most common and somewhat surprising comments we heard was that people were disturbed by our ethics of using living cells to grow living fabric," said Zurr, "while the use of leather obtained from animals seems to be accepted without any concern for the well-being of the animals from which the skin has been removed."
The artists are also designing what they call a MetaBody, creating a semi-living object consisting of different tissues that originate from different bodies. They will be collaborating with the French performance artist Orlan, who constantly experiments with her own face, using plastic surgery to transform herself into the quintessence of classical beauty: a new being modeled on Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa.
The artists will culture Orlan's own skin and hybridize it with skins of different pigmentation from other people of different races to create a miniature Harlequin dress. By culturing these tissues together while they are stripped from the bodies' immune systems and making them a single, semi-living entity, they intend to abolish identities of individuals, genders, races and species.
They'll also be growing facial parts for Stelarc, an Australian artist who explores extending the body through prosthetics. The duo plans to grow a nose, lips and a shape of the eyes, connecting them to form a living mask that would either imitate a face or represent a mutation of it.
"We are the wizards from Oz," joked Zurr. "In many ways, working with Orlan and Stelarc we are doing what the Wizard of Oz (did), and we have a bigger idea in the works. We will ask people to tell us what organ they want us to grow in order to enhance their feeling of well-being and we will do that for them and we will see if it works or not."
While there's still lots of research to be done before a fully formed live jacket can be created, the artists are quick to point out that they aren't interested in creating commercial products or even furthering scientific research. Calling themselves conceptual artists who create working prototypes, they say their aim is to bring to the forefront the philosophical implications of making living organisms tools for our own purposes.
"It's quite a scary thing, our attitude to life as it is at the moment," said Zurr. "And the more we manipulate life for human-centric purposes, I wonder now how compassionate we are going to be towards those living systems. Our work is more about questioning these things rather than saying, 'This is great, let's go for it.'"
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