DNA to 3D Printed Heads

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is just an ordinary scientist...who takes DNA of people she's never met and creates 3D computer generated models of them...and then prints them out and hangs them on her wall...

Heather Dewey-Hagborg has a strange habit. It starts with hair. Slapping on a pair of rubber gloves, Heather Dewey-Hagborg uses a pair of tweezers to collect hairs from a public bathrooms at Penn Station and places them in plastic baggies for safe keeping. She travels her usual routes through New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks onto city buses and subway cars-even into art museums-she gathers fingernails, cigarette butts, and wads of discarded chewing gum. 

Do you get strange looks? 

"Sometimes," says Dewey-Hagborg. "But New Yorkers are pretty used to people doing weird stuff."

Dewey-Hagborg's odd habit has a larger purpose. The 30-year-old PhD student, studying electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, extracts DNA from each piece of evidence she collects, focusing on specific genomic regions from her samples. She then sequences these regions and enters this data into a computer program, which turns out a model of the face of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette or gum behind. 

From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures using a 3D printer. When she shows the series, called "Stranger Visions," she hangs the life-sized portraits, life like masks, on gallery walls. Often, beside a portrait, is a Victorian-style wooden box with various compartments holding the original sample, data about it and a photograph of where it was found.

Rest assured, the artist has some limits when it comes to what she will pick up from the streets. Though they could be helpful to her process, Dewey-Hagborg refuses to swipe saliva samples and used condoms. She says that she has had most success with cigarette butts. "They (smokers) really get their gels into that filter of the cigarette butt," she says, "There just tends to be more stuff there to actually pull the DNA from."

The process she uses to create these life-like portraits is quite detailed and long...so if your not one for scientific lingo, just skim through and look at the pretty pictures ;) 

Once she has successfully collected a sample, she brings it to one of two labs; Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, or one on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (She splits her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.) Early on in the project, the artist took a crash course in molecular biology at Genspace, where she learned about DNA extraction and a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). She uses standard DNA extraction kits that she orders online to analyze the DNA in her samples. 

If the sample is a wad of chewing gum, for example, she cuts a little piece off of it, then cuts that little piece into even smaller pieces. She puts these tiny pieces into a tube with chemicals, incubates it, puts it in a centrifuge and repeats, multiple times, until the chemicals successfully extract purified DNA. After that, Dewey-Hagborg runs a polymerase chain reaction on the DNA, amplifying specific regions of the genome that she's targeted. She sends the amplified DNA (from both mitochondria and the cells' nuclei) to the lab to get sequenced, and then the lab returns about 400 base pair sequences of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine. 

Dewy-Hagborg then compares the sequences returned with those found in human genome databases. Based on this comparison, she gathers information about the person's ancestry, gender, eye color, propensity to be overweight and other traits related to facial morphology, such as the space between one's eyes. "I have a list of about 40 or 50 different traits that I have either successfully analyzed or I am in the process of working on right now," she says.

Dewey-Hagborg then enters these parameters into a computer program to create a 3D model of the person's face. "Ancestry gives you most of the generic picture of what someone is going to tend to look like. Then, the other traits point towards modifications on that kind of generic portrait," She explains. Then she sends a file of the 3D model to a 3D printer on the campus of her alma mater, New York University, so that it can be transformed into a sculpture. 

There is, of course, no way of knowing how accurate Dewey-Hagborg's sculptures are-since the samples are from anonymous individuals, a direct comparison cannot be made. Certainly, there are limitations to what is known about how genes are linked to specific facial features. "We are really just starting to learn about that information," says Dewey-Hagborg. The artist has no ways, for instance, to tell the age of a person based on their DNA. "For right now, the process creates basically a twenty-five year old version of the person," she says.

That said, the "Stranger Visions" project is a startling reminder of advances in both technology and genetics. "It came from this place of noticing that we are leaving genetic material everywhere," says Dewey-Hagborg. "That, combined with the increasing accessibility to molecular biology and these techniques means that this kind of science fiction future is here now. It is available to us today. The question really is what are we going to do with that?"