"An Ear for Research"

An Ear for Research
Nora Sdun
Published on May 1st, 2022

In 1997, a research group from Massachusetts led by the physician Joseph P. Vacanti published the results of their years-long research. The team had successfully grown cartilage tissue in the shape of a human ear on the backs of mice. This was not only a scientific but also a public sensation. The earmouse, also known as the Vacanti Mouse (it seems a whole group of such mice was needed, hence the mouse lacks a proper name like the cloned sheep Dolly), presented a bizarre and disturbing sight.

This mouse was eerie and unsettling because a normal-sized human ear appeared to "grow" on the back of a small, naked, red-eyed mouse. This growth, stretched over with thin mouse skin, couldn't hear, but unmistakably resembled a highly artificial human ear. The mouse served as a bioreactor for this non-hearing ear—a living medium carrying a "spare part" until it was harvested. The harvesting of the cultivated cartilage tissue could be done without killing the medium, but the fate of the Vacanti Mouse was like that of all other laboratory mice: it was consumed or "sacrificed," as stated in a paper by the research group.

The Earmice and the technique applied to them have since populated the collective imagination worldwide. For example, Stelarc, a Cypriot-Australian artist, spent over ten years from 2006, accompanied by several surgeries, growing a human ear on his arm. Stelarc's intention was to connect the ear to the internet, allowing it to "broadcast" globally what it "hears" at the location where his medium—the artist Stelarc—is present. However, this cartilaginous artificial ear couldn't hear independently; it was equipped with a technical recording device. The ear around it was "only" art.

Ceramic Earmice

Twenty-five years after the Vacanti Mouse became a global sensation, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann dedicated an exhibition to it at the ABC project space. Named after the street in Neustadt, ABC—like many project spaces—is a temporary use of space. The building, a Commerzbank investment piece from the nineties, aligns well with the time of the Vacanti Mouse. On March 12 and 13, a large family of ceramic mice was gathered on the floor. They are hairless and pink like the naked Vacanti mice. And like the Vacanti mice, they all carry a human ear on their bodies. It seems not to bother them.

Three of the mice sit in oversized shells, ceramic fantasies of seashell homes, on the wall. From there emanates white noise. However, it's not the shells that make the noise; it's the mice, or more precisely, the human ear shells on their backs. The mice are wired, so contrary to their usual role—and in the opposite direction to Stelarc's "ear" on his arm—they emit sound. They receive nothing. Such changes in behavior and direction are always to be expected in exhibitions by Frohne-Brinkmann, born in 1990 and a graduate of the HFBK.

Ceramic forms that are heavily undercut, concavely curved inward, can only be molded with great skill. The human ear is a maximally complicated form, whether as a sculpture or as a cultivated replacement ear (ears are now actually regrown in a inconspicuous location on the bodies of patients, after being initially cultivated in the laboratory, due to their complexity). Just like the cultivated non-hearing ear, the shape of a seashell is laborious to model due to its undercut areas. However, as a ceramic hollow object, the form undoubtedly produces the familiar "ocean noise," heard when placing a seashell against one's ear. This noise is not, as often assumed, the captured recording of a South Sea vacation or the acoustically amplified flow noise of one's own blood. Instead, it is generated because the shell picks up ambient sounds, amplifies them, and sends them back out as undifferentiated noise (in the opposite direction to the human ear shell, which picks up sound and, if it can hear, transmits it to the brain through the eardrum).

The Mouse as an Interface Between Human and Nature

The ceramic ear mice sitting in the seashells and emitting white noise are connected to the wiring behind the baseboard via their very long tails. The other mice also have a cable tail, but it is cut to a normal mouse length. This makes the mice reminiscent of one of the most important interfaces between human and machine since the invention of the personal computer: the computer mouse. During the earmouse era, the wireless technology found on almost every desk today had not yet prevailed. For most of the time since its invention in the 1960s, all mice had a "cable tail." Thus, the inventors of the "X-Y position indicator for a display system" (as designated in the 1963 patent application) dubbed it a "mouse." If it had managed without a tail through a wireless connection back then, it probably would have been called a hamster.

While the computer mouse serves as an interface between human and machine, medical research with laboratory animals operates at an interface between human and animal. For decades, transplant medicine has been researching how animals can become bioreactors for functioning organs, i.e. how they can be more than just carriers of deaf ears made from cartilage cells. Special genetically modified pigs now carry transplantable hearts—with the crucial difference compared to the earmouse that this heart first works for the pig and does not grow somewhere on its back as an extra post.

The highly publicized transplantation of a pig heart into a human patient on January 7, 2022, initially seemed successful. However, two months after the procedure, the man who received the implant died. For now, the experiment has failed. Nevertheless, such xenotransplants already raise the most bizarre questions for researchers and patients alike. Not least among them: What does it mean to approve the death of a mammal to continue one's own life? Unlike people with organ donor cards who, in the event of their death, agree to donate organs, these pigs are specifically bred as organ donors. The pig breeding geared toward human purposes is not a scandal; it has served the production of chops and sausages for centuries. However, what is remarkable is the transfer of living organs from animals to humans—not as food, but as the functional incorporation of a vital organ. In preparation for the xenotransplantation of January 2022, numerous discussions were held with religious leaders of various denominations. They all prioritized the saved human life over animal welfare.

Anti-Enlightenment Attitudes Yesterday and Today

The earmouse of 1997 provoked many vehement opponents of science who perceived a threat to "God's creation." A large advertisement from the Turning Point Project, a coalition of more than 60 NGOs, warned with a photo of the earmouse about (red) genetic engineering and titled: "Who plays God in the 21st Century?" It falsely suggested that the depicted mouse was genetically modified and relied entirely on the shocking effect of its Frankenstein-like appearance. In a human ear on the back of a mouse, one thought they could recognize the epitome of zombification, the monstrous self-overestimation of medicine. Even without large-scale ads, the image of the earmouse spread incredibly fast—thanks to its wired relative, the computer mouse. Internet users sent the image massively and often completely decontextualized via email.

A distorted reflection through the decades now presents these people as so-called "anti-vaxxers." To them, the (white) noise of the internet appears as the noise of their blood, their own, sacred, healthy bodies. They transmit this conviction while clicking around the web with a now wireless computer mouse, often outwardly—now rarely via email, but more frequently within the echo chambers of Telegram groups and YouTube channels. They do this believing it is their own thought resonating, yet they are merely hollow forms amplifying external noises—empty shells (or simply empty-headed).

Vaccination is rejected by these individuals because it penetrates individual bodies. In this regard, vaccine opposition resembles the rejection of xenotransplantations or, specifically, the transplantation of an ear cultivated on the back of a mouse. It can be observed that resistance to such procedures does not stem from ethical considerations or concerns for animal welfare but rather from fear for the integrity of one's own body. In the case of vaccinations, this resistance is additionally mixed with concerns about autonomy, distrust of authorities, and a yearning for a solid community, i.e. a community of infection, which, according to the wishful thinking, may become immune as a herd as a whole. In this regard, we may prefer to stick to the mice: They are social, but they are not herd animals—whether with or without an ear on their backs.

Translated from German
[1] In 2013, a monument was unveiled in Novosibirsk dedicated to laboratory mice and rats, these invisible yet tireless advocates for enlightenment and scientific progress.