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COMMENT
BOOKS & ARTS
FRANK HERMANN/THE
SUNDAY TIMES/NI
SYNDICATION
Humans are surprisingly adaptable: Philippa Smeed, who was born without arms, supports a mug with her foot.
Beyond the body
Ewen Callaway
finds immersion in human
enhancement to be both unsettling and uplifting.
TEC H N O LO GY
S
uperhuman,
a provoking and discom-
fiting exhibition at the Wellcome Col-
lection in London, projects equal parts
Clark Kent and Superman. An exploration
of human enhancement, it starts with early-
nineteenth-century tortoiseshell spectacles
and an ancient bronze Icarus to remind us
that the concept is neither inherently high-
tech nor particularly new.
Curator Emily Sargent takes a broad view
of technological improvement. Vivienne
Westwood platform heels, Viagra pills and
news clippings of the first child born as a
result of
in vitro
fertilization are displayed
beside cochlear implants and an ivory dildo.
Sex is everywhere in
Superhuman.
The exhibition explores the tensions
between replacement and improvement,
form and function. Should technological
aids — be they pills or prostheses — restore
‘normality’ (whatever that means) or tran-
scend it, like Icarus’ wings? Is fidelity more
important than utility?
The ancients favoured form. A perfectly
sculpted big toe made of a composite of linen
and gesso was found alongside an Egyptian
mummy dating to the sixth century bc. Histo-
rians believed at first that it was meant only as
a replacement in the afterlife, but the prosthe-
sis fit snugly on the feet of other people miss-
ing their big toes, suggesting that it may have
found a use in the real world, too. Similarly,
a silver prosthetic nose welded to spectacle
frames is testament to attempts by a well-
heeled woman of the Victorian era to avoid
social stigma after losing her nose to syphilis.
Yet too much emphasis on assimilation
can have heartbreaking consequences.
Between 1957 and 1962, many pregnant
women took the drug thalidomide to ease
morning sickness and improve sleep, until
doctors realized that it caused severe limb
deformities in the developing fetus. The UK
government funded the design of prosthetic
arms and legs for children born without
them. The disturbingly lifelike limbs were so
© 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
heavy and clunky that
Superhuman
some had to be pow-
Wellcome Collection,
ered by pneumatic
London.
pumps, and they were
Until 16 October
2012.
mostly useless. In one
of a series of haunting videos in the exhibi-
tion, a child describes using the prostheses as
a weirdly dreamlike experience: “It was like
somebody else touching [things] and I was
merely an observer.”
Beside the display of videos is a black-
and-white photograph of an 11-year-old girl,
Philippa Smeed (now Verry), who was born
without arms, lounging on a sofa and sipping
from a mug that dangles from her toe. Her
eyebrows are arched, and the mug seems to
conceal an impish grin. “When I look at this
photograph I realise what a wonderful, confi-
dent and happy childhood I had,” Verry says.
Examples of the extravagant and strange
abound in
Superhuman.
There are cyborgs
with limbs and faces cobbled together from
workshop tools. There is athlete and double-
amputee Aimee Mullins, made up as a chee-
tah with prosthetic hind legs: a still from
artist Matthew Barney’s film
Cremaster 3,
which will screen at the exhibition. And there
is the Whizzinator, a combination penis and
bladder prosthetic, designed to help male
athletes to evade anti-doping tests.
Aptly,
Superhuman
opened days before
the start of the London Olympics. Sport is
a study of human enhancement, by means
1 5 4 | NAT U R E | VO L 4 8 8 | 9 AUG U S T 2 0 1 2
BOOKS & ARTS
COMMENT
both honourable and underhand. South
African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, who was
born with missing leg bones, is running in
both the Olympics and the Paralympics. His
carbon-fibre Cheetah prosthetic blades, fit-
ted with running spikes, look nothing like
human limbs, but they perform so well that
the International Association of Athlet-
ics Federations appealed (unsuccessfully)
against Pistorius’s participation in races
against able-bodied athletes, claiming that
he had an unfair advantage.
At the start of the twentieth century,
Olympic marathon runners were allowed to
train intensively for only four weeks in the
year before the Games. They used strychnine
as an endurance enhancer to help them to
complete the gruelling course of about 42
kilometres (26 miles). A blurry photograph,
on display in
Superhuman,
shows a dazed
Tom Hicks, winner of the marathon in the
1904 games in St Louis, Missouri, being
helped to the finish line by his two trainers.
Like other exhibitions at the Wellcome Col-
lection,
Superhuman
leans heavily on histori-
cal and contemporary objects, and primary
documents such as newspaper clippings.
But the few fine-art displays are high points.
South Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee’s photo-
graph
Enlarging my Right Hand with Gauntlet
depicts a pump resembling an udder.
In her tongue-in-cheek short film
I Need
a Hero,
Charlotte Jarvis imagines a reality-
television show in which amputees compete
for body modifications and enhancements.
The most powerful film is Regina José Galin-
do’s
Recortepor la Linea
(Cut Through the
Line). In it, the artist stands naked and taci-
turn in a public park in Venezeula — home
to the world’s third-highest rate of cosmetic
surgery per capita — as a plastic surgeon
uses a marker to chart the changes he would
make to her body.
Revital Cohen’s room-sized installation
The Immortal
is the most ambitious art-
work: a closed loop in which air and water
flow between a respirator, an incubator, a
dialysis unit and other medical machinery,
in an attempt to simulate a living organism.
It will run for just one hour a day, so plan
your visit accordingly.
The exhibition ends with a series of
video debates on topics such as cognition-
enhancing drugs, life-span extension and
transhumanism — the idea that humans can
transcend their bodies through technology.
My favourite is a meditation by bioethicist
John Harris on the obligation to enhance.
Humans, he argues, must get over their
squeamishness if they are to outlive climate
change, global pandemics and eventually the
destruction of Earth itself. Sounds like a job
for Superman.
■
Ewen Callaway
is a news reporter for
Nature
in London.
Books in brief
The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness
Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning
Daniel Bor
B
AsiC
B
ooks
352 pp. £18.99 (2012)
As scientific enterprises go, cracking consciousness is up there with
deciphering dark matter. Neuroscientist Daniel Bor dives into the
conundrum with relish. He begins by defining consciousness as
the ability to gather knowledge, then works his way from a history
of the brain and the “neuroscience of awareness” to an exploration
of severe brain damage. Intriguing arguments abound — not least,
Bor’s recasting of mental conditions such as schizophrenia and
bipolar disorder as ‘disorders of consciousness’.
Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing
Neal Stephenson
A
TlAnTiC
336 pp. £20 (2012)
From
Snow Crash
(Bantam, 1992) to
Reamde
(Atlantic, 2011), Neal
Stephenson’s novels range over a dazzling array of disciplines
— including metaphysics, gaming, nanotechnology and the
history of science. Here, he assembles an entertaining sampler
of cyberpunkish treats. Among freshly edited essays, interviews
and other short works on topics such as geek cool and the
mainstreaming of science fiction are two previously unpublished
pieces. ‘Get Up’ is an essay on sitting; the other is a work of fiction
one sentence long. Prepare to be amused.
How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the
Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times
Peter S. Wells
P
rinCeTon
U
niversiTy
P
ress
304 pp. £24.95 (2012)
Look at a pot predating the Roman Empire, or a Bronze Age
burial site, and your interpretation of form and pattern will be
vastly at variance with that of their makers. So says anthropologist
Peter Wells, who argues that in late prehistoric Europe — a world
that lacked the written word and was thin on ‘stuff’ — people’s
perceptions were very different from our own. Wells ‘reads’
tools, vehicles, ornaments, textiles and buildings to reveal a
neurobiological map of profound changes in ancient society.
Birdie Bowers: Captain Scott’s Marvel
Anne Strathie
T
he
h
isTory
P
ress
224 pp. £18.99 (2012)
Scott of the Antarctic was surrounded by strong characters. One,
Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers, emerges as grounded, courageous and
ferociously well organized. He handled landing, navigation and more
for the 1910–12 Terra Nova expedition, and took part in the penguin-
egg quest immortalized in Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir
The Worst
Journey in the World
(1922). He was also the youngest to die with Scott
in the doomed ‘party of five’. Built on research in Antarctica and at
the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, Anne Strathie’s
biography includes previously unpublished material.
Drawn From Paradise: The Discovery, Art and Natural History of
the Birds of Paradise
David Attenborough and Errol Fuller
C
ollins
256 pp. £30 (2012)
Some dance; some are dubbed superb or magnificent; many sport
ruffs, streamers or elaborate headgear. Birds of paradise — found in
New Guinea and Australia and comprising about 40 species — are
celebrated here by broadcaster David Attenborough and artist Errol
Fuller. The authors trace the natural history of these beauties, known
to Europeans since the sixteenth century, with copious illustrations
by artists from Peter Paul Rubens to Jacques Barraband.
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© 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved

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