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PALGRAVE BIOART
Tissues, Cultures, Art

Ionat Zurr · Oron Catts
Palgrave BioArt
Series Editor
Ionat Zurr, School of Design, University of Western Australia, Crawley,
Australia
Reconfiguring living organisms into technologies can change our relation-
ship with the environment, our bodies, and with concepts of materiality,
nature, and life itself. What happens when we treat life as a raw mate-
rial for artistic expressions? Palgrave Studies in BioArt presents a series of
books written by researchers and artists who manipulate life in scientific
laboratories. These artists develop new meanings relating to the concept
of life through engaging, provoking, and creating contestable living and
semi-living biological artworks. They ask: What is life? What is a body?
What are the futures of life? And who is allowed to manipulate life? Such
BioArtistic investigations are vital in articulating this new somatic-cultural
space. The series will present important and diverse voices discussing fron-
tier biotechnologies and their effects on society, ecology, industry, and life
itself. This interdisciplinary series will be of interest to those working in
the areas of art and design, science, cultural studies, bioethics, science
fiction, and much more. We welcome proposals from researchers and
practitioners in the field of BioArt, and cultural/experiential laboratory
engagement.
Ionat Zurr · Oron Catts
Tissues, Cultures, Art

Ionat Zurr Oron Catts
School of Design School of Human Sciences,
University of Western Australia SymbioticA
Crawley, WA, Australia University of Western Australia
Crawley, WA, Australia
ISSN 2731-3026 ISSN 2731-3034 (electronic)

Palgrave BioArt
ISBN 978-3-031-25886-2 ISBN 978-3-031-25887-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Robert Foster Nutrient Bag – Stir Fly,
2016 Custom made Bioreactor, insect cells, nutrient media.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Dedicated to our best collaborative biological labour – Lilit & Rosa
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all of The Tissue

Culture and Art Project collaborators throughout the years and the many
projects; Guy Ben-Ary, who joined the Tissue Culture & Art Project in
1999 and collaborated with us on the Stone Age of Biology, Semi-Living
Worry Dolls, Pig Wings, fish’n’chips and Disembodied Cuisine until 2003
when he embarked on his own artistic journey; Stelarc for Extra ear
¼ Scale; Bioteknica (Jennifer Willet and Jason Knight) for Teratological
Prototypes, Marcus Canning for NoArk 1, Hideo Iwasaki for his support
of Victimless Leather in Japan and in many other projects, Corrie VanSice
for The Mechanism of Life - After Stephane Leduc, Robert Foster for
Better Dead then Dying and other projects, Chris Salter for Futile Labor
which also included Davon Ward who worked with us on Vapour Meat
[HP0.3.1]alpha and different versions of the Compustcubator and Tarsh
Bates for Crossing Kingdoms.
We would also like to thank Professor Miranda Grounds our forever
mentor, and Professor Stuart Bunt who were both the co-founders of
SymbioticA Laboratory. Special thanks to Professor Traian V. Chirilă who
was the first to invite us into his laboratory to get the first wet lab
experience. To Professor Stuart Hodgetts, SymbioticA scientific advisor
and ‘tissue culture guru’, we hope to continue working with you into
the future. Jane Coakley, Amanda Alderson and Chris Cobilis for their
managerial and administrative support.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is not enough space to acknowledge and thanks all the artists,
scientists, humanities scholars, students and curators we worked with and
shared personal and professional exchanges in the SymbioticA Laboratory.
We hope to write about these experiences in a follow up book exploring
the 22 years of SymbioticA.
Lastly, thank you Kelly Somers for editing this manuscript and for your
insightful comments and suggestions.
This book builds upon and expands on previous published papers as
well as original material. It is the first time, though, that our practice is
narrated into a one book.
Introduction
This book is a story about how ideas regarding the concept of life need to
be re-examined. It illustrates the complexity of human relationships with
life in the laboratory and outside it, and above all about our uneasiness
yet paradoxical joy in the hands-on exploration of the transformation of
life into the object and subject of our artistic work. Life becomes a raw
material which escapes full control and escapes being fully mechanized,
both literally and conceptually; this is a story about the semi-living.
In 1996 we came up with a question that we are still pondering in
this book: ‘Can living tissue be used to make art?’ This question took us
on a journey into much uncharted terrain and opened up so many more
questions, such as: What are biological bodies? What is this thing we call
life? What is art? And are there limits to interfering with life and art?
Very early in our work, on 5 August 1997, we were invited to an inter-
view on Australia’s ABC Radio National Art show to talk, for the first time
on radio, about our work. The idea that artists can work in the biological
laboratory with the stuff of life was unheard of then. After a short chat,
the host invited listeners to call in to comment and ask us questions. The
first caller, an older man, introduced himself as a painter who uses water-
colours to draw and paint birds. He questioned whether we were artists at
all and accused us of engaging in unnatural activity; he might as well have
said that we were dealing in the unhallowed arts. Pausing for a moment
to reflect, we responded, somewhat cheekily, by saying that putting marks
on a surface to make them look like birds seemed to us much less natural
ix
x INTRODUCTION
than working directly with living biological tissue and spending time and
effort in keeping these tissues alive and propagating. It might sound like
a flippant response, but for us it raised a profound issue at the core of our
and many other artists’ explorations.
This book, Tissues, Cultures, Art, is the first in the Palgrave Studies
in BioArt series. It narrates our collaborative artistic practice from 1996
to date. It reflects, through discussion of our artistic projects, on the
dynamic and sometimes dramatic developments and changes that have
happened to humans’ understandings of and relationship to life and
bodies. It explores how aesthetic intervention can craft different narra-
tives of the joy and pain experienced by life and the often paradoxical
nature of making sense of life while being alive.
This is our artistic and scholarly exploration of humans’ changing rela-
tion to life, both as a material and as a concept, following the shift from
the linguistic turn (e.g. Foucault and Derrida) to the new materialist
school of thought (e.g. Braidotti and Grosz, to name only two) and its
apparent limitations. In the ethos of the arts, we do not attempt in this
book to resolve or to provide solutions or answers but rather to contest,
problematize and deliberately provoke.
In a somewhat messy methodology, we narrate this book as a hybrid of
personal reflections, poetics and anecdotes with a more rigorous, scholarly
approach while mixing in visual representations of our artworks. These
are poor relatives to the living, semi-living and dying artworks we have
presented materially in different locations around the world, whether in
scientific laboratories, art galleries and art fairs, science and natural history
museums, public spaces, cafes or other strange places. These artworks,
when presented in the flesh, we believe, have much more of their own
stories to ‘tell’.
Yet this is our humble and somewhat futile attempt to narrate post-
anthropocentric stories, to explore whether a critical engagement with
life (sciences) can be sustained in an increasingly neoliberal and capital-
istic society which treats life as a technology and a resource to extract
profit from. This book is being published in a pivotal time of human
history, when notions of sentiency and agency usually associated with
living systems are being transferred to technological ones. Furthermore,
not only is sentiency being attributed to machinic bodies, it is literally and
conceptually being engineered out of the living in the quest for standard-
ization, efficiency and automation. One of the questions we ask here is,
is this the world we desire?
INTRODUCTION xi
Tissues, Cultures, Art is concerned with our – humans’ – current

psychopathologies of control, in particular when it comes to controlling
life. One of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens is that it modifies
and manipulates its surroundings to fit its needs; its extended phenotype
now reaches every corner of the Earth and further out into space. Life
and living systems are not immune to this reach of humans. In other
words, as human knowledge about life increases, so does the tendency to
control and shape living things for human-centric wants and desires. Life
is not only increasingly becoming a raw material to be engineered but, in
new and complicated ways, manipulated living systems are being used as
cultural objects and subjects. Artists, scientists, designers and engineers all
play their part in this transformation of life itself. This creates a range of
ontological conundrums and fantastical expectations as to what life could
be and what life can do.
Following the experience and success of our Tissue Culture & Art
Project back in 1996 (the story of which is narrated here), SymbioticA
laboratory was founded in 2000. SymbioticA is the first research labora-
tory of its kind, enabling artists and researchers to engage in wet biology
practices in a research-intensive university’s biological science depart-
ment. With an emphasis on experiential practice, SymbioticA encourages
better understanding and articulation of cultural ideas around scientific
knowledge and informed critique of the ethical and cultural issues of
life manipulation. The establishment of SymbioticA has encouraged the
growth of BioArt laboratories and centres within and outside academia,
many of which have been set up by residents of our laboratory. Given
the historical scope of this institution and its influence on the field, we
are dedicating a separate book in the Palgrave Studies in BioArt series to
the story of SymbioticA. In addition, many of the follow-up books in this
series are written by artists who were residents at SymbioticA laboratory
and were mentored by us.
Living things exist as cultural objects in all human societies throughout
history, as utilitarian as well as ritualistic and symbolic objects. Domesti-
cation shifted the power dynamics between humans and the nonhuman
living world around us, resulting in anthropocentric aesthetic and
emotional biases driving some of the selection pressures on domesticated
organisms. It was only at the end of the twentieth century that artists
started to experiment, in a serious yet playful way, with the manipula-
tion of living biological systems, organisms and their parts. This may not
be surprising, as humans’ perceived ability to manipulate living systems,
xii INTRODUCTION
from the molecular to the ecological level, has become systematic, more
predictable, more reproducible and easier. It is important to qualify
this assumption as this view is very short-sighted; in the long term,
the cascading impacts of these newfound ways of manipulating life are
nothing but messy, unpredictable and unreproducible. The complexity
of life and its interaction with itself and the environment is still out of
the grasp of the human ability to comprehend, let alone to control. The
new ways of engineering life come in a time when human-made dry, hard
and digital technologies are becoming more lifelike (e.g. ‘autonomous’
driverless cars and artificial intelligence systems).
In the twenty-five years since we began our artistic project, many things
about life and how humans relate to it have changed. This book narrates
some of these changes and concludes with our proposal, given the poverty
of language especially as it relates to the concept of life, of the notion of
Secular Vitalism. This is a way of being in which we extend to life special
consideration that is different from our treatment of non-carbon-based
things.
As ‘nature’ breaks down and we are on the verge of the so-called
fourth industrial revolution, where living systems and biological processes
are harnessed to undo environmental destruction and usher in a guilt-
free time of plenty, we believe that critical artistic expression with and
about life is called for. Our almost three decades of working in scientific
laboratories and the corresponding range of scientific understanding and
technological development over this time are reflected here. Those who
are familiar with our work may recognize some of the discussion from
numerous published papers. This is the first time these thoughts have
been gathered into one extended and reflective manuscript.
We ask what compels us, or, in other words, what is the human
imperative which drives us, to assert control over living systems that
exist independently from us, while nonliving technologies, computer-
generated algorithms and other human-made systems escape our control?
Our artistic expressions are a visceral struggle to articulate our human
complicity in this paradox.
This book is a hybrid product of embodied aesthetic and concep-
tual investigation, yet is based on contesting attempts to understand and
control life. It is also a book about our own personal journey starting as
young enthusiastic artists entering biological laboratories with the hope of
making ‘a better world’ through advancing the knowledge and technolo-
gies of the life sciences. Once embedded in this niche and its different
INTRODUCTION xiii
manifestations in the real world, we were forced into a reality check and
now – older, weary and, following Haraway’s words, ‘staying with the
trouble’1 – we immerse ourselves in the unpredictability of materials and
phenomena such as sunlight, soil and shit (the title of our most recent
artistic project).
Chapter 1 goes back to the mid-nineties, when we coined the evoca-
tive term ‘semi-living’ to refer to tissue-engineered constructs/sculptures
hosted in techno-scientific ‘bodies’ (petri dishes, incubators, bioreactors
– manufactured devices or systems that support a biologically active envi-
ronment). Here we outline the technological and conceptual backbone
of the semi-living as both objects and subjects, maintaining that the
semi-living applies to an array of issues, such as historical and evolving
relationships with scientifically constructed living entities; the fragile and
ambiguous boundaries between the living, nonliving and/or dead; the
interdependency of living systems, including humans, and technology;
and popular culture and political and social-based metaphors concerned
with the undead, among others.
Chapter 2 explores our artistic projects which contest the DNA-centric
view of life, particularly responding to the ‘genohype’ following the so-
called completion of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000.
Our artistic exploration challenges the scientific reductionism, and public
perception, of the idea that there is not much more to life than the DNA
code. We argue that not only is this wrong, but it is also an ideological
stance that entrenches a chauvinistic perspective using DNA and its asso-
ciated epistemologies and metaphors. We, through our artworks, called
for a more contextualized and diverse view of life and the fallacy of the
desire for one ‘elegant’ universalized, systematic way to explain and cate-
gorize life. This was also the time, in our own artistic development, when
we shifted our interest from cells and tissues to the context within which
they operate – their surrogate techno-scientific machinic bodies.
Chapter 3 takes the incubator as a starting point for the investigation
of systems which support life. From the invention of the chicken incu-
bator by the early Egyptians to current research into artificial wombs, we
explore the outsourcing of care for life to the automated machine.
1 Donna J. Haraway. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
xiv INTRODUCTION
Chapter 4 explains how we ended up, despite our best intentions,

creating artworks which became precursors to industries such as biofabri-
cation and cellular agriculture. Here we introduce the term ‘metabolic rift
technologies’ to point to the growing rift between humans and their envi-
ronment, and the ridiculous fantasy of living in a technologically mediated
utopia, whether it is producing food without ‘nature’ or an existence free
from nature and free of consequences.
Chapter 5 illustrates artworks that explore life’s resistance to system-
ization and human categorization. Context again is explored through
positioning living and semi-living artworks in different institutional
settings – from the natural history museum to art galleries and luxury
goods retailers. It is an opportunity to celebrate some of the strangeness
of living systems, whether they are human-made or not.
The concluding chapter visits and revitalizes the idea of Secular
Vitalism, asking whether there is something unique to life that we can
relate to (as we are life!) without resorting to metaphysical explanations.
This is more of an artistic provocation rather than a careful philosophical
study and it is very much needed today.
Contents
1 The Semi-living 1
2 Information, Genohype and DNA Chauvinism 39
3 Who Cares? Outsourcing Labour to Incubators 55
4 The Reverse Ontology of Sentience: The
Technologically Mediated Victimless Utopia 77
5 Taxonomies, Categorizations and Queer Life 103
6 Concluding Notes: Secular Vitalism 129
Index 143
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 B(w)omb, 1998 3

Fig. 1.2 Hamsa 1998 4
Fig. 1.3 Stone Age of Biology 2000 7
Fig. 1.4 [Carrel and Lindbergh’s organ perfusion pump, 1938]
on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science 14
Fig. 1.5 The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech,
Nantes, 2003 18
Fig. 1.6 The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech,
Nantes, 2003 19
Fig. 1.7 Extra Ear – ¼ Scale, 2003 29
Fig. 2.1 Pig Wings, 2000–2001: ‘the good, the bad and the extinct’ 41
Fig. 2.2 Pig Wings, 2000–2001: ‘the good, the bad and the extinct’ 42
Fig. 2.3 Oron near a sculpture of the Golem in a restaurant
at Prague 48
Fig. 2.4 Mechanism of Life, 2013 52
Fig. 3.1 The Semi-living Worry Dolls 2000 63
Fig. 3.2 The process of giving birth to a Worry Doll 2000 64
Fig. 3.3 Semi-living Doll H 2000 65
Fig. 3.4 Compostcubator 2019 69
Fig. 3.5 Compostcubator 2019 71
xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 3.6 Growth of cells in Compostcubator and control (with Kalle

Sipilä, Christina Philippeos and Jess Sells from the Centre
for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at Kings College
London) 71
Fig. 4.1 Tissue-Engineered Steak No. 1, 2000. Pre-natal sheep
skeletal muscle and degradable PGA polymer scaffold.
Part of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr Research Fellowship
in the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication
Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard
Medical School 79
Fig. 4.2 From Disembodied Cuisine installation, Nantes, France,
2003 82
Fig. 4.3 Victimless Leather – A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown
in a Technoscientific ‘Body’, 2004 85
Fig. 4.4 Stir Fly, 2016, in collaboration with Robert Foster 94
Fig. 4.5 Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle, 2022, in collaboration
with Steve Berrick 100
Fig. 5.1 OddNeolifism, 2010, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Australia 109
Fig. 5.2 OddNeolifism, 2010, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Australia 110
Fig. 5.3 Biomess, 2018, Art Gallery of Western Australia 120
Fig. 5.4 Biomess, 2018, Art Gallery of Western Australia 121
Fig. 6.1 ‘Untitled’ From the Monsters Series 1998 130
CHAPTER 1
The Semi-living
The cardboard box was delivered to Traian Chirila’s laboratory at the

Lion’s Eye Institute, an Australian medical research institute affiliated
with the University of Western Australia. We opened it to discover the
somewhat gruesome contents of about ten fluffy white rabbits’ heads cut
into halves, the white fur stained with fresh red blood. We were told
that the rabbits had been slaughtered earlier that morning; the bodies
had been delivered to a gourmet restaurant while the heads were sent
to a neuroscience laboratory, where they were cut in half and the brains
extracted to be used for research. Chirila’s laboratory then received these
halved heads, requiring the eyes for research into the development of an
artificial cornea.
Our next step was to ‘pop out’ the eyes. Using small scissors, we cut
the skin around the eyes and severed the optic nerve at the back of the
eyeballs. Once the eyes were disembodied, we immersed them in nutrient
media liquid with a high concentration of antibiotics in a 50 ml flask.
Once sealed, the flask was put in a fridge overnight. The following day,
in sterile conditions, we learnt how to cut the eyeball open and gently
dissect the thin layer of epithelial cells covering the front part of the eye.
Using scissors, we then mechanically dissected the layer of tissue. With an
enzymatic agent, we further separated the tissue into disassociated cells
that were seeded in a tissue culture flask with the appropriate nutrient
media for their growth. Finally, we placed the flask in a 37 °C incubator.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9_1
2 I. ZURR AND O. CATTS
In only a few hours, the cells attached to the bottom of the flask and
began to multiply.
This was back in 1997, while doing a research residency1 in a labo-
ratory that was developing an artificial cornea.2 A routine procedure of
obtaining cells from a primary source (an animal body) shifted our own
perception regarding life: we were able to get living cells from some-
thing as dead as half a head with no brain, more than 24 hours after the
animal was slaughtered; we viscerally realized that life can be extended by
culturing cells taken from a dead animal. Here, the boundaries between
life and death are gradual, and the life (or death) of the animal is decou-
pled from the life of its parts (the cells). By growing living cells derived
from dead flesh – with technological support – we were working with
entities that were both (or neither) dead and alive. This was the first
instance, as part of our artistic journey, that we encountered the poverty of
language as it relates to life. We felt that there were no words to describe
these different forms of liveness; therefore, we referred to the living frag-
ments from the dead rabbits, sustained alive by technology, as semi-living
entities.
Our first series of artworks, titled simply The Tissue Culture & Art,
Stage 1, was concerned with growing, observing, documenting and
presenting partially living ‘objects’ as pieces of art. At the time we did
not even entertain the idea of taking the artistic tissue sculptures to the
gallery due to technical hurdles and the perceived health and safety issues
of having living tissue-engineered constructs in a public space. We grew
tissues (fibroblast and epidermal cells) over miniature three-dimensional
glass figurines in shapes of human-made technological artefacts, such as
cogwheels. We used microscopes, a three-dimensional computer scanner
and medical imaging technologies to generate animated sequences, and
digital montages that described the growth of the living artefact and the
semi-living sculptures. We were especially fond of the artwork of a glass
figurine 2 cm high and 0.5 cm wide/deep that we designed to depict
the iconic image of a bomb, a symbol of humans’ destructive technolo-
gies. We grew connective tissue over its surface to later photograph its
1 Funded by an arts grant from the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in Western
Australia.
2 T.V. Chirila. 2001. An overview of the development of artificial corneas with porous
skirts and the use of PHEMA for such an application. Biomaterials 22: 3311–3317.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-9612(01)00168-5.
1 THE SEMI-LIVING 3
Fig. 1.1 B(w)omb,

1998
different angles, focusing on different areas, using an inverted micro-

scope. Once we overlaid all the images (using Photoshop software) into
a poetic montage, it resembled more of a fertility goddess (Fig. 1.1).
Therefore, we titled it B(w)omb.
From the same series of works (Fig. 1.2).
Looking back, the catalogue text that accompanied our first exhibi-
tion in 1998 seems very naïve and earnest (as were we), though it offers
a starting point of epistemological liberation from the life sciences or
biomedicine into a different, and public, context:
Current and future development in biological derived technologies, in

particular in the field of tissue engineering, may yield objects that could
be designed and artistically manipulated. This possibility raises many issues
Fig. 1.2 Hamsa 1998
that have to be addressed. Those issues concern aspects of human devel-

opment and scientific progress, and the interaction of humans (whatever
kind they may be) with their environment. The use of artificially grown
living skin (or living surface coating) as an independent tissue (by that
I mean living tissue that is sustained alive and grows not as part of an
organism but with artificial support) can become an exciting new artistic
palette which never existed before. The use of this palette will not be just
a method of creating new art forms, but also the actual process can be
seen as an artistic statement and investigation of possible futures. In those
futures the use of organic systems may replace and/or seamlessly interact
with human-made structures to the extent that our cultural perceptions
of what is alive and what is artificial will be redundant. This possible shift
will represent a change in values and a shift in the perception of humans
and nature. The purpose of the proposed project is to enable the artists to
address some of those issues …
Why?
To be able to use and generate a completely new art form that is yet
to be explored and utilized. The manipulated growth of living cells in
in-vitro conditions represents a new way for artistic expression with the
1 THE SEMI-LIVING 5
unique combination of shapes, colours and movement. An exploration of

such aesthetics in three-dimensional space was, as far as we know, never
utilized and explored artistically.
To highlight current technological developments and their cultural and
social implications. It is obvious that technological and scientific develop-
ments are exceeding the cultural capacity to comprehend these changes.
This is why this kind of artistic expression is so important now. Art that
can be seen as the optimal medium to generate a discussion and a debate
dealing with the contradictions between what we know about the world
and society’s values, which are still based on old and traditional perceptions
of the world.
To generate broader discussion concerning these issues and their ethics:
Our project will be a genuine attempt, free from scientific or commercial
hidden agendas, to raise different possibilities for the future as a base for
pure discussion about the ethics and values of manipulating living matter
and incorporating it with non-living systems.
To create a dialogue between the wider community and the scientific
community, using art as a generator of critical and aesthetical debate.
To create a radically different point of view, from which both the wider
community and the scientific community will be able to gain practically as
well as philosophically and culturally.
Stage Two of the project further explored the materiality of tissue and
nonliving material hybrids. In this stage, we grew muscle, epidermal and
connective tissue over biopolymers. As the cell cultures developed, they
grew inside the scaffolding as well as around it and had a better ‘grip’
on the structure. The result was a collection of images that documented
the ‘fusion’ of living tissue with human artefacts that were presented as
visual montages in the gallery space, sometimes alongside relics from the
process such as the semi-living constructs with fixed dyed tissue.
We titled Stage Three of the project Force and Intelligence on Plastic
as we extended our skills to growing muscle (‘force’) and neurons (‘intel-
ligence’) over P(Hema) hydrogel structures we moulded in different
shapes. The experiments led to the exhibition we titled The Stone Age
of Biology, which was shown in 2000 as part of the Perth International
Arts Festival at Scitech Science Centre in our home city of Perth, Western
Australia. The context of the exhibition – a science centre – as well as
the theme of the exhibition reflected that our early engagements with
biotechnology were rooted in a kind of awe and the relative innocence of
non-experts coming to work in a scientific laboratory. As will be shown
through the narrative of this book, this changed rapidly as we further

embedded ourselves within the biological laboratory, releasing the knowl-
edge and know-how (epistemology) we gained from working in the lab
to the cultural realm, which inadvertently was picked up by the consumer
goods industry.
The Stone Age of Biology posited, at the turn of the new millennium,
that we are in the midst of a major technological shift in which advance-
ments in biotechnology will radically alter life in ways we cannot possibly
imagine. The series of images featured mouse and rabbit muscle cells and
fish nerve cells grown over hydrogels shaped like European prehistoric
stone artefacts borrowed from the Western Australia Museum. Each arte-
fact was scanned in three dimensions using a touch sense scanner, which
allowed for the creation of miniature hydrogels. In an analogy to the
ways, the production of stone tools changed humans into a technology-
based organism and changed human society in ways the original stone
tool producers could not imagine, the same is happening now as we enter
another period of technological advancement, this time with biotech-
nology. For the first time we are treating life – in all of its conceptions,
including ourselves – as a resource for new biological tools that will be
part of our industrial society. The early humans carving their stone tools
was a result of a mental shift that separated them from nature for the first
time, and we have never looked back.
We asked through the exhibition what kind of mental shift we would
go through as part of this (bio)technological revolution? How will we
treat our biological bodies? How will we perceive manufactured living
matter? How much technology will invade the body and how much of
the body will invade technology? (Fig. 1.3).
In order to contextualize further our own initial shift regarding our
understandings of life, we need to dwell on the years back when living
bodies were first fragmented into separate (semi) living cellular colonies
independent of their original body.
Early Years of Tissue Culture

Much of the biomedical and biotechnological (and some artistic) research
done today is enabled through experimentation on cells in vitro. The
literal meaning of in vitro is ‘in glass’ and this term is now used to describe
a process ‘performed or taking place in a test tube, culture dish, or
1 THE SEMI-LIVING 7
Fig. 1.3 Stone Age of

Biology 2000
elsewhere outside a living organism’.3 This research includes developing

vaccines and generating antibodies. Cells in vitro have paved the way
to fields such as artificial reproductive technologies, tissue engineering,
stem cell research and development, and biofabrication (which will be
further discussed in Chapter 4). Aesthetic and performative considera-
tions, ideologies and some frivolous engagements developed alongside.
Here, we would like to travel back to the early years of tissue culture and
its socio-cultural and onto-epistemological affects, which linger on today.
Well into the twenty-first century, our scientific and cultural under-
standings of the concept of a ‘living body’ are continuing to shift. This
century we have added to the mid-to-late twentieth-century dominant
narrative of the body as coded DNA, offering an alternative view of the
3 Lexico. 2022. In vitro. https://www.lexico.com/definition/in_vitro. Accessed 22 July

2022.
body as an ecology, not only of parts, but also of different kinds of living
organism. The study of the microbiome has revealed that each body,
including the human body, is a symbiont within itself – we are more
than human. The human microbiota consists of 10 trillion to 100 tril-
lion symbiotic microbial cells, primarily bacteria in the gut that play a
role in our health, mood and behaviour. As this book will argue, there
is a need for a further shift in the mind-set of ‘a body’ (or a self) to the
understanding that, rather than a discrete entity, it is an ongoing semi-
permeable process of ecological being/becoming. Yet the endeavour to
understand, fix, enhance and automate bodies by fragmenting them into
discrete parts is still an important part of human enterprise and is lurking
in our onto-epistemological formation of discovering and articulating
what life is.
The cell is considered to be, from a western materialist perspective,
the basic unit of life – an organic automaton. Anything less complex than
the unit of the cell is not considered to be living. The realization that
communities of cells can be sustained alive and even grown externally
to the body if given the appropriate conditions is not just the result of
scientific advances; it has also required a cognitive shift regarding what
a body is or, more appropriately, what constitutes a body as well as new
interpretations of what life is. The first shift required an ‘assault’ on the
notion of the singular body. In western philosophy, which is based on
dialectics and dichotomies, it arose from the demonstration that an indi-
vidual body can be fragmented into smaller entities or semi-beings and
that these ‘collectives’ have complex and autonomous relations even when
they are completely disconnected from their original host body. Hence the
divide between a body and its environment is not a sealed one but rather
is diffused by membranes, and furthermore the divide between a whole
body and parts of a body is gradual and enables the fuzzy zone of the
semi/partial living.
Philip White, writing in 1963, dated the origin of the idea of tissue
culture back to Aristotle (340 BCE) and Theophrastus (320 BCE)
because they described animals and plants as being made up of unified
elements: blood and sap, flesh and fibre, nerves and veins, bone and
wood. Malpighi (1675) and Grew (1682) theorized that these elements
are literally ‘woven’ (tissé) into tissues of still finer elements.4 In 1667,
4 Philip R. White. 1963. The Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells. New York: The
Ronald Press.
1 THE SEMI-LIVING 9
Robert Hooke, using one of the earliest microscopes, observed cell struc-
tures in a thin slice of cork. He coined the word ‘cell’ as the structure
reminded him of a honeycomb. As observed by Georges Canguilhem,
already at this point the underlying notion of a body as a collective of cells
had been raised by the choice of the word ‘cell’. Canguilhem asks: ‘Yet
who can say whether or not the human mind, in consciously borrowing
from the beehive this term for a part of an organism, did not uncon-
sciously borrow as well the notion of the cooperative labour that produces
the honeycomb?’ He then answers: ‘What is certain is that affective and
social values of cooperation and association lurk more or less discreetly in
the background of the developing cell theory.’5 Hence the notion of the
cell was intrinsically linked to a larger body, the way an individual citizen
is linked to her social community and to its productive labour.
The second important development was the realization that the cell
was in fact an autonomous agent, as if a ‘little body’ by itself. In making
this claim, H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells argued that the term
‘cell’ was thus misleading, and offered a more ‘individualistic’ metaphor –
a corpuscle. They expressed their disapproval in a somewhat emotive way
in their book, The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge
about Life and its Possibilities (1929):
The word ‘cell’ is a most unfortunate word in this connection. That is why
the triplex writer has put fastidious inverted commas about it in the last
two sentences. He dislikes handling and using it … and many people at
the outset of their biological reading are misled, therefore, into imagining
that our living tissues have a sort of honeycomb structure. Nothing could
be farther from the reality. The proper word should be ‘corpuscle’ (little
body) and not cell at all.6
Furthermore, they argued, cells which are taken away from the body and
grown in vitro are cut loose from its labour: ‘An organ such as the brain
or liver is like the City during working hours, a tissue culture is like
5 François Delaporte (ed.). 1994. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges
Canguilhem. New York: Zone Books, p. 162.
6 H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells. 1929. The Science of Life: A Summary of
Contemporary Knowledge About Life and Its Possibilities. Vol. 1. London: Amalgamated
Press, p. 26.
Regent’s Park on a Bank Holiday, a spectacle of rather futile freedom.’7

Also implied here is that the body is like the nation state and the cells are
its productive citizens.
The botanist Matthias Schleiden (1838) and zoologist Theodor
Schwann (1839) were the first to formulate modern ‘cell theory’.
Schwann wrote:
One can thus construct the following two hypotheses concerning the origin
of organic phenomena such as growth: either this origin is a function of
the organism as a whole – or growth does not take place by means of any
force residing in the entire organism, but each elementary part possesses an
individual force. We have seen that all organisms consist of essentially like
parts, the cells; that these cells are formed and grow according to essentially
the same laws; that these processes are thus everywhere the result of the
same forces. If, therefore, we find that some of these elementary parts
… are capable of being separated from the organism and of continuing to
grow independently, we can conclude that each cell … would be capable of
developing independently if only there be provided the external conditions
under which it exists in the organism.8
Wilhelm Roux (1885) isolated, or removed, a medullary plate from a

chick and kept it alive for some days in saline solution.9 Julius Arnold
(1887) was ‘cultivating’ leucocytes and other cells by soaking very thin
slices of pith of the Elder tree in aqueous humour from the eyes of
frogs.10 These were then implanted under the skin of frogs, which were
soon infected by leucocytes. He then removed the slices of pith at inter-
vals to dishes of saline solution or of aqueous humour and observed
that the leucocytes migrated from the pith into the nutrient, where they
survived for some time. The first successful ‘tissue culture’ was grown by
Ross Harrison (1907, 1910) when he cultivated the neuroblast of the
frog in its clotted lymph and observed the growth of the fibrillae from
7 Wells, Huxley and Wells, The Science of Life, p. 29.

8 Theodor Schwann (1839) cited in White, Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells,
pp. 188–190.
9 Wilhelm Roux. 1890. Über die Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen.
10 Jorge R. Pasqualini and Robert Scholler. 1992. Hormones and Fetal Pathophysiology.
New York: Informa Health Care, p. 602.
1 THE SEMI-LIVING 11
the central body.11 Harrison was able to grow and proliferate cells rather
than merely sustain fragments of a body; therefore, he could legitimately
claim to be the first to have successfully ‘created’ partial life. However,
Harrison had devised the method only to solve a particular problem, and
once this was done he made no attempt to develop it further.
Harrison experimented with isolated pieces of living frog embryonic
tissue and grew them in hanging drops of frog lymph enclosed in glass
slides. His aim was to view and learn about the growth of a neuron cell
over time.12 The experiment was designed for the purpose of solving
a specific ‘riddle’ which puzzled neuroscientists at the time: the debate
whether an axon grows from its stem (like a fingernail) or from its end
part. The then method of histology, in which cells were fixed (killed),
dyed and mounted on a slide as a two-dimensional specimen, did not
allow such an observation. It was Harrison’s technical solution to a
problem of representing change over time in living biological matter that
led to the technique of tissue culture. Harrison’s ability to sustain life in
in-vitro conditions did not come as a result of a development of a new
technology but rather as a shift in and combination of ideas: ‘Any origi-
nality, therefore, that may be claimed for this work is due to combination
of ideas rather than to the introduction of any particularly new device.’13
In retrospect, he said:
it seems rather surprising that recent work upon the survival of small pieces
of tissue, and their growth and differentiation outside of the parent body,
should have attracted so much attention, but we can account for it by the
way the individuality of the organism as a whole overshadows in our minds
the less obvious fact that each one of us may be resolved into myriads of
cellular units with some definite structure and with autonomous powers.14
11 Ross G. Harrison. 1910. The outgrowth of the nerve fiber as a mode of protoplasmic
movement. Journal of Experimental Zoology 142: 5–73. https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.140
1420103.
12 For more see, H. Landecker. 2002. New times for biology: nerve cultures and the
advent of cellular life in vitro. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical
Sciences 33: 667–694. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1369-8486(02)00026-2.
13 Harrison (1913) cited in Landecker, New times for biology.
14 Ross G. Harrison. 1913. The life of tissues outside the organism from the embry-
ological standpoint. Transactions of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons 9:
63–75.
Harrison did not make the mental shift that would enable him to see
the long-term implications of the technique he developed not only in the
scientific sense (tissue culture is a technique that is widely and extensively
used for many purposes from tissue engineering to stem cell research,
reproductive technologies, therapeutic cloning and pharmaceutical uses
such as drug and vaccine development), but also in its radical implications
to conventional ontological understandings of life, bodies and today’s
notion of material agencies.
Montrose Burrows (1910) studied with Harrison and introduced the
idea of substituting blood plasma for lymph in the cultivation of chick
cells. Together with Alexis Carrel (1910 onwards) they developed the
use of embryo extracts as growth-promoting nutrient and elaborated the
methods for growing a great variety of animal tissues. Carrel continued
to explore the technique of tissue culture as the beginning of a wider
investigation into the notion of partial life.
Alexis Carrel and Revivalism
Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the
unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate
the lifeless clay?
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The person who made in-vitro life a central object of scientific interest and
beyond was Dr Alexis Carrel. By prolonging the life of body parts inside
a new artificial ‘body’, he showed that cells in culture were almost/sort
of a new life form. Carrel’s assistant, Eduard Uhlenhuth, wrote in 1916:
‘Through the discovery of tissue culture we have, so to speak, created a
new type of body on which to grow the cell; i.e., a new form of cell envi-
ronment, in many respects different from the normal body that nature has
given the cell in which to develop’ (emphasis added).15 Tissue culture, in
a sense, coupled two opposite narratives: (1) the Frankenstein-like fantasy
of revivalism from the dead (and nonliving matter) and eternal growth;
15 Eduard Uhlenhuth. 1916. Changes in pigment epithelium cells and iris pigment cells
of Rana pipiens induced by changes in environmental conditions. Journal of Experimental
Medicine 24: 689–699, p. 690. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC212
5483/.
and (2) the outsourcing of bodily functions and a symbolic agency to the
machine (‘a new type of body’).
While Harrison’s interest lay in observing differentiation and move-
ment, Carrel’s was directed towards observing ‘life’ and its essential
characteristics – growth and reproduction – outside the body, as part of
his continuing interest in the field of longevity, organ transplant, suturing
and surgery techniques. Carrel was the first to look at the technique of
tissue culture and growth of cells outside the body as a central object of
interest separated from other techniques – a technology that, he believed,
would enable him to capture the minimum ‘essence’ or vital force of life.
In addition, Carrel, in the spirit of the transhumanists, believed that this
human technological advancement would not only extend life but also
make immortality possible.
Carrel won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912 and became a
popular public figure who interweaved onto his discoveries ontolog-
ical, political and ethically questionable ideologies far from the strictly
biomedical or even scientific realms. In his visceral organism (or reduced
organism) experiments, the most explicitly stated goal was to attain
‘autonomous life’ for isolated organs or systems of organs and to under-
stand life processes through body reduction and the visibility of its
isolated organs.16 Needless to say, these experiments involved invasive
vivisection procedures. Together with the famous aviator Charles Lind-
bergh, Carrel devised the organ perfusion pump, a mechanical pump for
circulating nutrient fluid around large organs kept alive outside of their
host body. This was successful in keeping animal organs alive for several
days or weeks, but this was not considered long enough for practical appli-
cation in surgery.17 To describe the use of the perfusion pump, Carrel and
Lindbergh jointly published The Culture of Organs in 1938 (Fig. 1.4).18
The pump was a technological device designed not only for function
(to maintain the life of an organ) but also for aesthetics – to present the
new wonders and utopian potentials of techno-scientific advancement.
16 Alexis Carrel. 1912. Visceral organisms. JAMA LIX: 2105–2106. https://doi.org/

10.1001/jama.1912.04270120090001.
17 In 1953 surgeon John H. Gibbon developed this idea further by introducing the
heart–lung machine for open heart surgery.
18 Alexis Carrel and Charles Lindbergh. 1938. The Culture of Organs. New York:
Hoeber.
Fig. 1.4 [Carrel and Lindbergh’s organ perfusion pump, 1938] on display at
the International Museum of Surgical Science
The affiliation with Lindbergh, the great American hero, extended to

a shared ideology of eugenics, which Carrel outlined in his 1935 publica-
tion, Man, the Unknown.19 A conviction view of science combined with
religious, even mystical, declarations led him to speculate on the great
problems of human destiny. Carrel theorized that humankind could reach
perfection through selective reproduction and the leadership of an intel-
lectual (male) aristocracy. Through scientific enlightenment, humanity
would be free from disease and would gain long life and spiritual advance-
ment. Carrel suggested gas chambers as a solution to eradicate unwanted
19 Alexis Carrel. 1935. Man, the Unknown. New York: Harper & Row.
elements in society.20 ‘Eugenics’, Carrel wrote in the last chapter of the

book, ‘is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong. A great race
must propagate its best elements.’21 The book, a worldwide bestseller
translated into nineteen languages, brought Carrel international atten-
tion. A 1954 article in Collier’s magazine described Carrel as, ‘A brilliant
man … Dr. Carrel made valuable contributions to the science of tissue
culture’.22 Yet he is considered an eccentric mystic and fascist, or at least
a Vichy-collaborating eugenicist.
The Laboratory
Laboratories are places of labour-performance by the living, semi-living
and nonliving apparatuses (actants) occupying it. Techno-scientific inno-
vation and performance art share elements of the spectacle, the affective
and aesthetic considerations. Life sciences laboratories are also places
of extraction, isolation, reductionism and manipulation, where life is
controlled, colonized and mechanized.
Carrel’s practice in the lab and in the public domain involved a produc-
tion of elaborate theatrical performance, to the point that he was accused
of being ‘a hindrance rather than a positive force in the further devel-
opment of tissue culture after its initial establishment’.23 This was also
due to Carrel’s eccentric, mystic attitude towards ‘life’; Carrel’s practice
and laboratory were heavily involved in rituals. While head of the labo-
ratory for experimental surgery in the Rockefeller Institute in New York,
he designed it to conduct his experiments in a unique way. His contem-
poraries criticized him on the grounds that he treated tissue culture as
an occult art; the lab walls were grey and he insisted his assistants wear
20 ‘Those who have murdered, robbed … kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of
their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and econom-
ically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar
treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts’ (Carrel,
Man, the Unknown, pp. 290–291).
21 Carrel, Man, the Unknown, p. 299.
Hannah Landecker. 2004. Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’: the
origins of tissue culture. In Creating a Tradition of Biomedical Research: Contributions to
the History of the Rockefeller University, ed. D. Stapleton. New York: Rockefeller University
Press, pp. 151–174.
22 Landecker, Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’.
23 Landecker, Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’.
flowing black robes and hoods in the laboratory. ‘The whole tissue-culture
field suffered in the 1930s because of his eccentric behavior.’24
Carrel together with the popular press mythologized tissue culture, as
illustrated by the headlines in the Daily Express when he visited London
in 1924: ‘Alive without a body, heart that throbs by itself. Twelve years.
US wonder surgeon here’.25 By giving a scientific technique a theatrical
edge, whether through the use of mise en scène, performative elements,
and so on, Carrel was attempting to ignite human imagination to the
‘nature’ and possibilities of these new ‘lives’.
P.R. White wrote in the 1950s:
I have sought to strip from the study of this subject its former atmosphere
of mystery and complications. The grey walls, black gowns, masks and
hoods; the shining twisted glass and pulsating coloured fluids; the gleaming
stainless steel, hidden steam jets, enclosed microscopes and huge witches’
cauldrons of the ‘great’ laboratories of ‘tissue culture’ have led far too many
persons to consider cell culture too abstruse, recondite and sacrosanct a
field to be invaded by mere hoi polloi.26
It can be argued that the Hollywood version of Dr Frankenstein was

based on Dr Carrel through the laboratory aesthetics, rituals and the
mythical stories propagated about him, as well as his belief in a techno-
logical utopia that led to conceptual disastrous consequences. Carrel was
called a ‘modern Frankenstein’.27 On 27 March 1910,
ten days after the release of Edison’s Frankenstein – half a page of the
New York Times Sunday edition was devoted to Carrel’s success at what
we would now call open-heart surgery on cats and dogs … He stitched a
damaged vein in a newborn’s leg to a major artery in her father’s wrist,
thus creating a live transfusion that, according to the article, saved the life
of the baby.28
24 Bill Davidson (1954, May 14. Probing the secret of life. Collier’s Weekly, 81) cited
in Landecker, Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’.
25 Daily Express (1924, July 21, 3) cited in Susan Merrill Squier. 1994. Babies in
Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, p. 210.
26 White, The Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells.
27 Susan Hitchcock Tyler. 2007. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, p. 134.
28 Tyler, Frankenstein, pp. 133–134.
Was it the realization that complex bodies are a collection of commu-

nities of cells that led Carrel to his eugenics beliefs? The ontological
questions thrown up by Carrel’s scientific experiments ironically resulted
in his mystic and eugenic tendencies. However, rather than looking at
tissue culture or partial life as a metaphor for the human endeavour to
achieve pure and perfected life, through our sometimes uneasy expe-
rience with cellular manipulations in the scientific laboratory, we have
understood and communicated partial life or semi-life as a hybrid, fragile,
context-dependent and far from perfect entity.
It is important in our artistic work to resurrect the tainted history of
the life sciences and the deliberate or nondeliberate ideologies it raised
(and raises) through our histories. As this book will demonstrate, life
is going through yet another ontological shift with technological and
automated acceleration intertwined with ecological devastation.
While the Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project abhors Carrel’s mysti-
cism and belief in eugenics and considers his aesthetic accomplishments
the poor cousin of his science, his work cannot but help set the tone for
aesthetic engagements with tissue culture and the disintegration of the
body as a whole. It is also a constant reminder that the sciences, and
especially the life sciences, do not operate independently of the society
and culture they stem from.
In the early years of our practice, we had to construct a laboratory
in the gallery to be able to care for the semi-living sculptures (in later
years we resorted to using existing or fabricating automated systems that
stood for the laboratory itself). The laboratory became a dominant mise
en scène which many times overshadowed the small uncharismatic tissue
construct. The laboratory acted as a functional and theatrical setting. It
communicated the authenticity of the artwork (these are living, growing
cells!) as well as highlighting a scientific aesthetics. In order to change
the biomedical context, we had to redesign the laboratory to offer new
affective scenarios and reflections.
For this reason, the design of the TC&A laboratory, used in the 2003
exhibition L’Art Biotech in Nantes, referenced Carrel’s laboratory where
the first successful tissue culture experiments were performed in 1910 (see
Fig. 1.3).
We are interested in the wider history of the development of tissue
culture technique and its different articulations, and make many refer-
ences in our work to this history. Of particular importance to us have
been two scientists, Honor Fell as well as Alexis Carrel, because these
Fig. 1.5 The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech, Nantes, 2003
researchers were driven by their investigations and discoveries to ask

fundamental ontological questions about the nature of semi-life (Figs. 1.5
and 1.6).
As opposed to Carrel’s ideology, in which he proclaimed ‘A great race
must propagate its best elements’, and by default eradicate those elements
perceived as bad or ‘weak’, the artistic semi-living are defenceless, bare
life – an aggregation of cells. Through aesthetics and ritualization, we
have wanted to create an intellectual and emotional situation in which
the act of caring for or neglecting life, even partial life, is not devoid of
self-reflection regarding what the act symbolizes.
Honor Bridget Fell and the Tissue

Culture Point of View
Tissue culture came to Great Britain when Thomas Strangeways made
the technique the sole focus of his laboratory (founded in 1905). In the
Fig. 1.6 The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech, Nantes, 2003
early 1920s, Strangeways decided to focus the laboratory’s activities on

the microphysiology of disease and for that he introduced the new tech-
niques he had learned from Dr Carrel – tissue culture. With Strangeways’
death in 1926, Dr Honor Bridget Fell became the director of the labo-
ratory (which by then was funded by the Medical Research Council of
Great Britain).29
Fell independently developed quite a different type of investigation of
animal materials. Whole embryonic ‘organules’, such as bones, teeth, eyes
and glands, were grown in relatively large volumes of nutrient in simple
watch glasses and their metabolism was studied. This approach is different
to Carrel’s single-tissue pure-line studies.
29 Susan M. Squier. 2000. Life and death at Strangeways: the tissue culture point of
view. In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Theories of Contemporary
Culture), ed. P. Brodwin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 27–57, p. 31.
The British engagement with tissue culture presents a different

approach to the field not just scientifically but also in perception and ritu-
alization. The reasons might partly stem from the fact that the head of
the tissue culture lab, called (somewhat poetically, when considering the
wider context of tissue culture) ‘Strangeways’, was a woman. In her labo-
ratory, like in our SymbioticA laboratory, the personal relationships with
the cultures were openly discussed and, in what can be considered today
a posthumanist approach, Fell coined the term ‘the tissue culture point
of view’ in an attempt to explore partial life from the perspective of the
fragment of the body in the dish. In that sense the fragment of life was
not only transformed to be some sort of semi-being but, furthermore, it
was allocated a sort of agency.
This empathic approach to tissue culture created a different kind of
ritualization – more of a nurturing one, as illustrated by Susan Squier.30
Dr Fell, a known and credible scientist, was able to take the scientific
method of tissue culture beyond the methodology and scientific discourse
into the philosophical realm, discussing tissue culture as a method which
drew attention to the permeable border between life and death, the
embryonic and cancerous, the relations between humans, nonhumans and
Others.
Tracing back through the history of tissue culture, it is noticeable that
the relations between the tissue culturalist and the tissues growing in vitro
were more than just an objective experiment.
Tissue culture often suffers from its admirers. There is something
rather romantic about the idea of taking living cells out of the body and
watching them live and move in a glass vessel, like a child watching captive
tadpoles in a jar, which sometimes causes imaginative people to express
many extravagant claims and hopes that experience fails to justify.31 As
Squier writes, ‘The writings on tissue culture reveal a tendency to iden-
tify with the tissue culture as subjects rather than objects of study.’32
However, ‘the Strangeways researchers had no access to the point of view
of the culture itself. The point of view they articulate is that of the tissue
culturalist.’33 Though this position might skew the scientists from their
30 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways.

31 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways.
32 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways, p. 44.
so-called objective methodology, it also ‘encouraged scientists to draw

on their imagination as an aid to epistemology’.34 Honor Fell offers a
small and symbolic gesture towards a post-anthropocentricism, in which
the point of view taken is that of the fragmentary and context-dependent
entity that can survive only with technological support.
Tissue Culture and the Popular Imagination
If Dr. Strangeways had lived in the time of Julius Caesar and set a series
of sub-cultures growing from a scrap of him, fragments of that eminent
personage might, for all we know to the contrary, be living now.35
A decade prior to the discovery of tissue culture technique, in the late

nineteenth century, H.G. Wells wrote in a short journalistic medita-
tion, ‘The limits to individual plasticity’, printed in the London Saturday
Review in 1895, ‘We overlook only too often the fact that a living being
may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that
may be shaped and altered.’ In this article, Wells wondered just how far
shape and mental superstructure in one individual could be altered while
the ‘thread of life’ was kept going. Somewhat similar to Carrel’s concerns,
the search for the essential bare life and its versatile epi-body were a fasci-
nation. Wells’s answer, which only months later was put in the voice of Dr
Moreau, was that the living body of an individual could hypothetically be
so ‘extensively recast as even to justify our regarding the result as a new
variety of being’.36 Wells in a sense was creating a unique teratologist
discourse; in contrast to Shelley’s Frankenstein’s attempt of making new
life from discrete parts, Dr Moreau was testing the limit and plasticity of
a living being as an entity that is becoming or continues through time.
In a chapter about biotechnology and speculative fiction, Brian Stable-
ford explains:

35 Wells, Huxley and Wells, The Science of Life, p. 29.
36 H.G. Wells. 1975. The limits of individual plasticity. In H.G. Wells: Early Writings in
Science and Science Fiction, eds. R.M. Philmus and D.Y Hughes. Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, pp. 36–39.
Two scientific advances made in the first quarter of the 20th century
provided important stimuli to speculative thought. These were the tissue
culture experiments carried out by Alexis Carrel, Ross Harrison and others,
and experiments employing X-rays to induce mutations in fruit-flies carried
out by H. J. Muller and others. It is not surprising that Muller’s revela-
tions became the parent of vast numbers of stories in which animals and
humans were mutated into monsters, but there is some cause for surprise
in the fact that the speculative spinoff of the tissue-culture experiments was
also uniformly anxious.37
Judging by the literature of the day it seems the anxiety was about
the use of parts of living complex organisms – the disintegration of the
individual body. The sustenance and manipulation of parts were more
disturbing and confronting because it put into question our sense of the
inseparable, whole living being. If we can sustain parts of the body alive,
manipulate, modify and utilize them for different purposes, what does it
say about our perception of our bodies, our wholeness and our ‘selves’?
Even in today’s literature we see these two meta-narratives lingering:
mutation and genetic engineering versus cellular disintegration and re-
aggregation into an object with liminal agency. For example, in Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), a genetically engineered green rabbit
‘glows in the dusk, a greenish glow filched from the iridocytes of deep-sea
jellyfish in some long-ago experiment’ (luminescent green is reminiscent
of radioactive mutation) and tissue-engineered ChickieNobs come from
‘a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-
yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of
each tube another bulb was growing’. Atwood herself, inspired by recent
biological experiments and, more importantly, by biological arts (aka
BioArt), discussed some ontological questions arising from our Victimless
Leather project (discussed in Chapter 4):
Last week I came across a ‘project’ that’s a blend of art object and scientific
experiment. Suspended in a glass bubble with wires attached to it – some-
thing straight out of a 1950s B movie, you’d think – is a strangely
eighteenth-century Lilliputian coat. It’s made of ‘Victimless Leather’ –
leather made of animal cells growing on a matrix. This leather is ‘victimless’
because it has never been part of a living animal’s skin. Yet the tiny coat is
37 Brian Stableford. 2001. Biotechnology and utopia. In The Philosophy of Utopia, ed.
Barbara Goodwin. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, pp. 189–195.
alive – or is it? What do we mean by ‘alive’? Can the experiment be termi-

nated without causing ‘death’? Heated debates on this subject proliferate
on the Internet.38
In ‘The Tissue Culture King’, written in 1926, Julian Huxley reflects

and articulates some of the anxieties surrounding early tissue culture
experiments.39 ‘The Tissue Culture King’ is a story about a western scien-
tist, Hascombe, who is captured by an African tribe. In order to save his
life, he employs his skills in the service of the African king. He decides to
merge scientific principle and techniques with the religious beliefs and
rituals of the tribe. Hascombe then employs tissue culture techniques
to create ‘The Factory of Kingship or Majesty, and the Wellspring of
Ancestral Immortality’.40 The idea is to culture parts of the kings’ and
ancestors’ bodies and by that increase the biomass of the king, extend
the ‘lifespan’ of parts of the dead ancestors and enable the people of
the community to own parts of the king, to physically and ritualisti-
cally nurture, care and worship them. Furthermore, this technique will
‘increase the safety, if not of the king as an individual, at least the life
which was in him, and I presumed that this would be equally satisfactory
from a theological point of view.’41 Hence the fragment stands for the
whole.
There is a direct reference to Dr Carrel’s personality, his laboratory and
its tissue culture rituals, in Huxley’s impressions:
‘If you prefer a more prosaic name,’ said Hascombe, ‘I should call this
the Institute of Religious Tissue Culture.’ My mind went back to a day
in 1918 when I was taken by a biological friend in New York to see the
famous Rockefeller Institute; and at the word tissue culture I saw again
before me Dr. Alexis Carrel and troops of white-garbed American girls
making cultures, sterilizing, microscopizing, incubating, and the rest of it.
38 Margaret Atwood. 2011. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, p. 211.
39 Julian Huxley. 1926. The tissue culture king. In Great Science Fiction by Scientists,
ed. Groff Conklin. 1962. New York: Collier Books, pp. 147–170.
40 Ibid., p. 155.
41 Ibid., p. 156.
The Hascombe Institute was, it is true, not so well equipped, but it had
an even larger, if differently colored, personnel.42
Huxley considers the wide implications of the discipline of tissue

culture and associated epistemological revelations by looking at the option
of mass production and the economic potential of the use of scientific
knowledge and applied technologies in the context of the social sensi-
tivities of society: ‘The most important new idea which I was able to
introduce was mass production. Our aim was to multiply the King’s
tissues indefinitely, to ensure that some of their protecting power should
reside everywhere in the country.’43 It is important to note here, and
which will be covered more extensively in later chapters, the labour that
this mass production entails – ‘troops of white-garbed American girls’. The
citizens still need to work for their kings, even if these are mere fragments
in artificial ‘bodies’.
In another part of the story: “This laboratory is the most amusing,”
said Hascombe. “Its official title is ‘Home of the Living Fetishes.’”44
There is a great emphasis on the idea of life (rather than death) and the
vast possibilities involved with partial lives:
Not a necropolis, but a histopolis, if I may coin a word: not a cemetery,

but a place of eternal growth … A public proclamation was made pointing
out how much more satisfactory it would be if worship could be made not
merely to the charred bones of one’s forbears [sic], but to bits of them still
actually living and growing … A spurt on the part of great-grandmother’s
tissues would bring her wrinkled old smile to mind again; and sometimes
it seemed as if one particular generation were all stirred simultaneously by
a pulse of growth, as if combining to bless their devout descendants.45
Huxley’s emphasis on the labour and ritualization surrounding the

practice of tissue culture, the epistemological wonder in regard to the
extension of life of parts of bodies, even if these bodies ceased to live,
and the complex relations with those fragments of life in vitro is a satire
on the role of science in modernity. By setting his story in Africa, which
42 Huxley, The tissue culture king, p. 155.

45 Huxley, The tissue culture king, pp. 158–160.
Huxley presented as primitive and unenlightened, he aimed to make a

link between modern science and religious superstition. He thus ques-
tions a fundamental supposition of modernity and science, in which a
binary opposition is drawn between supposed ignorance and enlighten-
ment, and points to the cosmological rather than just technocratic issues
raised by science to the tendency to use scientific findings or tools for
cultural and ideological means.
Dr Joseph P. Vacanti and Tissue Engineering

The history of tissue culture and the following development of tissue
engineering (TE) represent a series of major conceptual shifts in the
perception of partial life and its impact on other fields of biomedical
research and practice. These shifts span a period of more than a hundred
years. It took more than eighty years to develop the idea that cells can be
grown in three dimensions to form a functional tissue of eventual implan-
tation into bodies or new parts or whole organs. This development came
from the collaborative work of a surgeon, Dr Joseph P. Vacanti, and a
material scientist, Dr Robert Langer, in the 1980s.46 They developed a
system that used specially designed degradable polymers to act as a scaf-
fold for the developing tissue. The term tissue engineering was coined in
1987.47
While early experiments with tissue culture emphasized the autonomy
of the fragment of life and questioned its ontology, tissue engineering
discourse relocates the living fragment literally and conceptually back to
the body. In tissue engineering, the growth of organs in vitro – neo-
organs – was developed as a surgical solution for fixing and reconstructing
body organs. In modern medicine, the replacement of body parts has
widely been with mechanically engineered, nonliving apparatuses, mainly
constructed out of metal, ceramics or plastic. From this grew the notion
of the cyborg – a human body enhanced by mechanical means – which
46 Charles A. Vacanti. 2006. The history of tissue engineering. Journal of Cellular

and Molecular Medicine 10: 569–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1582-4934.2006.tb0
0421.x.
47 François Berthiaume, Timothy J. Maguire and Martin L. Yarmush. 2011. Tissue
engineering and regenerative medicine: history, progress, and challenges. Annual Review
of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering 2: 403–430. https://www.annualreviews.org/
doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-061010-114257.
was dominant in the sciences and in the arts until the late 1980s. As
explained by Charles Vacanti:
The idea of improving on nature by using man made materials was

nurtured by the discovery and availability of the new synthetics during
World War II. Since that time of technological expansion, the quest for
substitutes for autologous tissues has been a roller-coaster ride … Many of
the postwar synthetics are still in use today, with major questions regarding
their efficiency hanging over us.48
The conceptual shift was to look at and treat the body as a regenerative
site, to use the body’s own tissue to repair itself – the use of the patient’s
own cells, grown in vitro and re-implanted back into the damaged site.
This would not only avoid the problem of rejection of foreign mate-
rials and foreign cells (from other bodies), but would also, in American
philosopher Eugene Thacker’s words, ‘produce a vision of the regenera-
tive body, a body always potentially in excess of itself’49 – a body that is
not dependent on artificial means to fix itself, but is an endless ‘natural’
resource. This resonates with the recurring human fantasy of technologi-
cally mediated natural resources which are in abundance or limitless and
can be used without consequences.
The earliest European example of such a concept of the body as a
regenerative site was recorded in the sixteenth century, when Tagliacozzi
of Bologna reported in his book, De Custorum Chirurigia per Insitionem,
‘a description of a nose replacement that he constructed from a forearm
flap’.50 However, the technology of tissue engineering – taking a frag-
ment of a body and regenerating it in vitro before its re-implantation
into the body – ‘as it exists today, arose in Boston in the mid-1980s, first
with the development of artificial skin by Ioannis Yannas and John Burke,
and then with engineered cartilage’, pioneered by Dr Joseph Vacanti and
colleagues.51 It was not a scientist or an engineer who came up with
the novel idea of growing tissue in three dimensions over scaffolds, but
48 Robert Lanza, Robert Langer and Joseph P. Vacanti (eds.). 2000. Principles of Tissue
Engineering, 2nd edn. San Diego, SF: Academic Press, p. xxxv.
49 Eugene Thacker. 1999. The thickness of tissue engineering. In Life Science: Ars
Electronica 99, eds. G. Stocker and C. Schopf. New York: Springer, p. 183.
50 Lanza et al., Principles of Tissue Engineering, p. 3.
51 Charles Vacanti. 2004. Cells for building. The Scientist 18(22): 22–23.
rather, like Dr Alexis Carrel, it was a transplant surgeon with a pragmatic

approach to hands-on, immediate solutions for pressing problems – Dr
Joseph P. Vacanti.
Vacanti came up with the solution – one now used for most engi-
neered tissues – in 1986, while standing in shallow water at Cape Cod
staring at seaweed. Inspired by nature’s use of branching networks in
plants, he returned from vacation and proposed a scaffold made out of
bioabsorbable material. Cells could be seeded along the branches of the
scaffold and they would grow to fill in the spaces in between. TE is widely
considered a ‘natural’ or transparent, almost non-technological technique.
‘It’s like growing the branches of the tree, and then you add leaves.’52 ‘As
engineers, scientists and doctors, we are simply trying to duplicate nature
as closely as possible to work out a successful design’, Vacanti has said.53
Thacker emphasizes the concept of ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’ in rela-
tion to TE by looking at the flesh value and malleability of TE and its
reliance on ‘natural’ body processes: ‘There is no body-anxiety with tissue
engineering; it is, rather, an explicit (and medical-political-economical)
investment in the very value of the body as a potentially infinite natural
resource.’54 However, TE is a highly technological application within the
biotech industry. Furthermore, as will be illustrated through the narra-
tives of this book, TE (and its entanglement with arts – we were visiting
researchers at Joseph Vacanti’s Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrica-
tion Laboratory, [at MGH (Massachusetts General Hospital), Harvard
Medical School], in 2000–2001) would lead to the diversification of TE
principles outside the biomedical realm to food, consumer products and
so forth.
TE work led to one of the most important icons of the late twen-
tieth century: the mouse with the ear on its back, created by the Vacanti
brothers and other collaborators in the mid-1990s. The image of the ‘real
flesh and blood’ mouse was broadcast and printed throughout the globe.
52 ‘In the late 1970s, they (Jay Vacanti and Robert Langar) had worked in the labora-
tory of Dr Judah Folkman, the pioneering researcher who seeks to kill cancerous tumors
by cutting off their blood supply. The flip side to Folkman’s work was encouraging blood
vessels to grow in new tissue.’ (Jeffery Krasner. 2001, March 11. The replacements. Boston
Sunday Globe, D4.)
53 Joseph P. Vacanti, quoted in Pepita Smyth. 2000, October 30. Organs on demand.
The West Australian, p. 15.
54 Thacker, The thickness of tissue engineering, p. 186.
It seemed to represent the horrors and the dreams of the new era of a
biomedical-driven consumer society. For many it also indicated that the
fantasy of the surrealist project could be manifested through the aesthetics
of scientists and medical professionals.
According to Joseph Vacanti’s brother and collaborator Charles
Vacanti: ‘Our goal wasn’t to grow an ear, it was to prove you could grow
cartilage.’55 In a series of informal interviews with us, the creators of the
ear-mouse acknowledged that the choice of the shape of the ear was partly
driven by the visual impact on potential funders and the public. We believe
that just like their previous research in partial life, the Vacanti brothers
were very much aware of the perplexities raised by their field of work and
knowingly and actively ‘helped’ with creating a larger context around the
field of partial life. Such ‘creations’ as the mouse with the ear cannot but
help cross over into the territories of ethics and art. While Carrel staged
the laboratory and Fell through her public talks attempted to project a
tissue culture point of view, the Vacantis brought into the public realm a
‘real’ chimera. This chimera was more ‘successful’ in triggering the public
imagination than any other biotechnological development of that time. It
was also a trigger to form our own artistic project.
The mouse we used acted as a life-support ‘vessel’, providing the
conditions needed for the cartilage cells to grow and gradually replace
the polymer scaffold. The aim of this experiment, at least formally, was to
prove that cartilage tissue could be coerced to grow into complex geom-
etry and remain viable for the replacement of injured, defective or missing
body parts. Chapter 4 has more about the earmouse, as it came to be
known, and its transformation into an artefact.
Developments in the design and construction of bioreactors opened
the possibilities of creating replacement body parts without the need to
use a mouse as a surrogate body and gave birth to the promise of the
creation of semi-living tissue entities (Fig. 1.7).
The earmouse influenced many artists, showing, as Wells wrote in the
late nineteenth century, that bodies can become a malleable material. In
our collaborative project with Australian artist Stelarc, we created a work
that shows our mutual interests as well as our differences. While our
55 Krasner, The replacements, D4. This also refers to the ear-mouse as the ‘poster boy’
for the field of tissue engineering.
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Great Queen Street, and yet the fact that it also deals with the steps to be taken
against “one Holford and his tennantes” for their default in allowing “the streete in
Drury Lane in his Maties ordinary way” to be very noisome, seems to point to the
Theobalds route. Perhaps the fields north of Holborn are referred to.
165. The entrance became known as “Hell Gate” or “Devil’s Gap.” The
widening of the street to its present measurements is said to have been carried out
in 1765 (Blott’s Blemundsbury, p. 370).
166. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1611–18, James I., vol. 69 (36).
Robert Cecil was created Earl of Salisbury in May, 1605; he died in May, 1612.
167. This form of the name occurs frequently.
168. See p. 14.
169. In January, 1669–70, references occur to “John Jones, the master of the
White Swan in Queen Street, Drury Lane,” and “John Jones, victualler, at the
White Swan in Queen’s Street” (Historical MSS. Commission, Ho. of Commons
Calendar, App. to 8th Rep. I., 155b, 157a). As late as 8th April, 1677, a letter was
addressed to “Don Manuel Fonseca, Queen Street” (Calendar of State Papers,
Domestic, 1677–8, p. 82). On the other hand, the title Great Queen Street is found
in 1667 as the address of Viscount Conway (Ibid., 1667, p. 535), and occurs even in
a passage which must have been written at least fifteen years earlier (see p. 50).
170. See, e.g. Wheatley and Cunningham’s London, Past and Present, III., p.
135: “The houses in the first instance were built on the south side only”;
Heckethorn’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields, p. 171; Parton’s Hospital and Parish of St. Giles,
p. 133.
171. See p. 50.
172. See p. 35.
173. Lease to Edward Fort of 18th May, 1612, quoted in indenture of 10th
February, 1625, between Jane and Richard Holford and Jeoffery Prescott (Close
Roll, 22 Jas. I. (2601)).
174. In the absence of deeds relating to the early history of Nos. 14–35, it is
impossible to be more precise. There may, of course, have been gaps in the north
side (excluding Nos. 1–6) even later than 1612. In the Subsidy Rolls of 21 James I.
(1623–4) and 4 Charles I. (1628–9), preserved at the Record Office, thirteen names
of occupiers of houses in the street are given, and the assessment in 1623 for the
rebuilding of St. Giles’ Church gives fifteen housekeepers in the street (Parton,
Hospital and Parish of St. Giles, p. 136n). No adequate idea of the number of
houses in the street can, however, be gained from these facts, for the subsidy rolls
certainly do not give all the occupiers, and, as the assessment was not compulsory,
it is improbable that every householder made a contribution.
175. History of ... St. Giles-in-the-Fields and St. George, Bloomsbury, p. 58.
176. No evidence has come to light in the course of the investigations for this
volume whereby Lord Herbert’s house might be identified. In his will, dated 1st
August, 1648, proved 5th October, 1648, he refers more than once to his “house in
Queene Streete”. (Somerset House Wills, Essex, 138).
177. Close Roll, 18 Chas. I. (3295).—Indenture between W. Newton and
Francis Thriscrosse.
178. Close Roll, 15 Chas. I. (3192).
179. Close Roll, 15 Chas. I. (3190)—Indenture between W. Newton and Ric.
Webb, Nicholas Redditt and Jeremy Deane.
180. Harl. MS., 5,900, fol. 57b.
181. Indenture, dated 7th February, 1734–5, between John Bigg and Peter
Guerin. (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1734, V., 85.)
182. British Museum, Crace Colln., Portfolio 28, No. 53.
183. It is possible that in 1646 Sir Martin Lumley was resident at this house,
but not certain. In the Subsidy Roll for that year his name is the first on the north
side of the street, and precedes Sir Thos. Barrington’s, who, it may be proved, lived
at No. 3. It may be, therefore, that Lumley was the occupant of No. 1.
184. G. E. C[ockayne’s] Baronetage, II., p. 80.
185. Reproduced here.
186. Elizabeth Killigrew, Lewis Richardes, Thomas Stoake.
187. Lewis Richardes.
188. See p. 35.
189. It is given (Close Roll, 22 Jas. I. (2601).—Indenture between Jane and
Richard Holford and Jeoffrey Prescott) as the eastern boundary of Prescott’s
property, which extended along the north side of Great Queen Street from Drury
Lane, and the length of which is given as 120 feet. Thus the Prescott property was
on the site of the present Nos. 38 to 45. A deed dated 20 June, 1721, refers to
property of which Seagood’s house had formerly formed the western boundary.
This deed gives the names of the occupants of the houses to which it relates both in
1636 and at that time, and the latter list clearly identifies the property as Nos. 26 to
35, thus leaving 36 and 37 for Seagood’s house. That this house corresponded to
two numbers is rendered quite certain by a careful comparison of the entries in the
series of Hearth Tax Rolls. In fact, the house is on two occasions taxed for 30
hearths, which seems an over estimate, as the assessment is afterwards reduced to
24 hearths. Even this implies a very large house.
190. Close Roll, 13 Chas. II. (3123).—Indenture between Henry Holford and
Paul Williams, etc.
192. Close Roll, 5 Chas. I. (2800). Indenture between Richard Holford and Sir
Edw. Stradling—reciting indenture of 1618.
193. See Recovery Roll, 9 Chas. I. rot. 23 (201). Indenture between Edward
Stradling and George Gage.
194. See p. 93.
195. Close Roll, 5 Chas. I. (2800). Indenture between Richard Holford and Sir
William Cawley and Geo. Strode.
196. Calendar State Papers, Domestic, 1629–31, p. 47.
198. See p. 93.
199. Close Roll, 11 Chas. I. (3059). Indenture between Sir Kenelm Digby and
William Newton.
200. He succeeded his father as Earl of Carnwath in 1639.
201. Patent Roll, 12 Chas. I. (2740).
202. The means taken to enforce a uniform design may be gathered from the
fact that the purchaser of certain plots to the west of Nos. 55–56 was required to
build three houses “to front and range towards Queenes Streete ... in the same
uniformity, forme and beauty as the other houses already ... erected by the said
William Newton in Queenes Streete are of.”
203. The evidence for this statement is gathered from the undermentioned
illustrations:
No. 51. Sir Robert Strange’s House (Parton’s Hospital and Parish of St. Giles,
p. 250), 3 bays, 4 pilasters. Western portion of third plot 41 feet wide.
Nos. 55–6, 57–8. Bristol House (Ibid.). Double façade each 44 feet wide, 5
bays, 6 pilasters. Fifth plot 88 feet wide.
Nos. 55–6, 57–8. J. Nash, 1840. (The Growth of the English House, J. Alfred
Gotch.)
Original Freemasons’ Tavern. Engraving by Joseph Bottomley, 1783. 5 bays, 6
pilasters. Seventh plot 44 feet wide.
Queen Street Chapel (Parton, op. cit. p. 250). Western portion of tenth plot 59
feet 6 inches wide.
No. 70. (Photograph taken by the London County Council in 1903.) Refronted
on old lines, 4 bays, 5 pilasters on plot 35 feet wide.
204. Survey of London, Vol. III. (St. Giles-in-the-Fields, Part I.), p. 97.
205. II., p. 174.
206. See p. 86.
207. See full quotation on p. 45 footnote.
208. Harl. MS., 5,900, 57b.
209. The reason why Lindsey House is now not in the middle of the west side
of the Fields is that in the original design the west row extended from Gate Street
to No. 2, Portsmouth Street. The building of the houses on the north and south
sides of the Fields, not included in the original design, encroached on both sides of
the west row, but the encroachment on the north being the greater, the axis of the
square was thereby moved further south.
210. British Museum. J. W. Archer Collection. “The house called Queen Anne’s
Wardrobe,” drawn 1846 (No. 55–6, Great Queen Street) and “House of the
Sardinia Ambassador,” drawn 1858 (No. 54, Lincoln’s Inn Fields).
211. “The expert surveyour will repart the windows to the front of a palace,
that they may (besides the affording of sufficient light to the rooms) leave a solid
peeres between them, and to place some pleasing ornament thereon, not
prejudicial to the structure, nor too chargeable for the builder, shunning
incongruities, as many (pretending knowledge in ornaments) have committed, by
placing between windows pilasters, through whose bodies lions are represented to
creep; as those in Queen Street without any necessity, or ground for the placing
lions so ill, which are commonly represented but as supporters, either of weight, or
of arms on herauldry.” (Counsel and Advice to All Builders, pp. 13–14.)
212. See p. 38.
213. Anecdotes of Painting, II., p. 60.
214. Survey of London, Vol. III. (St. Giles-in-the-Fields, Part I.), Plate 6.
215. It was assessed for the hearth tax at 40 hearths, while Conway House,
although of the same frontage, was only assessed at 31.
216. The frontage of this house is stated in certain deeds in the London County
Council’s possession (e.g., Indenture of 26th October, 1639, between Wm. Newton
and Compton, Dive and Brewer) to be 98 feet, but in others (e.g., Release by Wm.
Newton senr., to Wm. Newton, junr., dated 22nd January, 1637–8) is given as 88
feet. That the latter is correct may be regarded as certain from the perfect accord of
the total number of feet thus obtained with the present boundaries.
217. The deeds from which these particulars are taken are (1) Close Roll, 15
Chas. I. (3196)—Indenture between Wm. Newton and Sir Ralph Freeman; and (2)
a deed in the possession of the Council—Indenture between Newton and Sir Henry
Compton, etc. The former deed, in error, reverses the eastern and western
boundaries.
218. A release by deed poll from Wm. Newton the elder to Wm. Newton the
younger, in the possession of the London County Council.
219. Close Roll, 5 Geo. I. (5117)—Indenture dated 16th May, 4 Geo. I., between
Sir John Webb and Thos. Stonor, and Sir Godfrey Kneller, etc.
220. Mr. Stonor inhabited the western half of the original house, now forming
Nos. 55 and 56; Mr. Browne was in occupation of the eastern half, afterwards Nos.
57 and 58.
221. Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1832, V., 93.
222. See p. 53.
223. Survey of London, Vol. III. (St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Part I.), Plate 66.
224. In possession of the London County Council.
225. Close Roll, 15 Charles I. (3196). Indenture between Wm. Newton and Sir
Ralph Freeman.
226. Marginal note in his private journal (Memoirs and letters of Marquis of
Clanricarde, ed. by K. De Burgh, p. 68).
227. Deed in possession of the London County Council.
228. Memoirs and Letters of the Marquis of Clanricarde, p. xiv.
229. Hist. MSS. Comm.; MSS. of the Earl of Egmont, I., p. 223.
230. Constitutional History of England (ed. 1854) III., 389n.
231. Somerset House Wills, Nabbs, 117.
232. She was Catherine, daughter of Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford; her
husband, Robert Greville, second Baron Brooke, distinguished himself as a general
of the parliamentary forces in the Civil War, and was killed at Lichfield in 1643.
Fulke Greville, who was not born until after his father’s death, eventually
succeeded to the title, and died in 1710.
233. Close Roll, 1654 (3814).
234. Sir William Constable was afterwards possibly an occupant of the house,
for on 24th May, 1647, he wrote to the old Lord Fairfax from “Queen Street.” (Hist.
MSS. Comm.; Morrison MSS., Report IX., Part II., App. p. 439.) Constable had
married in 1608, Dorothy, daughter of Thomas, first Lord Fairfax. He contrived
with difficulty to raise a regiment of foot in the Civil War, and greatly distinguished
himself in the field. He was afterwards one of the king’s judges and signed the
warrant for his execution. He died in 1655.
235. C. R. Markham’s The Great Lord Fairfax, p. 191.
236. Ibid., p. 254.
237. Ibid., p. 274. The old lord had recently married again. He announced the
fact to his brother in a letter dated “Queen Street, October 20th, 1646.”
238. Hist. MSS. Comm., Pembroke College MSS., Report V., App. p. 487.
239. He was still in the parish (possibly in this house) in 1658, for Parton
quotes (Hospital and Parish of St. Giles, p. 356) an entry in the churchwardens’
accounts for that year: “Pd. and expended at the sessions, about Sir William
Paston’s complaynt, of his being double rated.”
240. Close Roll, 15 Chas. II. (4143)—Indenture between the Hon. John Digby
and Sir Anthony Morgan and Richard Langhorne.
241. Described in Survey of London, Vol. IV. (Chelsea, Part II.), pp. 18–27.
242. Some time between 1666 and 1675 he removed to No. 51, Lincoln’s Inn
Fields (Survey of London, Vol. III., p. 71).
243. See also North’s account: “The great House in Queen Street was taken for
the use of this Commission. Mr. Henry Slingsby sometime Master of the Mint, was
the Secretary; and they had a formal Board with Green Cloth and standishes,
clerks’ good store, a tall Porter and staff and sitting attendance below, and a huge
Luminary at the Door. And, in Winter Time, when the Board met, as was two or
three times a week, or oftener, all the Rooms were lighted, Coaches at the Door,
and great passing in and out, as if a Council of State in good earnest had been
sitting. All cases, Complaints and Deliberations of Trade were referred to this
Commission, and they reported their opinion, whereupon the King in Council
ordered as of course. So that they had the Province of a Committee of Council; and
the whole Privy Council was less charge to the King than this.” (Examen, p. 461.)
244. The Council of Trade was established on 7th November, 1660, and by
patent dated 1st December in the same year Charles II. also created the Council of
Foreign Plantations. (Haydn’s Book of Dignities, 1894, p. 263.)
245. Slingsby writes on behalf of the Council for Foreign Plantations from
Queen Street, on 27th April, 1671. (Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1671, p.
204.)
246. In October, 1672, the Council of Plantations was united to that of Trade
(Evelyn, Diary, 13th October, 1672), and the united Council seems thenceforth to
have utilised a portion of “Villiers House,” the house of the Duchess of Cleveland.
(Audit Office, Declared Accounts, Trade, etc., 2303 (2)).
247. See schedules of deeds appended to Indentures between Thos. Stonor,
etc., and Sir Godfrey Kneller, dated 11th and 12th March, 1717–8 (Close Roll, 5 Geo.
I. (5117)).
248. Chancery Warrants (Series II.), Signet Office, 16th April, 1669 (21 Chas.
II., 2386).
249. Indenture of 24th June, 1674, between Sir Chas. Harboard and John
Hanson, by direction of the Earl of Devonshire, and the Earl of Sunderland, recited
in Indenture of 12th March, 1717–8, between Thos. Stonor, etc. and Sir Godfrey
Kneller (Close Roll, 5 Geo. I. (5117)). Sunderland’s purchase of the Earl of Bristol’s
interest in the freehold was not effected until February, 1683–4 (Deed in
possession of the London County Council) just before his sale of the premises.
250. The fact that the 1675 Hearth Tax Roll shows the Earl of Devonshire at
the house is not conclusive against this, as it is probable, from other
considerations, that this particular roll, though bearing the date 1675, represents
the state of affairs in 1674.
251. Dictionary of National Biography.
253. Freehold and 99 years’ lease in April, subsidiary lease in June.
254. Second son of Thomas, first Lord Fauconberg, a prominent royalist. Died
in 1689.
255. Will of Lord Belasyse, quoted in Indenture of 12th March, 1717–8,
between Thos. Stonor, etc., and Sir Godfrey Kneller (Close Roll, 5 Geo. I. (5117)).
256. Indenture of 12th March, 1717–8, between Thos. Stonor, etc., and Sir
Godfrey Kneller (Close Roll, 5 Geo. I. (5117)).
257. The sewer ratebook for 1703 (representing probably the state of things in
the previous year) shows “Thomas Stonor, Esq.” still in occupation; that for 1709
(the next issue) gives “Sir Godfrey Kneller.” The Dictionary of National Biography
says he purchased the house in 1703, but this is obviously an error. (See above).
258. Somerset House Wills, Richmond, 161.
259. The statement seems to have originated with Horace Walpole (Anecdotes
of Painting, Wornum ed. (1888), II., pp. 209–210).
260. Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, I., p. 456.
261. London Past and Present, III., p. 137.
262. See p. 76.
263. A deed of 27th November, 1745, shows “Lady Goodyear” and Mr. Charles
Leviez then in occupation. (Midd. Registry Memorials, 1745, III., No. 156).
264. Sir Godfrey Kneller left his Great Queen Street property to his wife for
her lifetime, with reversion to his godson, Godfrey Kneller Huckle, “provided the
surname of Kneller be adopted.” Godfrey Kneller, the younger, died in 1781, and
his son, John Kneller, in 1814.
265. Bryan’s Dictionary of Artists; Walpole’s Anecdotes, p. 702.
266. The Dictionary of National Biography is in error in stating that he added
this house to the other.
267. Redgrave’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers.
268. Leask’s James Boswell, p. 125.
269. Nichol’s Illustrations of Literature, VII., pp. 308–9.
270. Details of Boswell’s residence there are given in the Council’s publication,
Indication of Houses of Historical Interest, I., pp. 79–84.
271. III., p. 137.
272. Holden’s Triennial Directory for 1802–4.
274. See p. 47.
275. “All that messuage ... lately divided into two shops or dwelling houses.”
Indenture, dated 7th October, 1813, between Sophia Kneller and G. J. Kneller and
Thos. Crook. (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1813, IX., 129.) The ratebook for
1812 shows the house in single occupation.
276. Close Roll, 17 Chas. I. (3275)—Indenture between Edward, Lord Viscount
Conway, Edw. Burghe, and William Newton and Elizabeth, Countess Rivers.
277. Release and quit claim by Wm. Newton, jnr., in possession of the London
County Council.
278. The house was still standing on 12th February, 1738–9 (see indenture of
that date between Philip Carter and Jas. Mallors, Middlesex Registry Memorials,
1739, I., 450–1), but by 22nd May in that year it had been demolished, the two
houses fronting Great Queen Street were then in course of erection, and others
were intended to be built. The parish ratebook for 1739 shows the house as
“Empty”; that for 1740 gives: “Empty. 12 houses made out of one.”
279. That the archway was exactly in the centre may be proved by the fact that
when the two houses were sold to Jas. Mallors in the year 1742, they were each
described as 22 feet in width, including half of the passage into Queen’s Court
(Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1741, IV., 424 and 1742, I., 435).
280. Between Thomas Wither and Thomas Raye (Common Pleas Recovery
Roll, 26 Chas. II., Trinity, Rot. 4).
281. Feet of Fines, Middlesex, 13 Chas. I., Trinity.
282. (27th January, 1650–1.) “Col. Berkstead to take care for the pulling down
of the gilt image of the late Queen, and also of the King, the one in Queen Street,
and the other at the upper end of the same street, towards Holborn, and the said
images are to be broken in pieces.” (Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1651, p.
25.)
283. Recovery Roll (Common Pleas), 17 Chas. I., Hilary, 236.—Indenture
between William Newton, Philip Willoughby and Edward Mabb and Edward
Burghe.
284. Afterwards Middle Yard.
285. See p. 82.
286. See Indenture of 18th May, 16 Geo. II., between Lord Conway and
Francis Paddy (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1743, I., 334–5).
287. Henry Sadler, Some memorials of the Globe Lodge No. 23 of the Ancient
Free and Accepted Masons of England, p. 11.
288. Documents and drawings preserved in the Soane Museum.
289. Photographs of various modern features, although not coming properly
within the scope of this volume, have been inserted for the purpose of showing the
historic continuity of the buildings on the site of the old Hall.
290. The premises had been purchased in 1880. (Middlesex Registry
Memorials, 1880, 962).
291. Indenture of 5th March, 1718–9, between Lord Montagu, etc. (1), William
Juxon and Jas. St. Amond (2), and Sir Godfrey Kneller and Ed. Byng (3), in the
possession of the London County Council.
292. G. E. C[ockayne’s] Peerage.
293. The sewer ratebook for this year shows “Henry Browne” in occupation of
the house, but that for 1700 has the entry “— Webb, Esq.,” referring to the owner.
294. The sewer ratebook for this year shows “Henry, Lord Montague” in
occupation.
295. Burke’s Extinct Peerage.
296. For other houses used for the purpose of the Portuguese Embassy in St.
Giles-in-the-Fields, see p. 97, and Survey of London, Vol. III., pp. 13, 82.
297. Somerset House Wills, Richmond, 161.
298. The house is referred to later on as “all that messuage, etc., formerly
called by the name of the Great Wardrobe” (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1811,
VI., 104). It will be noticed that the title “Queen Anne’s Wardrobe” given to the
western half of Bristol House in 1846 (Plate 16) is doubly incorrect. In the first
place it is assigned to the wrong half of Bristol House, and secondly the dates show
that it could not possibly have had any connection with Queen Anne.
299. See copy of deed, dated 11th March, 1708–9, for the appointment of
Dummer as deputy. (Treasury Papers, Cal. 1708–14, CXIII., No. 12.)
300. Shortly before 4th February, 1774, Sheridan took a house in Orchard
Street (Sanders’ Life of Sheridan, p. 23).
301. His name in the ratebooks is given as “Richard Sheridan” only, but a deed
of 1811, giving the names of occupants of the house mentions him by his full name:
“formerly in occupation of Benjamin Wilson, painter, afterwards of John
Henderson, sometime since in the possession of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and
now of Ann Boak, milliner.” (Indenture of 20th June, 1811, between Jno. Kneller,
Peter Tahairdin, and Thos. Grove—Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1811, VI., 104.)
302. Moore’s Memoirs of Sheridan, p. 213.
303. F. M. Parsons’ Garrick and His Circle, p. 369. As an example of how false
history comes to be written, it is interesting to note that Mrs. Parsons describes the
house as “an Inigo Jones house, in which five men known to fame: Hudson, the
painter; scritch-scratch Worlidge, the etcher; Hoole, Tasso’s translator, whom
Johnson loved; now Sheridan; and after him, Chippendale, the cabinet maker,
successively lived.” None of the other individuals mentioned lived in the house
occupied by Sheridan.
304. See p. 59.
305. Stafford’s Letters (Ed. Wm. Knowler, 1739), II., p. 165
307. Close Roll, 17 Charles I. (3275). Indenture between Lord Conway, Edw.
Burghe and Wm. Newton and Elizabeth, Countess Rivers.
308. Historical MSS. Commission, House of Lords Calendar, Appendix to VI.
Report, p. 109b.
309. G. E. C[ockayne’s] Peerage. The Dictionary of National Biography states
that he was born in 1628, and was the son of John Savage, a colonel in the royal
army.
310. Historical MSS. Commission, Frere MSS., Appendix to 7th Report, p.
531a.
311. Elizabeth Scroope, married to the Earl in 1647.
312. “Lord Rivers denies entrance to survey and payment,” and “Earle Rivers
refuseth to pay.”
313. Historical MSS. Commission, Frere MSS., Appendix to 7th Report, p.
531a.
314. At first a Roman Catholic, the Earl subsequently joined the English
Communion.
315. Mary, the second wife of the second Earl, at this time Countess Dowager
Rivers, by her will, proved 25th January, 1657–8 (in which she is described as “of
St. Giles”) left £400 to Sir Francis Petre (Somerset House Wills, Wootton, 5).
316. Covent Garden.
317. Was this the third Earl’s sister of that name, youngest daughter but one of
the second Earl by his first wife?
318. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1673–5, p. 37.
319. Ibid., p. 174.
321. Arabella, died s.p. 21st March, 1717. (G. E. C[ockayne’s] Peerage.)
322. He married, in 1679, Penelope, daughter of John Downes; and in 1688
Mrs. Margaret Tryon. (Ibid.)
323. Somerset House Wills, Barnes, 209.
324. Daughter of Sir Peter Colleton, and one of the Earl’s numerous
mistresses.
325. Sewer ratebook for 1720: “Lord North and Grey.”
326. On 29th September, 1722, the Duchess of Rutland wrote to Lady Gower:
“The two lords went there [to the Tower] last night, Orrery and North and Gray,
through their own want of consideration and indiscretion, ’twas said.” (Hist. MSS.
Commission, MSS. of Duke of Sutherland, Report V., p. 191.)
328. His country residence was St. Osyth’s Priory, Essex.
329. She died on 23rd June, 1746. (Gentleman’s Magazine, 1746, p. 328.)
330. Indenture of 12th February, 1738–9, between “Philip Carter of Tunstal,
Suffolk, clerk, and Bessy, his wife (widow of Frederick late Earl of Rochford,
deceased, and now commonly called Countess Dowager of Rochford), William
Henry, Earl of Rochford, eldest son and heir of the said Frederick by the said
Bessy, and Sir John Colleton, of Exmouth, Bt., brother and heir at law of Elizabeth
Colleton alias Johnson, deceased, and James Mallors”; purporting to be a lease
“for a year to vest the possession of and concerning all that capital messuage or
mansion house situate on the south side of Great Queen Street where the said
Frederick did lately dwell, which said messuage or mansion house was heretofore
the house of Richard, Earl Rivers, and then called or known by the name of Rivers
House.” (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1739, I., 450–1.)
331. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, p. 174.
332. FitzGerald, Life of Mrs. Catherine Clive, p. 84.
333. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. IV., pp. 7, 243.
334. See p. 60.
335. “March 31, 1638–9.... Direct your letter to be left with Lord Conway’s
maid in Queen Street, so it will come more speedily to me, since I am very often
with the Lord Admiral [Earl of Northumberland], whose house is next to Lord
Conway’s, as I think you know” (Calendar State Papers, Domestic, 1638–9, p.
630).
336. See p. 86.
337. Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, Book III., par. 228.
338. Letters from Thos. Smith to Sir John Pennington (Calendar of State
Papers, Domestic, for 1638–9, pp. 92, 103, 113, 130).
339. Order of the Committee of the Council of War (Ibid., p. 166.)
340. March 5th, 1638–9. Instructions from the Lord Admiral to Capt. John
Mennes of the Victory (Ibid., p. 537).
341. Letter, headed “Queen Street,” from Northumberland to the deputy
lieutenants of Nottinghamshire (Hist. MSS. Commission, Reports on MSS. in
Various Collections, VII., 295).
342. Recovery Roll (Common Pleas), 17 Chas. I., Hilary (236).
343. After her husband’s death she fell under the displeasure of Parliament,
and “endured a long imprisonment ... and had ... been put to death if she had not
made her escape to Oxford.” (Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, Book
XI., par. 222.) She afterwards (in 1648) married Sir James Livingstone, who
became Earl of Newburgh.
344. Close Roll, 17 Chas. I. (3275)—Indenture between Lord Conway, etc., and
Countess Rivers.
345. John Lucas, etc., “say they carried divers pictures, with frames, others
without frames, and some rayles into Mr. Withers House [it will be remembered
that Anthony Withers had purchased the house from Newton in 1637–8] in
Queen’s Street, now in the possession of Col. Popham, the which goods above said
these examiners say are the proper goods of Mr. Withers” (Interregnum Papers,
A., 98). Withers was reported as a delinquent in October, 1645 (Domestic
Interregnum Committee for Advance of Money (Order Book), A., 4 (295)), and
was sequestrated in January, 1646 (Interregnum Papers A., 98 (13)).
346. Interregnum Papers G., 17 (704).
347. A deed relating to the house, dated 20th May, 1674, refers to it as being
“now or late in the tenure ... of the Right Hon. Francis, Lord Viscount Mountague”
(Common Pleas Recovery Roll, 26 Chas. II., Trinity, vol. 4 (366)).
349. She was Elizabeth, daughter of Edward, first Marquess of Worcester. She
died in 1684.
350. Sewer ratebook for 1683.
351. Indenture, 9th May, 1764, between Packington Tomkins (1), the Hon.
Geo. Lane Parker (2) and Philip Carteret Webb (3) (Middlesex Registry
Memorials, 1764, II., 491); indenture 16th November, 1774, between the Rev. Jas.
Hallifax, etc., and Trustees for the Freemasons (Ibid., 1775, II., 122).
352. Historical MSS. Commission, Earl of Denbigh’s MSS. Appendix to 8th
Report, Part I., p. 556b.
353. Feet of Fines (Middlesex), 1 Anne, Hilary.
354. His country residence was Woodberry Hall, Cambridge.
355. Somerset House Wills, Bedford, 210–211.
356. Mary, his eldest daughter, married (with a dower of £30,000) George,
Viscount Parker, who in 1732 succeeded his father as (second) Earl of Macclesfield.
357. Afterwards married William Cartwright, of Aynho, Northampton.
358. See her will, dated 22nd June, 1753 (Somerset House Wills, Pinfold, 80).
359. Indenture of 9th May, 1764 (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1764, II.,
491).
360. See his will dated 7th February, 1770 (Somerset House Wills, Jenner,
417).
361. Indenture between the Rev. Jas. Hallifax, Ric. Blyke, Edw. Beavor of
Farnham and Rhoda, his wife (lately Rhoda Webb, widow of Philip Carteret Webb,
late of Busbridge, Surrey, deceased) and the Rt. Hon. Robert Edward Lord Petre,
Henry Duke of Beaufort, Henry Duke of Chandos, Washington Earl Ferrers,
Viscount Tamworth and Rowland Holt (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1775, II.,
122).
362. Foxcroft’s Life of Gilbert Burnet, p. 144.
363. Survey of London, Vol. III., p. 75.
364. Macaulay, History of England, II., p. 180.
365. Ibid., II., p. 460.
366. Foxcroft’s Life of Gilbert Burnet, I., p. lvii.
367. Foxcroft’s Life of Gilbert Burnet, I., p. lix.
368. Beaven’s Aldermen of the City of London, II., pp. 109, 186.
369. Lipscombe’s History of Buckinghamshire, II., p. 222.
371. See p. 56.
372. See p. 74.
373. Campbell’s Lives of the Lord Chancellors, IV., p. 560.
374. Wheatley and Cunningham (London Past and Present, III., p. 137),
mentioning his residence, which they wrongly identify with Nos. 55–56, say: “Here
on October 18, 1740, the young Joshua Reynolds came to him as a house pupil and
remained under his roof till July, 1743.” Leslie, in his Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
also states that this occurred at Hudson’s house in Great Queen Street. The
ratebooks, however, show quite clearly that in 1740–42, “Vanblew,” was in
occupation, and that from 1743 to 1745 the house was empty. The first year in
which Hudson is shown as the occupier is 1746. Reynolds’ residence with Hudson,
therefore, must have terminated before the latter had moved to the house in Great
Queen Street.
375. The entry “Geo. Hudson” in the issue of the ratebook for this year is
probably a mistake.
376. The Dictionary of National Biography states that Worlidge settled in
Great Queen Street in 1763, and the fact that Hudson’s name appears in the 1764
ratebook is not conclusive against this. On the other hand, a deed dated 9th May,
1764, mentions the house as being then in the occupation of Hudson (Middlesex
Registry Memorials, 1764, II., 491).
377. The parish ratebook for 1764 shows Hudson still in occupation of the
house, but he had apparently built his house at Twickenham before this. “In 1762
Reynolds dined one Saturday with his old master, Hudson, at ‘Twitenham,’ where
he had built a house in the meadows” (Leslie’s Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, I., p.
213).
378. A deed of 16th November, 1774, refers to the house as “formerly in the
tenure of Mr. Hudson, painter, and late in that of Mr. Worlidge” (Middlesex
Registry Memorials, 1775, II., 122).
380. Memoirs of Mrs. Robinson, ed. by M. E. Robinson, I., pp. 74–5.
381. Memoirs of Mrs. Robinson, I., p. 94.
382. See p. 60.
385. Letter, dated 16th May, 1631, from Thomas Case ... to Edward, Viscount
Conway, etc., “at his house in Drury Lane” (Calendar State Papers, Domestic,
1631–3, p. 45).
386. Recovery Roll, Common Pleas, 21 Chas. I., Mich., rot. x (251).
388. Possibly Lord Wharton was the actual occupant of the house at the time.
389. Historical MSS. Commission, Duke of Portland’s MSS., Vol. III., p. 291.
390. Calendar State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, 1660–70, p. 701.
391. Ibid., pp. 712–3.
392. Calendar State Papers, Domestic, 1667, p. 535.
393. Ibid., 1667–8, p. 259.
394. Ibid., 1668–9, p. 223.
395. Roger Boyle, Baron Broghill and 1st Earl of Orrery (1621–1679) rendered
great service to the Parliamentarians in Ireland, but afterwards realising that
Richard Cromwell’s cause was hopeless, he combined with Sir Charles Coote to
secure Ireland for Charles II. He was also a dramatist of some repute.
397. Ibid., 1668–9, p. 567.
398. Ibid., 1670, p. 111.
399. A less known contemporary account is the following: “Wednesday night
last ... some mischievous persons to dishonour my Lord Chancellour crept through
a window of his house in Queen Street and stole the mace and the two purses, but
by good chance could not find the seal. There was upon the table a great silver
standish, and a thousand guineyes in a cabinet, as they report, but nothing of them
touched, the design being upon another score than bare robbery” (Letter, dated
8th February, 1676–7, from Edward Smith to Lord Rous, Historical MSS.
Commission, Rutland MSS., XII. Report, App. V., p. 37).
The entry in the Middlesex Sessions Records concerning the event is as
follows: “7 February, 29 Charles II.—True Bill that, at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, Co.
Midd., in the night between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. of the said day, Thomas Sadler alias
Clarke, William Johnson alias Trueman and Thomas Reneger, all three late of the
said parish, laborers, broke burglariously into the dwelling house of Heneage Lord
Finch the Lord Chancellor of the said Lord the King and then and there stole and
carried off a silver mace gilt gold worth one hundred pounds and two velvet purses
imbroydered with gold and silver and sett with pearles, worth forty pounds, of the
goods and chattels of the said Lord the King. Found ‘Guilty,’ all three burglars were
sentenced to be ‘hanged.’” (Middlesex Sessions Records, IV., p. 75).
401. Roger North’s Autobiography, p. 165.
402. “After we came to London, we were to wait on the Lord Jeffreys, who had
the Seal, to congratulate and offer him all the service we could do, and to receive
his commands touching the house in Queen Street where the Lord Keeper lived,
and it was so proceeded that he took the house” (Roger North’s Autobiography, p.
195).
403. H. B. Irving’s Judge Jeffreys, p. 332.
404. 7 and 8 Will. III., cap. 27 (sessional number, 53).
405. Then resident next door, see pp. 73–4. She was Ursula, widow of Edward
Conway, first Earl of Conway.
406. See e.g., Indenture of lease, dated 18th November, 1743, between Francis
Paddey and Jas. Mallors (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1743, III., 453).
407. The vestry minutes for 1712 also refer to the house under this title: “That
a proper place for the site of a new parish church, and a house for a minister,
would be at the great house in Great Queen Street, commonly called by the name
of the Land Bank” (Parton’s Hospital and Parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, p. 291).
408. He wrote several medical books, as well as a Narrative of the Birth of the
Prince of Wales. He had been summoned to attend the confinement of James II.’s
queen, but was away from London and arrived too late.
409. Subscriptions were to be paid at Mercers’ Hall and Exeter Change
(London Gazette, May 28th–June 1st, 1696), and Dr. Chamberlain’s office was, at
any rate, at first in New Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn (Ibid., June 20th–23rd, 1696).
410. “The trustees of the Land Bank, late at Exeter Change (now removed to
the Three Anchors, over against Salisbury Court in Fleet Street) do give notice, that
on the 11th day of February next they will make a dividend to such persons as are
Heads of classes to whom transfers are made” (The Post Boy, January 25th–27th,
1697–8).
412. See pp. 60–61, 63.
413. Survey of London, Vol. III., p. 98.
414. Confirmation of his residence in Great Queen Street about 1794 is found
by the mention of “Thos. Leverton of Great Queen Street” in a deed of 29th
September, 1795 (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1795, VI., 211).
415. Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson (1786), p. 173.
416. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 5th April, 1775.
417. Obituary notice in Gentleman’s Magazine, 88, part ii., 179.
419. Indenture of 19th July, 1798 (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1798, III.,
185), referring to the sites of Nos. 67 and 68, recites the lease so far as it concerns
those sites. The recital also refers to other ground dealt with by the lease, and this
was almost certainly the site of No. 66, which it is known was also a Mills house,
the eastern boundary of Conway House being described as “the messuage of Peter
Mills, bricklayer, now in the tenure of the Countess of Essex.” (Recovery Roll
(Common Pleas), 17 Chas. I., Hilary (236).)
420. Peter Mills died in 1670, then being resident in Little St. Bartholomew’s.
(Somerset House Wills, Penn, 147.)
421. There is a clause referring to “such messuages and buildings as then were
or afterwards should be erected thereon,” which is quite indefinite, but if there had
been any houses the names of the occupiers would almost certainly have been
given. The Finalis Concordia relating to the transaction does not mention houses,
but only half a rood of pasture.
422. Parton’s Hospital and Parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, p. 290.
423. The occupier of No. 68 seems to have persisted later than 1709 (see
below). Moreover, the assessable value of No. 67 drops from £40 in 1703 to £25 in
1715 (the next record), a fact which seems to point to the curtailment of the
property due to the erection of the chapel.
424. Baguley’s The True State of the Case.
425. On 3rd September, 1728, Thos. Burges sold to Thos. Parnell and Wm.
Page certain houses (one of which was certainly No. 68), and “all that building or
chappell, together with all and singular the pews, seats, gallereyes and other rights
and privileges thereunto belonging.” (Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1728, I.,
251).
426. A Sermon preached at Queen Street Chapel and St. Paul’s, Covent
Garden, on ... the day appointed for a general fast.
427. He was certainly in possession on 19th June, 1758, for on that date he
mortgaged the whole of the property to William Ferrand (Middlesex Registry
Memorials, 1758, III., 4).
428. Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1798, III., 185.
429. Blemundsbury, p. 397.
430. Middlesex Registry Memorials, 1815, III., 227.
431. “The new Methodist Chapel erected on the south side of Great Queen
Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was opened yesterday morning. It is a spacious,
handsome building, and will accommodate a larger congregation than most of our
churches. It has a range of two galleries on each side. The altar is an appropriate
and beautiful piece of architecture.” (Morning Herald, 26th September, 1817).
432. Heckethorn’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields, p. 183.
433. See p. 61.
435. A much mutilated Hearth Tax Roll, dating apparently from some time
between 1666 and 1672, shows “Geo. Porter, Esq.,” residing on the south side of
Great Queen Street, but it cannot be proved that the entry refers to the same house.
437. Survey of London, Vol. IV., p. 81.
438. Burke’s Extinct Peerage. Knighted, 7th August, 1624 (Shaw’s Knights of
England, II., p. 186).
439. Peerage of England, 1710 (2nd edn.), p. 232.
440. See Survey of London, III., p. 53.
441. Probably the “Ashburnham Froude” who is shown in joint occupation
with Burges of No. 68 in 1723 (see p. 92).
442. Francis Const (1751–1839), legal writer. “Wrote some epilogues and
prologues, and numbered among his convivial companions Henderson, John
Kemble, Stephen Storace, Twiss, Porson, Dr. Burney and Sheridan.” (Dic. Nat.
Biog.).
443. “Yesterday was married by the Rev. Mr. Francklin at his chapel near
Russel Street, Bloomsbury, David Garrick, Esq., to Eva Maria Violetti.” (General
Advertiser, 23rd June, 1749). Fitzgerald (Life of David Garrick, p. 126) wrongly
says: “at the church in Russell Street, Bloomsbury.” The statement of Mrs. Parsons
(Garrick and his Circle, p. 143) that it was “at Dr. Francklin’s Chapel in Queen
Street (the modern Museum Street)” is based on unknown, but possibly quite
good, evidence.
445. The Dictionary of National Biography states that her death also took
place in Great Queen Street. It is difficult to reconcile this with the fact that the
parish ratebook for 1795 shows that Francis Const took up his residence in the
house in the course of that year. She was, however, certainly resident there on 4
June, 1795, the date of her will.
446. Burke’s Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, III., p. 402.
447. Historical MSS. Commission, MSS. of Duke of Rutland, IV., p. 545.
448. “The style of Lord Ros of Roos continued to be still used (wrongfully) by
the Earls of Rutland, as, indeed, it was until a much later period, and the well-
known divorce of John Manners ... was granted to him ... under the designation of
Lord Roos, to which he was not entitled.” (G. E. C[ockayne’s] Peerage.)
449. On the death of the sixth Earl of Rutland, the Barony of Ros of Hamlake
expired, and the old Barony of Ros devolved upon his daughter, Katherine, who
married George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. She died in or before 1663, and
was succeeded in the title (of Ros) by her son George Villiers, second Duke of
Buckingham (Burke’s Peerage and G. E. C[ockayne’s] Peerage).
450. After his death she married Sir William Langhorn, Bt.
451. Historical MSS. Commission, MSS. of Duke of Rutland, Vol. IV.
452. Ibid., II., p. 19.
453. The latter is probably for the whole of this period in respect of the Chapel.
In 1733 a separate entry is made for Burges and the Chapel.
455. See p. 42.
456. The licence was granted in 1630 (see p. 43).
457. This ran parallel to Great Queen Street, 197 feet distant therefrom.
458. The above particulars are taken from Recovery Roll, 9 Chas. I. (Easter)
(201). Rot. 23.
459. Indenture dated 9th August, 1633, between Geo. Gage and the Lady Alice
Dudley (Close Roll, 10 Chas. I. (2652)).
460. Then (under the indenture of 9th August, 1633, mentioned above)
charged with a rent of £150 a year, during the life of Lady Dudley (Chancery
Proceedings, Series II., 409–73).
461. See Chancery Proceedings, Bridges, 562–24. Suit of Sir Edw. Stradling.
462. Such was the statement made by Weld in answer to the claim advanced
by Sir Edward Stradling, junr., grandson of the other Sir Edward, who, however,
suggested that the transaction was a mortgage containing a proviso for redemption
for £416. (Chancery Proceedings, Bridges, 562–24).
463. Parton (Hospital and Parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, p. 138) mentions a
tablet at one end of Wild Street, with an inscription suggesting that the east side of
the street was finished in 1653. This fits in quite well with the above-mentioned
facts.
464. It is mentioned as “the way ... leading on the back side of Drury Lane
from Princes Streete to Queene Streete” in Indenture of 13th August, 1629,
between Richard Holford and Sir Edw. Stradling (Close Roll, 5 Chas. I. (2800)).
465. The date of the lease to Ittery (see p. 93).
466. Weld’s own name, though usually spelt with an “e” is also found in the
forms: Wild, Wield, Weild.
467. Indenture between Richard Holford and Edward Stratton (Close Roll,
1658 (3984)).
468. Weld having been ordered to build a wall to prevent back avenues to his
chapel, at his house, was in 1679 accused of having evaded the order by leaving a
door in the wall, “whereby there will be as free access to the chapel as before.”
(Historical MSS. Commission, House of Lords MSS. App. to 11th Report, Part II.,
p. 127).
469. Blemundsbury, p. 384.
470. The lease was not held directly by the ambassadors; see particulars of a
mortgage of Weld House, 20 June, 1665, wherein was reserved a lease made on 10
May, 1678, by Weld of the ambassador’s house to Augustine Coronell for 10 years
at a rent of £300. (Chancery Proceedings, Bridges, 438–48).
471.
Lands. Goods.
Lady Francis Weld and Mr. Humphrey Weld 2 10 0 2 0 0
Sir John Wray. 1 0 0 1 0 0
472. “John Corrance ... sheweth that ... Humphry Weld, of Weld Street, esq., ...
built these several messuages, viz. ... and two other messuages scituate in Weld
Street, with two coach houses, stables and hay lofts over, being at the further end
of a garden in his, Humphry’s, possession, and by indenture of 17th May, 1665,
demised them to John, Lord St. John, of Basing, Earle of Wilts and Marquis of
Winchester, for twenty yeares, at a rent of £160; and also one other house in Weld
Street, which messuage with the use of a house of office at the end of a garden of
Weld’s called the Back garden, and the use of a pumpe in a stable yard thereto
adjoyning in common with his other tenants by indenture of July 31st, 1671, Weld
demised to Thomas Hawker, of St. Giles, gentleman, for 11¼ years at a rent of
£30.” (Chancery Proceedings, Bridges, 465–184).
473. See previous note.
474. Worsley’s residence was the last house but one in Great Queen Street,
and the premises held by him in Wild Street obviously backed on to his residence.
475. Hospital and Parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, p. 248.
476. It is impossible to make the entries in the Hearth Tax Rolls agree with all
the particulars of occupations given by Parton, and copies of the deeds from which
he quotes have not come to light in the course of the investigations for this volume.
477. “Finding them, however, to be too numerous, they ventured to apprehend
only some few that stood outmost, and hurrying them away as fast as they could,
by the time they were well within my gates, the rest made after them, attempted to
break open my doors, fell upon the watchmen, broke their halberts, flung brickbats
and stones up against my house, cried out: ‘This is the grand justice that hangs and
quarters us all, and caused Jones and Wright to be executed the last sessions,’
divided themselves into two parties, sent one to beset the back lane behind my
garden, having information given them that I sent prisoners out that way to avoid a

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Tissues, Cultures, Art

Tissues, Cultures, Art

ISSN 2731-3026 ISSN 2731-3034 (electronic)

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all of The Tissue

Tissues, Cultures, Art is concerned with our – humans’ – current

Chapter 4 explains how we ended up, despite our best intentions,

Fig. 1.1 B(w)omb, 1998 3

Fig. 3.6 Growth of cells in Compostcubator and control (with Kalle

The cardboard box was delivered to Traian Chirila’s laboratory at the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Fig. 1.1 B(w)omb,

different angles, focusing on different areas, using an inverted micro-

Current and future development in biological derived technologies, in

Fig. 1.2 Hamsa 1998

that have to be addressed. Those issues concern aspects of human devel-

unique combination of shapes, colours and movement. An exploration of

through the narrative of this book, this changed rapidly as we further

Early Years of Tissue Culture

Fig. 1.3 Stone Age of

elsewhere outside a living organism’.3 This research includes developing

3 Lexico. 2022. In vitro. https://www.lexico.com/definition/in_vitro. Accessed 22 July

Regent’s Park on a Bank Holiday, a spectacle of rather futile freedom.’7

Wilhelm Roux (1885) isolated, or removed, a medullary plate from a

7 Wells, Huxley and Wells, The Science of Life, p. 29.

Alexis Carrel and Revivalism

16 Alexis Carrel. 1912. Visceral organisms. JAMA LIX: 2105–2106. https://doi.org/

The affiliation with Lindbergh, the great American hero, extended to

elements in society.20 ‘Eugenics’, Carrel wrote in the last chapter of the

It can be argued that the Hollywood version of Dr Frankenstein was

Was it the realization that complex bodies are a collection of commu-

researchers were driven by their investigations and discoveries to ask

Honor Bridget Fell and the Tissue

early 1920s, Strangeways decided to focus the laboratory’s activities on

The British engagement with tissue culture presents a different

30 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways.

so-called objective methodology, it also ‘encouraged scientists to draw

Tissue Culture and the Popular Imagination

A decade prior to the discovery of tissue culture technique, in the late

34 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways, p. 57.

alive – or is it? What do we mean by ‘alive’? Can the experiment be termi-

In ‘The Tissue Culture King’, written in 1926, Julian Huxley reflects

Huxley considers the wide implications of the discipline of tissue

Not a necropolis, but a histopolis, if I may coin a word: not a cemetery,

Huxley’s emphasis on the labour and ritualization surrounding the

42 Huxley, The tissue culture king, p. 155.

Huxley presented as primitive and unenlightened, he aimed to make a

Dr Joseph P. Vacanti and Tissue Engineering

46 Charles A. Vacanti. 2006. The history of tissue engineering. Journal of Cellular

The idea of improving on nature by using man made materials was

rather, like Dr Alexis Carrel, it was a transplant surgeon with a pragmatic

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