How to Start

As I wrote at the beginning of this course, the term apoptosis, in its modern usage, refers to the natural death of normal cells (biologically programmed cell death) to preserve the cellular order needed for healthy human life. I came across the term when I read Natalie Angier's Natural Obsessions: Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell several years ago. I like science.  I went through a phase of reading nontechnical publications about the galaxy and the mechanics of the universe.  During that period, I spotted Angier's book on a shelf in the science section of a local bookstore. I bought it, and it lay on my bookshelf for a year or so (as most of my good finds do) before I read it. When I did finally start reading it, I did not expect to be taken on a suspense-filled journey, in the company of esteemed scientists and a terrific writer, in the race to find the molecular origins of cancer—it would not have stayed unread for so long if I had known. Needless to say, the book was memorable. I am writing this because I am searching around for a lead into a 1st story. I want to somehow refer to cell function—normal cell death, a cell’s “suicide program” (xvi), the factors that cause a cell to become cancerous, and a cancer cell’s immortality—in the routine I will create using appropriation art as my delivery mechanism.

In my first blog, I explain that the Greek term apoptosis also describes “the ‘dropping off’ or ‘falling off’ of petals from flowers, or leaves from trees” (OED). It is also a medical term used to indicate “resolution, relaxation, or loosening of something” (OED). Leaves falling from a tree in the wind in autumn or petals separating from a stem when they have served their purpose, and the notion of relaxation or the loosening of something, as a sort of gentle letting go, can be seen as external manifestations of the internal process by which a healthy cell initiates the sequence of events that lead to its death in order to preserve the life around it. This same idea can also be reversed and interpreted to describe how cancer cells slough off primary tumor sites into the tissue around the tumor or through the body's bloodstream or lymphatic system when a cell's suicide program fails and a cell blindly repeats its pre-programmed biological function to divide. Angier writes that a “cell is a perpetual waffler. It is poised to grow and must be told not to; and it is inclined toward slothfulness, toward stasis, and must be strong-armed to divide. Each cell is outfitted with scores of genes that can impel a cell to divide, and perhaps an equal number that tell it to stop dividing” (xv). Considering the amount of times a human being’s cells divide over a lifetime (“10 million billion cell divisions over a seventy-year lifespan, and those division are almost always orderly, precise, and effective”), regular, healthy cell division is a miraculous biological feat.

Can the healthcare debate be compared in some way to these ideas? Can I use images to articulate the difficulties cancer patients face when they navigate the healthcare system to receive care? When I started this blog, the Obama administration was in the heat of their battle to pass the healthcare bill. It has now been signed into law, but I don’t think that really changes the fact that I can perhaps make a statement about  cancer, as a disease, and the very public healthcare policy debate that was acted out earlier this year and last year. I think I can correlate the notion of stasis in the healthcare system with the term apoptosis in some way using images. If I find the right series of words or images, I might be able to contrast the idea of orderly cell division in normal cells with in tact "suicide programs" and the suicidal chase of cells with malfunctioning suicide programs. Ideally, I want my 1st and 2nd story to play off some of these ideas. With the use of juxtaposition and specific intended détournement techniques, I want to make a statement about the similarities and differences between a citizen outside and inside the U.S. healthcare system, and the complexity of needs that are and are not being met right now.

With these preliminary ideas in mind, I explored the internet for images that I might be able to use to create the turn in my thought (from the status quo to something else) using appropriated images for this final task of the course. Here are some of the great images that I found (and thought I might use somehow), before I decided to take a different approach: