About

I am an immunologist and have spent most of my adult life in labs: at universities, in big pharma, and in a biotech startup. Each space has its contradictions in values and practice. In academia, the pursuit of scientific truth is coloured by what is “cutting edge,” “high impact,” and fundable. In industry, drug discovery is fuelled by what is scalable, patentable, and profitable. Creativity shackled by phantom forces with a capital K.

It has become clear to me that without acknowledging the structures within which we operate, we will never truly liberate the scientific imagination. Donna Haraway argued that all knowledge is situated, that there is “no view from nowhere, no god trick” that lets science see everything from above while remaining invisible itself. Being in the lab gave me an extraordinary appreciation not only for the plurality of our existence and the complexity of our interactions within our bodies and the world beyond, but also a clear-eyed understanding that situatedness is the condition of all knowledge-making, and that pretending otherwise is its own kind of distortion. That recognition became a springboard for my entanglements with art.

Haraway’s provocation that our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert is a call to caution for me as a scientist, a reminder that the boundaries between organism and tool, nature and culture, are more porous than the stories we tell about science admit. We must first learn to observe without rationalising, to sit with the messy entanglements of greed, ego, and profit that shape not just how science is done, but which questions get asked at all. From that honest accounting, poetic technologies in Graeber’s sense might actually spring forth.

I am drawn to what technologies open up, the possibilities they make thinkable. But I am also wary, not just of how technologies are used, but of who makes them, who uses them, and for what purpose. These questions run through everything I do, whether I am painting, building a speculative device, or asking what makes a biological system alive.