Making Portraits Out of DNA

Questions of genetic determinism, surveillance, and privacy are brought up in the work of Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who makes life-like portraits out of DNA from strangers’ hair and fingernail clippings.

On WNYC’s program Radio 360, Robert Klitzman, Director of the Masters of Bioethics Program, discusses the project and the complex issues it raises, “Genetic discrimination could happen in the courtroom, schools, even relationships…. All this genetic information is coming at us like a tsunami, and we’ve not yet thought about what it means, what we’d like to do about it.”