CRYING ORGANOIDS
Dr. Marie Bannier Hélaouët, Organoid Group, Hubrecht Institute of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), The Netherlands; Oncode Institute, The Netherlands; and Dr. Albert Wu, Ophthalmic Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, Stanford Medicine, with lab members Dr. Aditi Swarup, Dr. Hala Dhowre, Dr. Sanja Bojic, and Julietta Picco
2024
Organoids, brightfield microscope, video projector; dimensions variable.
Presented as part of Emergence: Art from Life
An excerpt from “Crying Inside” by Claire Evans, an essay commissioned for the Emergence catalog, 2024.
In every organ in the body, adult stem cells serve as internal engines of renewal, occasionally awakening from quiescence to divide and regenerate replacements for damaged cells. They are so good at doing this that when these cells are removed from the body and left to their own devices, they will naturally self-assemble into miniature, working models of the organs from which they were drawn. The first such “organoid” was created in 2009, using stem cells from the intestine; in the busy years since, biologists have miniaturized nearly every major organ in the body, including the brain. Despite their tiny size, organoids are faithful models. Gut organoids digest; brain organoids crackle with electrical activity; lacrimal gland organoids, it turns out, cry.
Bannier began with stem cells surgically extracted from human lacrimal glands—the bean-shaped gland, just below our brow bones, that produces tears. She laid the cells in a sugary cushion of nutrients known, poetically, as a “human expansion medium.” Under her care, the cells set about doing, in the medium, what they ordinarily do in our heads. After a week, they’d formed spherical, functional tear glands no wider than a human hair. There was only one thing left for Marie and her colleagues to do: cajole them into crying.
The tears of these glands were not emotional tears, exactly; that would presume that the glands can “feel” on their own, untethered from the brain and the neurochemical system that floods them with hormones. Rather, after much trial and error, the tears were brought on by the introduction of adrenaline—something closer to a reflex reaction, although Bannier is still unsure what variety of tears her organoids produced. As the organoids watered, Bannier was flooded with relief. “That was my PhD moment, getting them to cry,” she says.”
A tear without anyone there to cry it: sounds like a Zen koan. It’s a beautiful image, but where does it belong, exactly—in a laboratory or in an exhibition space? Bannier does not consider herself an artist. “I’m very rational, normally,” she tells me. I tell her rational people can produce beauty, too. She hesitates. “But is that art?” she asks.
Perhaps—in the eye of the beholder. It’s certainly good science: the newly-minted Dr. Marie Bannier earned her PhD on the strength of this research, and her organoids will be used to screen for treatments for dry eye disease. Clinical trials are a long way off, but someday, lacrimal organoids might be transplanted back into patients, helping them to cry again. Science is often beautiful, and the science of life is most beautiful of all. Biology resists tidy categorization; it’s dynamic and ever-changing, always greater than the sum of its parts. The discovery of some clever cellular clockwork never stays on the Petri dish; at every scale, it implicates us and implicates the world.
Image credit: (Lacrimal Gland Organoids Detail) Dr. Marie Bannier Hélaouët, copyright: Hubrecht Institute; (Gallery) Carson Davis Brown
Crying Organoids was featured in Emergence: Art from Life, an exhibition at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, as part of PST ART. Presented by Getty, PST ART returned in September 2024 with Art & Science Collide, a regional event exploring the connections between art and science, past and present
Thank you PST ART; JACCC; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles for your support of Emergence.