In 1983 as part of research on cancer treatments at Harvard, geneticists Philip Leder and Timothy Steward introduced an oncogene which allows uncontrollable cancer growth in a mouse using a recombinant DNA technique, making it highly prone to developing cancer and passing on this trait to its offspring. This manipulation in the cells of the mouse created a new species which they called “the Harvard Mouse” and was later patented by the DuPont medical company that funded the research as the Oncomouse (onco being a prefix for ‘tumour’ or ‘mass’ in reference to cancer). It was the first vertebrate species to be patented by a company and acts as living proof of the need for ‘bare life’ to experiment on in the modern medical industrial complex – the invention and patenting of a new species whose sole intended purpose is to be a test subject.

Donna Haraway’s writings about the figure of the Oncomouse as a surrogate for human suffering has been a key reference for Bengtsson: “OncoMouseTM is my sibling, and more properly, male or female, s/he is my sister... Although her promise is decidedly secular, s/he is a figure in the sense developed within Christian realism: s/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of secular salvation—a ‘cure for cancer’” (Haraway, 1997: 79). The painting represents a specimen of Oncomouse standing on its back legs like a martyr in the foreground while stepping on a sickly human face, with its long tail tucking itself into the hair. The background of the painting shows a pair of lungs that are afflicted with a severely metastasised cancer and brings forth the relation between the two figures: a new form of life destined to suffer from this terrible illness in order to develop treatments for human bodies.

Bibliography:

-Haraway, D. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, Routledge: New York, London