I came across a beautiful set of images created by German doctor / scientist / artist Fritz Kahn (1888 – 1968). In many of these images, he places the human body in an industrial context. The resulting combinations of technology and biology have a retro-futuristic feel to them, but are fare more than just a gimmick, Kahn displays a clear grasp of human anatomy and an amazing ability of finding industrial analogs to the biological and anatomical principles that he illustrated. What I find really fascinating is that the drawings reflect the times Kahn lived in: these were the Golden Twenties of the Weimar Republik where the German steel and chemical industry were at their peek.
"Der Mensch als Industriepalast" / "Man as Industrial Palace" (1926) by Fritz Kahn. An exciting view of the human body as a factory: natural resources (oxygen, food) are transported, processed, used and stored.
Amazing! Kahn shows us the entire human body as a chemical processing plant. Food enters the mouth, the sugars are extracted in the intestines and stored in the liver. There’s all kind of cool stuff going on in this poster: there’s a guy spritzing saliva on the food that just entered the mouth, to name an example. The image is crafted with such eye for detail you almost expect this to be a diagram of an actual factory.
"Auto und Ohr sind übereinstimmend" / "Car and Ear are similar" (1929) A comparison between a car and ear. Movement of air is transmitted mechanically in both cars and ears.
A good analogy makes difficult concepts insightful, but even the best analogy becomes worthless if poorly executed. Here we see the opposite, the comparison between an ear and a car seems ridiculous at first, but starts to make a lot of sense if you look at the figure and read the accompanying text. The process of translating a movement of air into mechanical motion is skilfully displayed.
"Der Arzt der Zukunft" / "The Doctor of the Future" (1925).
This last image is no clever combination between technology and biology. In this picture, a doctor is sitting at a desktop, analyzing diverse patient data at the touch of a button. Kahn simply nailed it in this visionary drawing, but he sadly died in the same year as the Personal Computer was introduced. I’d like to think he would be delighted to know that we’re at the verge of introducing genome sequencing into the clinic, unleashing a flood of data on this poor doctor of the future.
Scientists today also use technologies of this age as analogies of the subjects they study. In this way, protein interaction networks are likened to the internet, and synthetic biology becomes the biological equivalent of electrical engineering. But I’ve yet to see someone visualize these analogies in an equally appealing way!
These are fabulous, thanks for posting them! I’ve never heard of Kahn before, his work seems really interesting. I’m fascinated by how technology and our understanding of biological systems feed back on each other in different time periods. Whether it’s about industrial factories or computer systems, we naturalize technology by comparing it to biology and at the same time simplify biological systems to manageable analogies to things we build, use, and understand. Every time period has so much going on in terms of this kind of concurrent technological and scientific development, and all of it has an impact on how we construct our understanding of living things for synthetic biology today. Maybe that came out kind of jumbled but hopefully you get the idea :) Anyway I’m looking forward to reading more of your blog!
Thanks for the comment Christina!
I completely agree with you. It’s fascinating when abstract concepts from biology and technology fit together so well. Also, there’s this interesting tension lying in analogies like these, because they can be limiting if taken to seriously, but they also often inspire to look or apply things one normally wouldn’t (I’m anxious to see how far the electronic circuitry analogy in synthetic biology will take us for example!).
I was planning to write on scientific analogies in general, but then I found your excellent post and decided to link to it instead :). Plus, Kahn’s pictures are so beautiful that they deserved a post of their own anyways. Maybe also interesting: a German artist animated the poster, and brought the industrial palace to life. You can find it here!
I love the first picture. It reminds me of a picture in this kids encyclopaedia I used to have, which (slightly less artistically) showed the human body as a machine run by little blobby people, carrying out all the tasks of sorting the food for the digestive system and sending it off to different parts of the body. I used to wonder when they got any sleep!
Well, I guess the amazing thing is that they never sleep ;).
For me, the memory that is triggered by the first poster is that of “Once upon a time… Life”. It’s a French production and a really great animated TV series I used to watch. There’s factory workers everywhere, keeping the body running. It’s really detailed, considering children were the target audience!