Tina Gorjanc, a wildly ambitious student at Central Saint Martins in London, has proposed a rather odd fashion design idea: to use lab-grown human skin as fabric. Which is, admittedly, better than using synthetic human skin. And it’s not just any human skin either; using Alexander McQueen‘s DNA, Gorjanc is building a replica of the late iconic designer’s skin, which she will then use as the material for her collection, Pure Human. Apparently, with this collection—which is her final project with the two-year CSM master’s course MA Material Futures—the London design student is attempting to “address shortcomings concerning the protection of biological information.”

From Tina Gorjanc’s project ‘Body Spam.’

At this point, you’re probably wondering how Gorjanc plans to get her hands on McQueen’s DNA. But before you chalk it up to “grave digging,” remember that McQueen attached a lock of his hair to every piece of his first collection, “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.” It was from a piece in this collection that Gorjanc was able to procure a lock of his hair. After extracting genetic material from said hair, she was able to harvest the cells into skin tissue, and then tan the material to produce “human leather.” If you’re not already covered in goosebumps, then you probably need to think about your life choices.

And if that weren’t enough, in May, Gorjanc filed a patent application to use McQueen’s genetic information with her technical processes, potentially making Alexander McQueen leather her own. “If a student like me was able to patent a material extracted from Alexander McQueen’s biological information as there was no legislation to stop me,” Gorjanc said, “we can only imagine what big corporations with bigger funding are going to be capable of doing in the future.”
For Pure Human, Gorjanc plans to make backpacks, bags, and jackets. She’s already made a few prototypes from pig skin, which she embellished with decorative freckle designs in order to give them a real flesh feeling.

While it certainly pushes the limits of fashion, this project isn’t the first time Gorjanc has played with human skin. In a previous project entitled Body Spam, the Londoner incorporated synthetic bacterial systems, the logos of popular brands, and a horror movie villain attitude into surreal works. The synthetic materials were created as an implant on one’s skin using plaster, silicone, and body paint to look like a Chanel logo was rising from under the skin. The final product doesn’t actually break the skin, but the result looks realistic enough to make you do a double take—and question humanity.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE >>>

Board members of Soddy-Daisy’s water system are set to vote today on whether to continue their policy of adding fluoride to the city’s water supply.

Several residents have questioned fluoride’s effectiveness and claim it is a health risk. Some of them showed up at last month’s meeting of the board of the North West Utility District, which supplies water to about 7,500 customers in Soddy-Daisy, Falling Water, Mowbray Mountain and Sale Creek, asking that the board stop adding fluoride to the water, despite assurances from several local dentists that fluoride is both safe and effective at preventing cavities.

Some residents claim fluoridation has been linked to health problems and has not been shown to be very effective in stopping cavities.

In a press release, a group called the Soddy Daisy Citizens Against Water Fluoridation said that “while fluoride in drinking water does NOT decrease rates of tooth decay, numerous studies show that these chemicals have a wide array of devastating health effects, as well as environmental and economic concerns.”

Several local dentists who were also at the meeting disagreed.

“Fluoride has been shown over the years to reduce tooth decay rates, and the best across-the-board way for people to get that is through the water system,” said Dr. Brian Schenck, president of the Chattanooga Area Dental Society, in an interview Monday. Schenck told the water system commissioners at their meeting last month he believes they should continue to inject fluoride into the water supply.

Fluoride was not recognized as a tool to fight cavities until the 1940s, when researchers tried to figure out what caused a brown stain on the teeth of people who lived in certain U.S. neighborhoods. They discovered the cause of the stain was a high level of the naturally occurring chemical fluoride in local water supplies. But they also discovered that high levels of the chemical significantly reduced dental cavities.

Health officials launched a nationwide effort to get local water systems to add fluoride to their drinking water and, by 1992, about 56 percent of the nation’s water supply was fluoridated, including 70 percent of all towns of more than 100,000 population. In Tennessee, about 54 percent of the state’s 460 water systems add fluoride to their water, including all of the water systems in the state’s four largest counties, according to the Tennessee Department of Health.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called the fluoridation of the water supply one of the 10 greatest public health successes of the 20th Century.

CDC researchers noted that reducing cavities also meant fewer people needed expensive dentures and dental care.

“Tooth loss is no longer considered inevitable, and increasingly adults in the United States are retaining most of their teeth for a lifetime,” the CDC noted. “For example, the percentage of persons aged 45-54 years who had lost all their permanent teeth decreased from 20 percent in 1960-1962 to 9.1 percent in 1988-1994.”

From the beginning, fluoridation has had its critics, either those who claim it is a health hazard, or others who saw a government plan to add chemicals to the water supply as a possible conspiracy.

For example, the Soddy-Daisy debate mirrors a similar one last year in Lyerly, Ga.

An online petition being circulated by the anti-fluoride residents in Soddy-Daisy claims the additive “causes cancer, impairs bone strength, impairs IQ, impairs kidneys, impairs thyroid, recedes gums, depresses heart, depresses cell growth and increases infertility.”

“My main concern is the health issue,” said Chiesa Smith, one of the residents opposing the addition of fluoride. “There is recent science showing the danger of fluoride in the body.

“Fertilizer corporations make a profit selling hazardous waste as a ‘safe and beneficial’ additive for teeth,” she said. “We do not enjoy being used as a hazardous waste dump.”

The vast majority of scientists reject those claims.

“Since 1950, opponents of water fluoridation have claimed it increased the risk for cancer, Down syndrome, heart disease, osteoporosis and bone fracture, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, low intelligence, Alzheimer’s disease, allergic reactions, and other health conditions,” CDC researchers said in a report on fluoridation. “The safety and effectiveness of water fluoridation have been re-evaluated frequently, and no credible evidence supports an association between fluoridation and any of these conditions.”

The National Cancer Institute agreed.

“After examining more than 2.2 million cancer death records and 125,000 cancer case records in counties using fluoridated water, the researchers found no indication of increased cancer risk associated with fluoridated drinking water,” researchers concluded.

From the 1950s, some critics have argued that consumers should not be forced to drink fluoridated water, but instead should be able to choose whether to protect their teeth against cavities by choosing toothpaste with fluoride.

“This is the only chemical we put in the water to treat it for medical purposes,” said water system general manager David Collett. “Is it the water company’s responsibility to be medicating with the water?”

Dentists argue that is shortsighted because many people don’t brush their teeth regularly, while fluoridation guarantees everyone will be protected against cavities even if they do nothing.

“The problem is, some children in the community would most likely miss out if the parents were making the decision to get the fluoride elsewhere,” Schenck said. “A tooth cavity cannot be ignored. It would be advantageous to prevent this rather than have to treat it. You’d have much less lost time at work or time at school, and less expense.”

The citizens’ group disagreed, arguing most of the fluoride in the water supply is wasted. Only about one percent of the water supply ends up as drinking water, the group said, while the other 99 percent is used for watering lawns, washing cars or flushing toilets and therefore has no medical impact.

In addition, adding fluoride is costly for the water system.

North West spends about $20,000 annually for fluoride, Collett said. The water system is planning a $9 million expansion and its components will be more expensive if fluoride is added to the water, Collett said.

“It is damaging to the pipes and fittings because it is an acid,” he said.

The seven commissioners are to vote on the issue at their meeting tonight.

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A leading South Bay lawmaker and critic of safety at the former ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance has renewed his criticism of a regulatory study aimed at discovering whether a commercially viable alternative to the use of highly toxic hydrofluoric acid exists.

In his second letter in the past three months to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which is conducting the study, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Manhattan Beach, accused the agency of failing to look at whether the use of the potentially deadly acid with a 10 percent additive is safe.

“The failure to do so along with an evaluation of on-site safety measures in place intended to minimize a major spill or release of the modified hydrofluoric acid undermines the intent of the entire study,” Lieu contended in a letter sent to the agency Wednesday and made available exclusively to the Daily Breeze.

“The entire way SCAQMD is going about this study is backwards,” Lieu wrote. “And one of my fears is that by intentionally failing to address the question of safety, SCAQMD is going to produce a study that is at best irrelevant and at worst used by some to maintain a status quo that could be extremely dangerous to the community.

“I am at a loss as to why SCAQMD is refusing to address the basic question of public health and safety of MHF with only 10 percent additive,” Lieu added. “I hope it is not because SCAQMD intentionally designed a study to arrive at a predetermined conclusion of preserving what could be a catastrophic status quo.”

The additive, called sulfolane, is intended to block the formation of a toxic ground-hugging cloud the acid forms at room temperatures by turning into a less dangerous liquid that falls to the ground via a process dubbed “rainout.”

The cloud has the potential to kill or injure tens of thousands in the densely populated neighborhoods surrounding the refinery.

But experts say that at the low level of 10 percent additive, there is little evidence that the supposedly modified HF is any safer than unmodified HF.

“If 10 percent or 20 percent sulfolane is being used, there is very little difference between HF and MHF in the hazard it presents in terms of concentration and travel distance downwind,” said Ron Koopman, a retired expert in the field who conducted ground-breaking experiments with HF on behalf of the oil industry in the 1980s.

“At 30 percent, there is approximately 80 percent rainout of MHF, (meaning) for example, only 20 percent travels downwind, while at 10 percent there is only 10 percent rainout, which means that 90 percent of the MHF travels downwind. This is a much bigger hazard.”

Lieu, along with Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, initially criticized the scope of the study in May in a letter to Wayne Nastri, acting executive officer with the AQMD.

In response, Nastri maintained the safety of MHF and the effectiveness of safety measures in place at the Torrance refinery now owned by PBF Energy was not within the scope of the study, which he maintained was much broader in nature.

“Once this study is completed and feasibility and commercial availability of various alternatives are provided, we can evaluate what are the appropriate next steps,” Nastri wrote.

The Torrance Refinery Action Alliance has similarly taken the AQMD to task over the study for many of the same reasons as Lieu, including its response to Lieu’s initial letter.

In a July 19 letter to Nastri, TRRA President Sally Hayati pointed out that the patent for modified HF specifically pointed out that “HF may be used in combination with up to about 50 percent of various additives which may be present either to reduce the aerosol-forming tendency of HF … or to modify the properties of the HF so that any accidental release may be more readily controlled.”

That’s far higher than the 10 percent additive being used in Torrance. At 50 percent or so, ExxonMobil found that MHF simply doesn’t work in the production process for refining crude oil, Hayati wrote.

“This explains why Mobil promised to use 50 percent additive in 1990 … but quietly slashed it to 10 percent in 1998,” Hayati wrote. “MHF is 90 percent HF and scarcely different from HF in airborne toxic cloud formation.

“MHF is not ‘safer’ than HF, only marginally less deadly.”

(This article was updated on June 22)

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