Transparent Animals Make Transfixing Art

I can’t take my eyes off this new way of preserving animals, which is equal parts entrancingly beautiful and kind of creepy. “TaxiClear” makes (dead) animals and plants transparent so you can see right through their tissue to the skeleton and organs inside. It’s almost like the inverse of taxidermy: the focus is on everything except the skin.

Developed by a group of graduate students at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the process was initially created for scientific research, as a way of clearing specimens so they could better study them without slicing them up. Now they’re trying to take the technique out of the lab and into the artist and hobbyist sphere with a Kickstarter campaign.

The TaxiClear method uses a chemical product called Visikol that the same students developed. On their website, they write that they created the clearing agent as an alternative to chloral hydrate, which they were previously using as a clearing agent on microscope slides and such. But chloral hydrate is toxic, regulated, and hard to get your hands on.

Then they also realised you can clear a whole animal with the agent, stain it pretty colours, and end up with something that looks pretty awesome. The point of the Kickstarter is to raise money to bulk-buy some of the chemicals they need, so they can prepare specimens for artistic purposes at low prices (as campaign awards, you can get small specimens like mice and anole lizards from donating $40 dollars and more).

Obviously, the key point of the clearing agent is that it makes the animal bodies transparent without breaking them down too much. The creators explain that that’s down to its “intrinsic optical properties.” Basically, what you see is all about how light passes through the specimen. Cell walls and cell membranes have a pretty high “refractive index”—a measure of how much they bend light—but the cytoplasm (inside the cell membrane) has a lower index. Its the difference in these qualities that causes light to refract.

Because Visikol has a high refractive index, it essentially smooths out this effect by increasing the refractive index of the cytoplasm, hence the transparency.

Besides the fact that see-through dead stuff is just mesmerizing, this also has some pretty hefty scientific applications: understanding anatomy, cancer research, neuroscience, and so on. They’ve even used it to turn a whole mouse brain into clear goo.

And yeah, according to an interview with project leader Michael Johnson at io9, they’re already working on a human brain.