Description: Pink Chicken Project suggests changing the color of the entire species Gallus gallus domesticus – using the recently invented CRISPR Gene Drive technique – coloring the geological trace of humankind, pink!

Abstract

The Pink Chicken Project is an ambiguous proposal to use a recently invented biotechnology called “Gene Drive” to genetically modify the bones and feathers of all chickens in the world to the color pink. As scientists suggest chicken bones to be a primary identifier of our time (the Anthropocene), this intervention would modify the future fossil record, coloring the geological trace of humankind, pink!

Framed as an activist campaign/startup, this speculative suggestion reveals the intimate link between social and ecological justice, and allows us to think about the impact of novel biotechnologies from multiple ethical and political perspectives: why should we seek/avoid this future? How does the violence of entire-species genetic modification compare to the violence already inflicted on billions of chickens in factory farms? How can we have ethical relationships with other species in a shifting landscape of human-nonhuman power?