International Year of Chemistry 2011
Chemistry, Pharmaceuticals, and Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy
Marek H. Dominiczak*
Pharmaceuticals affect the lives of an ever-increasing
number of people. Global spending on prescription
drugs in 2006 was $643 billion (1 ), and in 2009, 3.9
billion drug prescriptions were filled in the US (2 ).
Although pharmacy is an ancient art, the pharmaceutical industry, in historical terms, is young. For example, an extract from the willow tree (which contains
salicylic acid) was known to the ancient Greeks, but
acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) was synthesized only in
1897. Chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology have played major roles in the development of
the modern pharmaceutical industry, which now
makes medicines with enormous interventional potential, sometimes associated with considerable risk
of side effects. Pharmaceutical companies started to
grow late in the 19th century. In the 1920s and 1930s,
the main achievements were the production of insulin and penicillin. Then came the birth control pill,
the hypotensive drugs, and the later “blockbuster”
drugs, such as Valium, Prozac, and the statins. Anticancer drugs and compounds for the treatment of
AIDS are the newer classes. The thalidomide tragedy
in the 1960s led to more stringent regulation. In
1964, the Declaration of Helsinki, which set out the
principles for human studies, was adopted. The industry attained an even higher public profile at the
end of the 20th century as it became a substantial
part of consumer culture and maintained a high profile in advertising.
The room-sized installation entitled Pharmacy
(Fig. 1), created by British artist Damien Hirst, is in the
Tate Collection in London, England. It was shown at
the Cohen Gallery in New York in winter 1992–1993. A
360-degree panorama of this installation can be seen at
http://www.tate.org.uk/pharmacy. It looks so much
like an interior of a real-life pharmacy that when the
installation was being shown in New York, visitors
would sometimes not enter the exhibition because they
thought they were in the wrong place (3 ). But then it
contains—as do many contemporary pieces of art—
allusions, metaphors, and symbols. The vividly colorful
apothecary bottles represent earth, air, fire, and water.
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow
UK.
* Address correspondence to the author at: Department of Biochemistry, Gartnavel General Hospital, 1053 Great Western Rd., Glasgow G12 0YN, UK. Fax
⫹44-141-211-3452; e-mail [email protected].
790 Clinical Chemistry 57:5 (2011)
Their old-fashioned forms contrast with straight, minimalist lines of furniture and the simple geometric
shapes of drug packaging. The pleasantness and comfort of colorful packaging allude to the power of marketing and advertisement. Another part of this installation has bowls with honeycomb, placed there to
attract flies, which are then eliminated by Insect-OCutor. The honeycombs represent the natural world
and contrast with the artificiality of the pharmaceuticals. This sterile, sparse, clean space is at the same time
reassuring and ominous. It may speak of help and
recovery— or of decay and dependence. The Pharmacy
installation has been associated with another Damien
Hirst project: the Pharmacy restaurant in London. It
opened in 1997, and the art contained in it was later
auctioned at Sotheby’s. In an interview with Gordon
Burn (3 ), Hirst talked about the aesthetic concept
common to the Pharmacy installation and the restaurant, their main difference being the static nature of the
former and the liveliness of the latter.
Damien Hirst (1965–) is a leading British artist, a
key figure in a group known since the late 1980s as
the Young British Artists (YBAs). In their work, the
YBAs used a wide range of artistic media, such as
photography, drawing, painting, embroidery, installations, film, and video (4 ). Most of the artists also
embraced media and celebrity culture. The group
played an important role in bringing contemporary
art into cultural focus in Britain. Damien Hirst is
also many other things: an entrepreneur, art collector, curator, and film director. He won the prestigious British Turner Prize in 1995 (5 ). Most recently, he created a work consisting of a platinum
skull encrusted with 8601 diamonds, said to be
worth £50 million ($80 million) (6 ). Perhaps not
surprisingly, the piece attracted as much attention in
the world of finance as it did in the art world.
The core of Hirst’s art uses themes of decay and the
finality of life. A lot of it is strongly “biological”: There are
works composed of dissected dead animals preserved in
formaldehyde, the best known being the shark in The
Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, created in 1991. Hirst is not alone in such a biological
take on art. Compare the video work of Bill Viola (1951–)
with its focus on human experience, and the installation
of Mona Hatoum (1952–), Corps étranger (foreign body),
an installation based on endoscopic and colonoscopic images of the artist’s body.
International Year of Chemistry 2011
Fig. 1. Damien Hirst (1965–).
Pharmacy. 1992. Room installation, mixed media (dimensions variable). ©Tate Collection, London. With kind permission from
the Tate Collection and the artist. Approved by Hirst Studio.
The Pharmacy installation is an example of how
contemporary art can bring developments within sciences closer to real-life human concerns and how it
may become a platform for reflection on current
issues—in a framework refreshingly different from the
traditional academic discourse.
Author Contributions: All authors confirmed they have contributed to
the intellectual content of this paper and have met the following 3 requirements: (a) significant contributions to the conception and design,
acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (b) drafting
or revising the article for intellectual content; and (c) final approval of
the published article.
Authors’ Disclosures or Potential Conflicts of Interest: No authors
declared any potential conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgments: The author thanks Jacky Gardiner for her excellent secretarial assistance.
References
1. Wikipedia. Pharmaceutical industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_
industry (Accessed March 2011).
2. Angell M. FDA: This agency can be dangerous. The New York Review of Books
2010 Sep 30:66 – 8.
3. Hirst D, Burn G. On the way to work. London: Faber and Faber; 2001. p
66 –79.
4. 100: The work that changed British art. Saatchi C, introduction writer; Ellis P,
writer of text. London: Jonathan Cape in association with the Saatchi Gallery;
2003. 222 p. The Saatchi Gallery indicated moral rights as an author.
5. Button V. The Turner Prize. Rev. ed. London: Tate Publishing; 2007. p 114 –20.
These are pages relevant to 1995 Turner Prize to Damien Hirst for Mother and
Child Divided.
6. Kennedy M. Hirst’s skull makes dazzling debut. Guardian Art and Design Blog,
June 1, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/jun/01/
hirstsskullmakesdazzlingde (Accessed March 2011).
DOI: 10.1373/clinchem.2011.164418
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