Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives

A newly commissioned play by Billy Bragg, extracts from the diary of Tony Benn and the invention of DNA fingerprinting are all part of ways in which Identity is explored at the Wellcome Collection. Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives, the latest temporary exhibition at the science centre dedicates eight rooms to exploring the lives and works of people that have shaped thinking about human identity. The first person in Britain to undergo gender reassignment and a special time lapsed mirror revealing how the rest of the world see us are also part of this investigative exhibition which attempts to explore human identity, its history, and its infinite amount of possibilities. To make the theories easier to digest, and to give Identity a human face, each of the eight rooms has been named after a well known figure who has influenced our thinking about identity. These include British geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys, responsible for devising the DNA profiling we still use today; Fiona Shaw, an actress who has taken on the identity of everyone from Richard II at the National Theatre to Aunt Petunia in Harry Potter; and Samuel Pepys whose famous diary has kept his name alive. Billy Bragg's new musical play, Pressure Drop, runs in the final weeks of the exhibition, from 19th April to 12th May 2010, in the temporary gallery space.