Beauty and Bacteria: Visualizations in Molecular Microbial Ecology

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Beauty and Bacteria:Visualizations in Molecular Microbial Ecology Julie Sommerlund Introduction In November 2000, Nature, the prestigious scientific periodical, ran a news feature entitled "Slimebusters." The feature dealt with biofilm, and was illustrated by a picture of biofilm made by a group of microbiologists working with Confocal Scanning Laser Microscopes (CSLM) at the Danish Technical University (Fig. 1).1 Having a picture published in Nature was somewhat of an event for these researchers. At the time, I was doing observational studies in the group, and the researchers told me that this would probably be the only time that anything they produced would be published in Nature. They joked about it–that their only publication in Nature was a picture illustrating an article called "Slimebusters," and not a "real" scientific article. I did not understand what was "not really scientific" about it. I asked the professor in the group what the problem was, and he replied that the pictures they made had become "too [End Page 375] artistic"; the group had even been approached by an experimental jazz-saxophonist, who wanted to use the pictures as a visual background at a concert. Not that it matters as such, the professor said, but the group is becoming famous for the aesthetic qualities of its pictures, not for its contribution to "hard science." Interesting dichotomy, I thought. In this paper, I intend to pursue the assumed dichotomy between science and aesthetics. One of the most remarkable features of the boundary between the two is that these researchers seem to disregard it in practice and to mix science and aesthetics in a quite radical way, while their verbal reflections of their practice seldom recognize this. In other words, there seems to be a major discrepancy between what the researchers say and what they do. In the following, I will trace the discourses and practices of science and aesthetics by analyzing the making of the group's emblematic photographs, the CSLM-images. In the first part of the paper, I will examine how bacteria in biofilms are modified in a fashion that makes them visible; in the second part, I will analyze how the pictures are edited and made understandable. Science, Art, and Aesthetics Like the stated aim of Alberto Cambrosio, Daniel Jacobi, and Peter Keating, my aim with this paper is to "contribute to the analysis of "nonart" (in the present case scientific) images."2 The critical difference between art and nonart is arguably that aesthetics is an explicit actor in the construction of art, whereas aesthetics plays only an implicit, or even hidden, role in the construction of science. In the following, I will discuss the relations between these three phenomena: science, art, and aesthetics. Traditionally, science is perceived as focusing solely on content while being completely oblivious to form, whereas aesthetics is perceived as concentrating exclusively on form and disregarding content. This division is so crude that it borders on caricature, and many scholars have written about the complexity of the relation between content and form.3 Here, however, I will stay with the more "traditional" [End Page 376] stance on content and form for a while, because this is the stance that I have met in the laboratory when the researchers commented on their work, and therefore it will have a profound impact on the analyses that follow. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Christensen, Haagensen, Heydorn & Molin, Biofilm consisting of Acinetobacter and P. putida (Courtesy of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and the authors, republished from "Metabolic Commensalism and Competition in a Two-Species Microbial Consortium," May 2002, Vol. 69, no. 5. p. 2496–202) Important consequences of the traditional view of content and form—that they are different, and that aesthetic concerns have no place in science—are the divergent ways of regarding the constructive processes leading to the end product, be it scientific or aesthetic: Aesthetics generally highlights the processes leading to the final product. Skill and technique are often major elements of the work, and are experienced as pleasurable to the viewer/listener/receiver. Thus, appreciating the violinist's ability to move her fingers rapidly and precisely is as vital a part of the experience...