Aesthetic bewilderment” is a kind of common ground in science and art, an engine for new ideas in both disciplines, writes Brazilian artist Vik Muniz in the introduction to a new book of photographs and essays about bacteria by microbiologist Tal Danino. That book, titled Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse, was published last week.
Danino collaborated with Muniz on a number of projects—including one that involved making art out of viruses and cancer cells—when Muniz was a visiting artist at MIT. “I think that scientists often see a beautiful pattern and wonder about the underlying processes that make such a pattern happen,” says Danino when I ask him what aesthetic bewilderment means to him. Take the complex architectures of the snowflake, the markings on the coats of animals, or the fractal-like arrangements produced by some communities of microbes. “I think that there’s a lot of scientific work that just begins with a scientist saying, ‘Wow, this is such a cool pattern or dynamic process and I really want to study it,’” he says.
The microbes themselves are collaborators in the artwork process.
Aesthetic bewilderment seems like the bedrock of Danino’s new book: Here are the invisible microworlds so many of us take for granted brought to screaming life in flamboyant colors and electrifying geometries. Bacteria often inspire fear or disgust—particularly disease-causing pathogens such as Escherichia coli or Staphylococcus—but the beauty of these images draws the attention, provokes a desire to understand what the eye beholds.
We spoke with Tal Danino about the book, bacteria, and his work.
Do you remember the first time you found bacteria beautiful?
My dad is an engineer and my mom has an artistic background so I was always doing some art and some engineering. In grad school, these two disciplines converged. I was looking at microbes under the microscope and designing them to communicate with one another as a population, what people call core sensing, and turning what I saw into these beautiful movies. The microscope would take a picture every minute, we would stitch it together and make a movie over time and speed it up. These films were rhythmic, making oscillations, waves, all these really interesting patterns. At the time I was doing a lot of science outreach, so showing videos like this to kids and to general audiences, non-scientists. I was thinking about how do we share the excitement of the research that we’re doing, the excitement of discovery, and the really beautiful things that scientists see on a daily basis.
Do you think there’s something inherently beautiful about bacteria?
I think that the thing about bacteria that is unique in the bioart realm is that the microbes themselves are collaborators in the artwork process. We put them in specific conditions inside a petri dish, or we genetically manipulate them, so we give them a set of instructions. But they have their own minds, so to speak, and they make these beautiful patterns that are inherently one-of-a-kind. Any of the dishes that you see in the book, I can’t make them again. It’s impossible. There’s a lot of unpredictability and chaos because they have these elements of noise and randomness and mutation and adaptation, which are in some ways like intelligent features of those systems. It’s exciting to see what happens and it’s different every time.
You mention in the book that there are trillions of bacteria in our bodies, which is more than the number of stars in the galaxy. It's a bit hard to understand and even a little scary. What should we understand from this and what does it tell us about life on this planet?
It's almost like a philosophical challenge when you hear something like that because it makes you turn inward. We've done a lot of space exploration and are always looking to new parts of the galaxies. This is a very popular theme in contemporary culture today. But it's really interesting to think about how even within us—within one person—there's just enormous complexity. And that's the complexity that's not just in our own DNA, but rather this other part of our body, which is transportable and manipulatable and has this interesting evolutionary history. These bacteria evolved with us.
You talk about researchers in microbiology creating new types of relationships between humans, microbes, and machines, including using AI to envision new forms of bacteria. Can you explain the goals of this work?
Bacteria in our bodies are able to sense thousands of different molecules, so in my own work, we have modified them as biosensors to detect diseases like cancers. We manipulate their DNA. But there are advantages and disadvantages to that. Another approach is to have bacteria communicate with electronic devices. For example, one group developed a pill into which you could insert bacteria that could communicate with a small electronic interface. They gave this pill to pigs and rodents, showing that the bacteria could sense important molecules in gut inflammation and create electrical signals that the device would transmit to a cell phone for detection. So there are some really interesting connections between bacteria and machines happening now.
I think the role of artificial intelligence is twofold: One, to better understand a lot of the data that’s coming out and to be able to predict how to better design these microbial systems. And in the future also to help us try to interface with our bacterial systems to say, “Hey, I wanna design a bacteria that does X, Y, and Z. Can you design the DNA sequence that does this?” AI would help you learn that process so that you could build it in the lab, or a robot could build it for you. These kinds of concepts are really in their infancy.
What is one of the biggest mysteries about bacteria that scientists are still trying to solve?
The really big question is how do the bacteria in our bodies affect our health and disease? You may have heard about the importance of the microbiome, but the challenge is that a lot of the existing studies are correlational. Certain bacteria species are more prevalent in cancer patients, but it’s not clear that they necessarily cause the cancer. And the causal studies are oftentimes done in mice, which are pretty different in terms of host-microbe interactions. So the microbiome has become such a huge field because of its complexity and we are trying to understand how so many of these strains affect different points of health and disease.
In my own research, a major question is, how do you effectively design a microbe to treat a disease like cancer? We study bacteria that can enter tumors, similar to Trojan horses, and produce drugs. There are numerous possibilities. You can select different types of bacteria, different drugs, make them safer and more specific, and choose different types of cancers. It's all about finding the right combination of elements.
Is there anything else you want readers to take from this book?
I think it's important to know that the book focuses on the Petri dish, which is a simple and accessible platform for studying bacteria. All the imaging is done using a commercial scanner or a camera, and many of our swabs were done at home. We are using very accessible technologies that others could also use, such as science or art students or anyone interested in creating art with bacteria. In scientific literature, you rarely find Petri dish images highlighting their aesthetics. We really emphasize the aesthetics and these simple tools that might inspire others to do similar work or become interested in microbiology.
All images and captions by Tal Danino.
