For as long as humans have been alive, we have mistaken the limits of our sense-perception for the full extent of reality — thinking our galaxy the only one, because that was as far as we could see; thinking life impossible below 300 fathoms, because that was as far as we could reach — only to discover, as we wield our minds to develop prosthetic extensions of our senses, scales of complexity infinitely wider and vaster than we had imagined, full of wonders we could not conceive with our self-referential imagination.
“I have observed many tiny animals with great admiration,” Galileo reported after converting his telescope into a compound microscope to reveal a cosmos inside the world, an exponent of life never before imagined.
“I examined water in which I had steeped the pepper,” the artist turned scientist Robert Hooke wrote a generation later in his pioneering 1665 book Micrographia, “and as if I had been looking upon a Sea, I saw infinite of small living Creatures swimming and playing up and down in it, a thing indeed very wonderful to behold.”
Within two centuries, Darwin had drawn a link of kinship between us and these tiny wonders. “Each living creature,” he wrote, “must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”
Today, we know that there are more bacteria in your body than there are stars in the Milky Way, more in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people living in Europe. In the body of the Earth itself, there are microbes that breathe rock rather than oxygen and live for millions of years — a mysterious intraterrestrial universe that may have sculpted the continents we live on. Microbes touch every aspect of our planet’s history and health, from climate change to the origin of life. They are the golden threads in the tapestry connecting everything alive.
Centuries after it enchanted the early microscopists, their strange and subtle wonder comes aglow magnified by our modern tools and thinking on the pages of
Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse (public library) by synthetic biologist Tal Danino.
Against the backdrop of bacteria’s billions of years of evolutionary history, here is a young art (photography, born in 1839) drawing on a young science (bacteriology, established in the 1860s) and using an even younger canvas (the petri dish, devised in 1887) to capture the primordial, eternal beauty of Earth’s first life-forms.
Part artist and part futurist, Danino runs a lab working on microbial programming that aims to turn these ancient organisms into futuristic aids for human life, ranging from living environmental sensors to bespoke probiotics that target specific diseases.
Centuries after the pioneering microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used saffron to stain the cells he was observing in order to reveal their intricate structure, Danino’s dazzling array of samples — bacteria from the sands of Venice Beach in California and the rocks of Breakneck Ridge in New York; bacteria from a man’s foot, a woman’s bellybutton, and a baby’s hand; bacteria from the soil of South Korea and of New York City — are stained with vibrant dyes that render their enchantment partway between expressionist painting and psychedelic vision.
Complement Beautiful Bacteria with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions, neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s stunning drawings of brain cells under a microscope, and the mesmerizing microscopy of tree tissues, then revisit the haunting science of mental health, free will, and your microbiome.
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