Engineering x Art

By Grant Currin


Bacteria are ubiquitous almost everywhere on earth— including inside the human body.

For decades, researchers have been engineering these microbes in the hope of developing new ways to diagnose and treat disease. Tal Danino, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, is a leader in that effort. His Synthetic Biological Systems Lab has developed groundbreaking advancements in using bacteria to treat lung and colorectal cancer and even “painting” targets that lead the body’s own immune system to kill cancerous cells.

Danino and his lab members are also artists, using bacteria to create wondrous images that expose the hidden world of microbes and reveal the beautiful diversity of these unseen worlds.

“As a graduate student, I made movies of E. coli by using a microscope to take a picture every minute and then stitching them together,” Danino says. “These movies became a really effective form of science communication, both for telling colleagues about our experiments and for introducing microbes to kids and other general audiences.”

Danino’s movies became the launching point for making art with the bacteria themselves. In his new book, “Beautiful Bacteria” (Rizzoli 2024), he shares gorgeous images alongside a crash course in the history and future of bacteria and the many, many ways they impact human life. The Petri dish photographs also reflect toward the ephemeral nature of creating art with living things.

“Bacteria become living collaborators in the artworks. It’s something that’s very unique, and it’s really hard to reproduce. We could never reproduce any of the images in the book — that’s part of the artistic process,” Danino says.

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