Short Wave - Arts Week: Harnessing Bacteria For Art

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Pull out your art supplies because it's time to get crafty—with agar! We're beginning Arts Week at the intersection of biology and art. Therein lies a creative medium that's actually alive. Scientists and artists practice etching designs on petri dishes with bacterial paint that can grow and multiply. This encore episode, Aaron talks with science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce about her foray into the agar art world. Love the science powering another craft? Email the show at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Emily, when you were a kid, what did you like to draw? I drew very pedestrian scenes. I like drawing buildings, sidewalks, crosswalks, and cranes, like for construction projects. It sounds like one of those, like, things to identify you're a real person and not a robot when you're about to click something. You could just put in Emily Kwong's drawings of urban landscapes. That's right. What about you? I pretty much drew the opposite.

Well, you were focused on the everyday in front of you. I was focused on magical monsters and dragons and superheroes and the things that defy physics and biology. And I ask because today we are going to focus not on the huge things, not on the fantastical things, but we're going to focus on drawing with the microscopic critters that cover us. They're everywhere on our eyes, our tongues, our fingertips. Yeah, today we're talking about bacteria. So put on your smocks and put away that hand sanitizer. Reporter Nell Greenfield Boyce is about to take us inside Microbial Arts 101.

We're kicking off Art Week, a collection of some of our favorite episodes that sit at the intersection of art, science, and inspiration. Enjoy. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hello, Shortwaver's Aaron Scott here with Nell Greenfield. Boys, hello. Hey, Aaron. You're taking me somewhere delightful and surprising and creative and I don't know where it is. What are we doing?

Well, I wonder first, do you do any art yourself? Are you an artist? I am a lapsed artist, I would say. I definitely have painted and drawn, but currently I mostly look at art and salivate a little bit. Yeah, I'm not a big artist either. I mean, I like to dabble in things. And the other day, I got this opportunity to work with some. something that most people don't ever use.

So I recently went to the library, one of the local public libraries here in Washington, D.C. And down in the basement, they had set up all these art supplies. So it was like arts and crafts. Are we talking like construction paper and scissors and things like that? No, no, no, no. As you know, this is a science show. And so what they had set up was plates with agar and little vials of bacteria. Vials of bacteria.

Yeah. One of the people running this little demo who got me started is Jennifer Kerr. What are we doing here? We are actually taking bacteria, E. coli. And it's a special type of bacteria that has some extra DNA in it that allows for it to be colorful. So it actually creates color palette, so to speak, paints. And we can create pieces of art with it, which is amazing. So you know what Agar is, right?

That's like that gelatinous medium that you grow bacteria in science class. Yeah, or microbiology labs or whatever. So there is this art form called agar art. Basically, people take these dishes with a layer of this sort of nutrient jello called agar, and they draw with living bacteria. Would you like to go ahead and take a try? Sure. All right.

You can draw a star, you can draw your favorite bacteria, I feel like this is a lot of pressure. No, it's not. Whatever your heart desires. They give you a petri dish, and then you have these vials that are labeled like pink, you know, blue, purple. But the liquid in them is totally clear. The bacteria haven't, like, grown yet.

That's what they're going to do once they get on the nutrients. And you drag the stick across the surface of the agger, like drawing on jello, you know, like it's not a... With an invisible ink. With an invisible ink. ink. That's exactly what it's like. It's like drawing on jello with invisible ink. So those are pretty awesome. And so these are, so this is pink and blue here. We have pink and blue and we have purple and green. The green's pretty special because we can actually

put it underneath a special light that allows for it to fluoresce. It's, it's the green fluorescent protein that's actually been taken from jellyfish. I love this. So today on the show, where science meets art on a microbial scale, I'm Aaron Scott, and you are listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcasts from NPR. So now this idea of making art with microbes, it's not something that was invented a couple of years ago. It goes back a really long time. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, who were the first people to paint with bacteria? So arguably the first people lived 5,000 years ago in British Columbia. So basically there are these things microbial mats.

So it's basically like layers of microbes that grow like in lakes or something like that. Apparently what they found by studying rock art is that people who lived back then would collect these microbial mats and like heat them up and get a sort of reddish pigment. And they would use this reddish pigment to like paint on the rocks. So you could argue that they were the first microbial artists, although they weren't painting with living bacteria. They were just sort of using it as a source for pigment. But the one person that people point to as a sort of like major historic figure who engaged in microbial art was Alexander Fleming. Do you remember who Alexander Fleming is? The gentleman who discovered penicillin.

Penicillin, exactly, right. So, you know, around like the 1920s, he was studying all kinds of, you know, bacteria. And he was an artist and he liked to draw and paint. And so sometimes he would take, like, paper and draw on it, like trace an image on it. and then soak the paper in nutrients and then put in microbes that would grow and, like, color the drawing. And I actually would love to know a little bit more about that. I mean, because we think of these things as being invisible or so small that they wouldn't really have color, why is their pigment and why are different microbes different colors?

Actually, colored bacteria existed before vision did. Wow. Bacteria have been around for a really long time. longer than multicellular, yeah, creatures. And so it's just, they're apparently just byproducts of their various enzymes and life processes. It's not like they're doing anything necessarily with these colors. You know, you have to think about the fact that these bacteria potentially communicate with each other, right? The bacteria might interact.

They might repel each other. I talked to Mehmet Berkman. He's a scientist at New England Biolabs. And he says that these bacteria can influence each other in all sorts of ways. They not only grow up to different rates, different temperatures, they also communicate with each other. So what a red bacteria might not be red beside a yellow one. So it's not just like painting. It's also understanding them.

Mehmet has been exploring the world of agar art in his lab for a while now, even before something that the American Society for Microbiology started doing, which is this agar art contest. So basically, every year since 2015, they've been having this contest. And, you know, they get like hundreds of entries from all around the world. They just had a party at one of the main microbe meetings was here in Washington, D.C., and they had this cocktail party where they invited some of the winners to come and present their art. I love this one. So people were drinking wine. It was very much like a sort of art scene kind of thing.

Like a gallery opening. But the pictures are all made of bacteria. So what do they look like? What were the highlights? Oh, there was all kinds of things. of stuff. You know, there was a portrait of Barack Obama. There was another using microbes that were taken and cultured from a woman and her daughter's bodies, so sort of showing their microbial connection between the two of them. Another one looked really simple. It was this coy fish and

this lotus flower, but it was actually really complicated to make. I talked to the artist. Her name is Arwa Hadid. When you look at it in first glance, it's kind of just like a very normal, like, flower and fish, but I use nine different organisms to get it to get the shading right, to get the outlines right, to really pop. So most people when they look at it don't really assume that there's nine different organisms that went into making it. One guy standing next to us pointed at her stuff and was like, wow, that is really hard to do. This all sounds so complex and also so very, very cool. What else struck you now? Well, there was one that I really like. It's made of dozens and dozens of square petri dishes, and they're laid out in the shape of Manhattan.

The bacteria in the dishes are tracing all the sort of streets in New York City. Wow. And I talked with the researcher who did this, Christine Marezi and her friends and colleagues there, they got this idea to basically just like give random people walking by in New York City the opportunity to draw their corner of the city in microbes. You always want to make sure to have this person. connection, right? So I asked him, so where do you live? Do you live like in a downtown? You want to, I don't know, you want to pick Chinatown and this is like you paint your

street, you're actually just going to be living in. So I very often just really picked like the place to live. It was just the same year that there had been this like sort of report of plague bacteria in the subway. So, you know, sort of like bacteria in the city was on people's minds. People were aware but also frightened of microbes in the city. So let's let's talk about microbe probes around you and also like, you know, how you can actually culture them and, you know, how we use them for good stuff. I think that people underestimate how much of science is just mucking around and like playing with things and trying different things and having fun.

You know, scientists are really creative and fun people. We have, we always talk about science identity, but, you know, part of science identity is also like, you know, come up as very novel solutions. And I think that's what like art can, you know, express like very well. I mean, I'm an artist and I'm a scientist. You know, you cannot reduce me to one persona. This is a field of art where there's still tons that could be done. I mean, we've barely scratched the surface of microbial art here.

Do you want to share your picture? Well, yeah, I'll send it to you. I mean, you can take a look. Behold my masterpiece. Okay. This is beautiful. I see a reddish flower with green petals, maybe a stem and a green leaf. and then these like little purple dots that I'm going to imagine are like, you know, pollen just kind of filtering through the air.

You're like every parent who ever looks at a picture that their kid gives them. Oh, it's beautiful. It's, yeah, it's beautiful. Whatever it is, it's gorgeous. Yeah, I don't think I was really like pushing the artistic form forward here. It wasn't like pushing the envelope of microbe art. But you get the idea. And the beautiful thing is it would change over time.

I mean, if this was in your fridge, it would slowly grow and morph like a flower. Yeah, they don't last forever. Well, Mel, thank you for making the invisible visible for us in a most beautiful manner. Thank you. This episode was produced by Margaret Serino and Rebecca Ramirez. It was edited by Giselle Grayson, who is also a senior supervising editor with help from Thomas Liu. Rachel Carlson checked the facts and the audio engineer was Stu Rushfield. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming.

I'm Aaron Scott. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.