Humans first used drawing and centuries later photography to understand natural phenomena and to share and explain reality. There are many examples that could show how pictures have helped us understand science. I suggest you take me on a short journey through the history of science to pick out six images that changed the world.
Galileo’s moons
On March 13, 1610, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) published his astronomical treatise Messenger star (Messenger of the stars), which represented a change in view of our identity and place in the world and decisive support for the heliocentric theory of Copernicus.
This little book contained Galileo’s first observations made with a simple telescope he had made himself.
Galileo saw objects orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, saw moons orbiting Jupiter, saw hundreds of stars in the Milky Way, and observed and drew the Moon as no one had done before. Galileo was a magnificent painter, although his father put the absurd idea of pursuing art out of his head.
With his watercolors of lights, darks and shadows, he painted the Moon with unique precision and beauty. Until then, the moon was thought to be smooth as a canvas, but Galileo showed it with its craters, mountains and valleys. These drawings of the moon were the origin of modern astronomy.
Flee in Micrography
A little over 50 years later, in 1665, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) published Micrography. Unlike Galileo, Hooke concentrated his devices, the first microscopes, on the smallest and most minute. At the time, only a small handful of scientists and famous people had access to microscopes, but Hooke was the first to spread science and draw in large format what he saw through them.
He drew with precision and tremendous clarity and artistic quality all kinds of everyday objects observed with his microscopes like never before: from descriptions of ice and snow to cork, fossils, charcoal and detailed descriptions of animals and animal parts. An unpleasant flea seen under a microscope thus turned out to be a great miracle of nature.
in Micrography The term cell first appears in reference to the pores observed in a thin sheet of cork. Micrography he was probably the first the best seller a scholar of history.
I think
More than a century and a half later, in 1831, young Charles Darwin (1809-1882) boarded the HMS Beagle under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy.
During this trip, which took nearly five years and circled the world, Darwin collected and made detailed observations of the plants, fossils, and animals he found. The journey of the beagle marked his entire life, it was the basis for the ideas he developed for years in England and which led to his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Perhaps one of Darwin’s most revolutionary drawings, and the one that most influenced 20th century science, was one he made in 1837 in one of his notebooks, a simple sketch of a tree with a few branches. At the top of the page he wrote: “I think“.
In the diagram, each branch was labeled with a letter that represented a species and indicated that they were all related, evolving from a common ancestor. It was the first representation of the tree of life. Twenty years later, Darwin presented his book Origin of species.
Neuron of Cajal
But if there is one person for whom drawing and photography were essential to his scientific research, it is Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934).
As a child, Cajal discovered the workings of the camera obscura, and even as a child, a passion was awakened in him that lasted until the end of his days: photography. His restless and enterprising spirit led him to innovate in the field of photography.
He used his microscopes to look at the photographic plates, so he was able to understand what was going on there. The sensitivity of the plates was improved, the exposure time was shortened, the contrast and sharpness of the images and the chemical treatment of the developer were improved. I got much better quality pictures that way.
Cajal was a pioneer of color photography, taking some of the first color photographs in Spain in the early 20th century. But apart from that, he had an uncontrollable love for drawing. He enjoyed drawing everything from caricatures to still lifes, landscapes and portraits.
In 1887, Cajal became enthusiastic about a new dyeing technique developed by the Italian Camilo Golgi. This technique allowed us to see the complete structure of the cells of the nervous system in a way that had not been seen before, but the staining had many disadvantages and Cajal set out to improve it.
In fact, this silver stain was very similar to photographic developments, and Cajal used his photographic knowledge to improve neuron staining techniques. But what Cajal sees under the microscope are very complex images of the brain.
Cajal must interpret them and above all explain what he sees in order to complete the definition of his theory. For this, he does not use a photograph, but a drawing. All your publications will have an associated artwork. Drawing allows you to dwell on important details.
His drawings are not a faithful graphic representation of what he sees at a particular moment under the microscope. It is an integrative, ideal image, reconstructed from hundreds of images seen under a microscope and extracting the best details from each one. This is how he develops his neuron theory, a neuron is an anatomical and physiological unit.
Cajal received the Nobel Prize in 1906 together with Golgi and is the best example that only geniuses are able to unite different forms of knowledge (art and science) to solve complex problems.
Photo 51
The image that represents a radical change in 20th century science is the so-called “Photograph 51” by Rosalind Franklin, an image of DNA obtained by X-ray diffraction in 1952.
When a crystallized form of a molecule, such as DNA, is exposed to X-rays, the atoms in the crystal bend some of the rays to create a diffraction pattern that allows the structure of the molecule to be interpreted. That picture, one X perfect, it was one of the decisive tests that confirmed the structure of the spiral staircase, the famous double helix, DNA.
James Watson and Francis Crick collected data from several researchers (including Franklin and his collaborator Maurice Wilkins) to build their model of the 3D structure of DNA.
In 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Unfortunately, by then Franklin had died in 1958 of ovarian cancer caused in part by repeated exposure to radiation, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.
Images by James Webb
And the story continues: in July 2022, NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the universe as we’ve never seen it before, from neighboring exoplanets to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe.
The above are just some examples of how pictures, drawings and photographs are inseparable from the advancement of scientific knowledge. We need the art of the image to know and understand the world and the universe.
The original version of this article was published on the author’s microBIO blog.
Ignace Lopez-Goni He is a member of SEM (Spanish Society of Microbiology) and a professor of microbiology at the University of Navarra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.
