Nikon Small World Event - Wistar Institute

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zed
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Nikon Small World Event - Wistar Institute

Post by zed »

Hi All,

The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia will be hosting a virtual event this Friday 2/12 from 5:00pm-6:00pm EST discussing the art and science of microscopy which I though might be of interest to many on this forum.

Nikon Small World Virtual Event: Science Meets Art in the Infinitely Small

https://wistar.org/events/nikon-small-w ... tely-small

Scientists — like artists — are driven to observation and use their work as a means to render ideas about the world. Imaging and photomicrography allow them to capture the beauty and complexity of life.

Wistar is hosting a virtual conversation on microscopy—photos taken through a microscope. It gives us a glimpse into a world that most have never seen. The event will feature winning images from the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition.

This event is free and open to the public.

Speakers:

James Hayden, Managing Director Imaging Facility
Irene Bertolini, Postdoctoral Researcher
THE WISTAR INSTITUTE

Eric Flem, Communications Manager
NIKON INSTRUMENTS INC.

Daniel Castranova, 1st place
Jason Kirk, 7th place
Nadia Efimova, Image of Distinction Winner
2020 PHOTOMICROGRAPHY COMPETITION

zzffnn
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Re: Nikon Small World Event - Wistar Institute

Post by zzffnn »

Thank you, Jason. You saved the the event and made it more enjoyable.

Other presenters there don't seem to remember that this is about "science meets art". There is artistic beauty in biology to be revealed.

Even to me, as an immunologist and microbiologist PhD, this year's presentations have too much science and not enough art in it. So much so that the general public (microscopy hobbyists without biology training) may not find it interesting enough.

As for professional scientists, we have already heard too much hardcore science at our pizza club to pay attention to anything else.

Personally, I really want to hear more from amateur micro photographers (those without mega bucks confocal scopes) on how they obtained their award-winning photographs. Granted, those are not the main customer base of Nikon.

zed
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Location: Houston, TX
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zed

Post by zed »

@zzffnn - Thanks for the compliment and I'm glad you enjoyed the event.

I think it is very difficult for imaging scientists to focus energy on the artistic component of this type of work because it is something that is actively discounted within the community. The rise of digital imaging and the realization that quantifiable data can be obtained from images has massively shifted the field away from using images purely as visual evidence to one where the priority is measuring the data contained within them. Sadly, many scientists using microscopy could care less about the visual impact of the images they generate - instead choosing to view them merely as data points.

It is hard to fault them for this - as their goal is to generate data to support a hypothesis. Art is not even an after thought for many. In fact, if you look at many of the top 100 images in NSW over the years, most of the images taken by research scientists are one-offs - meaning they likely generated that image in the process of collecting thousands of others and they submitted said image thinking it 'looked cool' - rather than there being any overarching artistic process to its creation.

So it can be hard to find speakers in the scientific community who can talk at length about the artistic process when there really isn't any to speak of.

I do agree with you that it would be nice to hear from the hobbyist microscopists who routinely place images - as they create their images mainly for artistic pursuit. But they are the flip side of this coin - as there is often no scientific component to the imagery. Events like this are promotional tools for research institutions like the Wistar (whose priorities are advancing science) and Nikon Instruments (whose priorities are to sell expensive instruments to those institutions) - so I can see why their speaker choice would lean towards the scientific. I cannot imagine it is an easy process to find speakers that strike a balance - I just hope I was able to do that reasonably.

PeteM
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Re: Nikon Small World Event - Wistar Institute

Post by PeteM »

My thanks as well.

Just to echo zzffnn's point about the artistic side -- innovation and discovery very often emerge from a mash up of different viewpoints and disciplines. We talk of "thinking outside the box" -- and that box might as well be a confocal scope as anything. The greatest value of technical conferences is, IMO, exposure to new perspectives -- leading to new questions and sometimes providing guiding analogies, ideas, metaphors. Einstein was big on them (trains, clocks . . .) to guide the math and so on. Physics still can't decide if it would rather see light as a wave or a particle - and benefits from the "mashup" of it being both.

Point being that the "art" side can provide a sort of visual metaphor to spur new thinking.

As one tiny example (and my background is not microbiology) my initial semi-understanding of DNA is that it was a sort of code, written in four letters, much like early numerical control tapes. Just follow the sequence and all is revealed?? But only when I saw protein folding, did it become clear that the shapes of our molecular machinery (and thus access to it) were an important factor. And so, it turns out, that a mash up of microbiology and computer-aided geometric modeling has utility.

The point is that breathtaking images can be a potent invitation to discovery.

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