A Night at the MIT Museum

Brandy Freitas, Director of Data Science and Analytics, syGlass

Last week, I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the MIT Museum's After Dark series. The crowd was there to explore the theme of monsters: "It is said that Monsters reside in spaces not well understood. Join us as we navigate unchartered waters and explore unusual creatures real and imagined." — MIT Museum

When I think of uncovering the unknown, I can't think of a better field than microscopy, where we use different tools to peel back layers and make discoveries. So, to prepared for this, the syGlass crew scoured our connections and research friends, and collected some great specimens to show how advanced microscopy is helping us understand biology in new ways.

The specimens: a zebra fish imaged on a confocal microscope by a high school student at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole; an axolotl (above) from the Murawala lab at the Mount Desert Island Marine Biological Laboratory (MDI) imaged by Rylie Walsh at the MBL on a home grown stage-scanning line confocal microscope; a live sea urchin from Tzer Han Tan's lab at UCSD imaged overnight on a Bruker TruLive lattice light sheet microscope; and a wrasse imaged on a microCT by Kory Evans at Rice (with a terrifying surprise inside).

Using techniques like light sheet fluorescence microscopy and microCT, we can now image entire organisms in 3D, sometimes over time, sometimes at incredibly fine resolution, and often without damaging the sample. These tools let us explore development, structure, and function in ways that weren’t possible even a few years ago.

But the real takeaway from the crowd wasn't just about the imaging, it was about how we shared this kind of work. You can see above a 3D anaglyph video of the wrasse, including the secret parasite hidden in it's mouth. Rendered like this on a large screen, more then a hundred people were able to experience Dr. Evan's discovery together, in real time, along with some gasps that I won't forget.

Scientific communication too often assumes people already know why something matters. Visuals, especially interactive or immersive ones like videos in 3D, can help. They give people a reason to ask questions and a clearer way to understand the answers. I know that the most excited questions I got at the podium were around whether the specimen can be alive in the microscope (sometimes!), whether we released them into the wild (if they were already there!), or what happens to the fish with the parasite (just a little underweight, it weirdly does not kill the fish). 

Whether you’re studying something as small as a developing urchin embryo, or as complex as the evolution of a parasitic relationship, the way you present the data matters. And when you do it well, it can change how people see the science, and maybe even how they ask questions about the natural world.