WORDS Madhumita Venkataramanan PHOTOS Jonathan Bloom and Eshel Ben-Jacob
SHEL BEN-JACOB is taking cues from the collective intelligence of bacteria to learn how to interrupt communication between cancer cells. The physicist and senior scientist at Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics tells how this strategy could turn the disease against itself. The creativity in Ben-Jacob’s ground-breaking approach to cancer research has its corollary in the “bacterial art” he creates — beautiful and intricate images of the very bacterial strains he studies.
A colony of Paenibacillus vortex, a strain of bacteria discovered and studied by physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob. This bacterial colony has been grown in a petri dish and its image captured and manipulated by the scientist to help illustrate the bacteria’s social sophistication. Each dot in the image is a dense collection of up to a million cells.
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