Have you ever looked through your parents’ old photo albums, with pictures of them when they were still kids? Ever seen the black and whites of your grandparents’ or maybe parents’ wedding? Did you ever consider your children might look at your baby pictures in the same way? Or have you thought photography has evolved as much as it possibly can?

If you’ve answered yes to the latter, then I’m sorry, but scientists at the University of California, San Francisco are determined to prove you wrong. They’ve already started a revolution in the domain of photography, even though it’s still in its early stages. Bacterial photography is the subject of their studies and as the name suggests, yes, they do use bacteria to create pictures. By slightly altering the DNA of a certain strand of E-coli bacteria, scientists have successfully managed to “teach” it to create a dark pigment according to the amount of light it receives. Translated into English, that means the bacteria that don’t get sufficient light will appear darker than those that do. Sadly, this means the image can only be monochrome, but due to the small size of the bacteria, it is of much greater detail, such as 100 megapixels per square inch. If that doesn’t ring a bell, you’ll just have to trust me when I say it’s 10 times sharper than your high-performance camera and 50 times sharper than your average cell phone camera.

Of course, there is a very obvious drawback to it, besides the monotony of monochrome images. Did any of you feel uneasy when I said E-coli? Of course, that would make anyone feel a bit uneasy about the device, but scientists have assured us that this is a harmless strand of the bacteria. If they’re able to manufacture a biological light sensor, they should be able to know how dangerous it is, shouldn’t they? If there was a risk of an outbreak, I’d like to think the project would’ve never reached the public’s ears. But as others have very well put it “Out of all the strands of bacteria known to man, only a few are actually dangerous. Most of us have millions of harmless ones in our system and never find out about it”.

Despite the fairly limited possibilities that bacterial photography offers at the moment, it has enormous potential. “We must keep in mind that we’ve barely learned to sit up straight in this field, we’ll need some more time before we actually learn to walk” University of California representatives commented. Although it’s a bit early for predictions, this new discovery will make current digital cameras look obsolete, much like black and white ones seem to us now. And that is exactly what we need – pioneers to drive our world forward, because if none of us would ever have taken a risk, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

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