Creating small wonders
By Erin Wayman
Cell biologist and inventor Gary Greenberg’s career took a turn about 10 years ago when his brother sent him a canister of beach sand. Greenberg placed a pinch under a light microscope. Magnified hundreds of times, the colorful, intricate sand grains resembled beads from a necklace.
“I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe that was what sand looked like,” he says. “I got hooked on the idea that there was this entire world people didn’t know existed.”
He started photographing the magnified sand, as well as flowers, fruit, wine, clothes, paper — whatever he could stick under a microscope. His photos have been displayed in museums and have formed the basis of four books.
Greenberg (left) has always thought art and science should be intertwined. Before earning a Ph.D. in biology at University College London in 1981, he worked for several years as a photographer and filmmaker. He first combined his two passions to create special effects for the 1978 film Superman, turning magnified human pancreatic cancer cells into a distant view of the planet Krypton. (The cells’ nuclei made great craters, he says.)