Cells on film – the past and future of cinemicroscopy

Abstract

Movie making is now a ubiquitous experimental tool that biologists use alongside more traditional techniques such as molecular biology and biochemistry. It is no longer just cell biologists, but scientists from many other disciplines, such as immunology and neuroscience, that utilise movies to dissect their processes of interest. When did filming become such a standard laboratory technique? Who developed the use of the movie as an experimental tool? The Wellcome Library has recently restored and digitized a number of original 16-mm films from two pioneering cinemicroscopists, Ronald Canti and Michael Abercrombie, which are now freely available to the scientific community. In light of these films, this Essay will give a brief history of the early cinemicroscopists and discuss what is driving the use of movies in the laboratory today.

Understanding cell fate control by continuous single-cell quantification

“…The origins of time-lapse microscopy can be traced back to Etienne-Jules Marey, 15,16 who assembled the first documented time-lapse microscope in 1891 and filmed red blood cells. 15,17 In 1895, the Lumiére brothers patented the cinematograph, a device capable of "manipulating" time by speeding up or slowing down recordings during playback. 18 Shortly thereafter, cinematographers started to look at microscopic specimens.…”

“…In 1903, Duncan recorded, in one of the earliest microcinematographic movies of living organisms, the movement of cheese mites. 15 In 1907, Ries filmed sea urchin development, 19 and, in 1909, Comandon demonstrated that disease-causing and nondisease-causing syphilis bacteria could be distinguished based on their motility. 16 After the development of tissue culture in 1907 by Harrison 20 and the first commercial microcinematograph in 1914, 21 microcinematography was adopted by Carrel and Rosenberger to study the movement of fibroblasts and macrophages in culture.…”

“…23 Canti and Lewis were the first to use time-lapse microcinematography to study the developing embryo. 15,24 Canti's movies are particularly impressive because he managed to record the growth of an entire chicken thigh bone for 2 weeks. Maintaining the viability of these cultures for such extended periods of time while keeping the specimen in focus and the microscope running is not trivial, even today.…”

“…21 This impression was shared by many cytologist at the time and only slowly began to change after Abercrombie demonstrated that time-lapse imaging could be used to extract quantitative information about the cellular movements of fibroblasts. 15,25 Irene Boll, a pioneer in time-lapse cinematography of hematopoietic cells, quantified their maturation, locomotion, mitosis, and apoptosis. [26][27][28][29] However, Boll's work remained an exception; it took until the 1990s, with the arrival of cheap electronics and solid-state cameras enabling the acquisition and storage of digital images, for time-lapse imaging to become more widespread.…”

Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

“…According to Comandon, just as microscopes had opened up the spatial dimension of investigation, the film camera enhanced the temporal dimension of perception, allowing us to see well-known phenomena in a new way or to discover previously imperceptible processes (Landecker 2005(Landecker , 2006(Landecker , 2009.⁴ Ever since the introduction of time-lapse imaging, the development of methods for acquiring, analysing, and understanding images in order to generate numerical information has been the main technological breakthrough in enhancing the manipulability of time. With the so-called 'computer vision', filming allows the observer not only to see events that are not visible in static images, but also to subsequently deal with time as a measurable variable in experiments (Stramer and Dunn 2015).…”