Science Writing Prize Winner 2026 – Sayantika Ghosh
From stones to cells – tracing the invisible
by Sayantika Ghosh, University of Cambridge
I was wandering through the streets of York when I saw a lapis lazuli. Its surface shimmered with tiny flecks of white and gold, like a fragment of the night sky trapped in glass. I had seen that stone before, about a decade earlier, at the British Museum: a necklace composed of alternating gold and lapis beads, discovered resting over a skull in the ‘Great Death Pit’ of the cemetery at Ur, a royal burial site dating to around 2500 BC. Bone, metal, and blue laid together – colour granted a place among the dead, still luminous after millennia.
The appeal of lapis lazuli did not fade with time. Blue pigments are rare in nature, usually locked deep inside mineral veins that must be mined and painstakingly processed. Stones must be broken, crushed, washed, refined. Colour does not arrive freely; it is earned. In the medieval world, ultramarine was often more valuable than gold, reserved for the most luxurious manuscripts and paintings. Blue was held back for what mattered most – for heaven, for holiness, for the margins where meaning was made visible.
Sometimes, the history of art leaves traces in unexpected places – not in galleries or archives, but in the body itself. In 2019, microscopic studies showed that dental calculus, the hardened plaque on ancient teeth, can trap tiny fragments of material from everyday activities. When researchers examined the teeth of a middle aged woman buried near a church monastery complex in Dalheim, dating from the 9th to 14th centuries, they found something remarkable: microscopic crystals of lazurite and phlogopite, the mineral signature of lapis derived ultramarine pigment. The discovery suggests that the woman had been working directly with the precious blue, perhaps as a manuscript illuminator, carefully painting vivid blues onto sacred texts. Each brush was shaped again and again with the lips (1). The manuscripts vanished. The habit remained. The mouth became a record.
This is what microscopes do. They recover what slips past notice. They bridge worlds.
Perhaps more than any other scientific instrument, the microscope mirrors the evolution of clinical medicine and scientific understanding over the past several centuries. As the primary tool of the pathologist, it has long served as a bridge between clinician and scientist, connecting the symptoms observed in patients with the hidden cellular processes that explain them. Yet the microscope is more than a medical device. Though inanimate, bounded by optical dimensions, its design grew alongside the Renaissance, shaped by advances in art, music, engineering, and scientific thought in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Through the microscope, natural ‘magic’ became ‘matters of fact.’
The story of lenses begins much earlier still. The first optical lens takes us back to the Assyrian dynasty in Mesopotamia and the Nimrud rock (2). It is unclear whether this object was used as a magnifying glass three thousand years ago; its purpose remains debated. Yet its existence is enough: rock crystal shaped and polished, held up to the light.
From that uncertain beginning, the evolution of the microscope traces a steady determination. We moved from simple magnifying glasses that merely enlarged, to instruments capable of super resolution and electron microscopy — tools that can image and measure from single proteins to pico scale forces. Each step was not a leap, but a refinement: better glass, steadier light, sharper questions.
The modern ability to visualise the microscopic world stems from a scientific journey that began with Ibn al Haytham, whose Book of Optics established an experimental understanding of light and vision. Building on this foundation, early lens systems developed by Zacharias Janssen and refined by Galileo Galilei transformed observation into a scientific tool. Through these advances, Robert Hooke first described “cells,” while Antonie van Leeuwenhoek revealed living microorganisms. Even the name of the instrument instructs us: microscope, from the Greek mikrós, small, and skopeîn, to see (3,4).
Early microscopes, however, were imperfect witnesses. Smaller things often appeared blurred. Different colours of light bend differently through glass, producing coloured fringes – chromatic aberrations along edges. You can still see the effect today in high contrast smartphone images, where colours split at the borders (5).
Clarity arrived by craft. In 1826, Joseph Jackson Lister designed an achromatic microscope lens by combining different types of glass so that all colours focus at the same point. The blur receded. The image steadied. Later, Ernst Abbe, working with Carl Zeiss, defined the limits of optical resolution – a limit later surpassed by electron microscopy and advanced imaging techniques (5).
Today, super resolution microscopy and computational methods allow scientists to visualise structures beyond the diffraction limit. For centuries, microscopes revealed the shapes of cells and the structures of life. Now they do far more than imaging. Modern microscopy can measure the physical properties of cells – their stiffness and the forces they exert on their surroundings. A single cell is no longer merely observed; its interactions can be quantified in real time. Advanced light based techniques identify proteins, lipids, and metabolites without labels. Microscopes capture molecular interactions, reveal metabolic states important in diseases such as cancer, and trace invisible processes such as ion fluxes and electrical activity.
And so, the river returns to its source: to the blue stone in York, to the necklace at Ur, to the woman at Dalheim with ultramarine caught in her teeth. This is not a collection of separate marvels, but one continuous current – from mineral vein to pigment, from pigment to page, from page to body, from body to lens. In essence, the microscope has evolved from a passive observer into an active investigator, transforming our understanding of life at the smallest scales.
So next time you pick up a magnifying glass, wear your spectacles, look through binoculars, or examine a sample under a microscope, you can trace a line back through history to the Nimrud rock that once sparked Assyrian curiosity. The urge to see beyond the visible is ancient. And today, with ever more powerful microscopes, the question is no longer whether the world still holds secrets – but how much of it has been waiting patiently for us to learn how to look.
References:
(1) Radini, A. et al. (2019) ‘Medieval women’s early involvement in manuscript production suggested by Lapis Lazuli identification in dental calculus’, Science Advances, 5(1). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aau7126.
(2) Brill, R.H. (1978) ‘Some miniature glass plaques from Fort Shalmaneser, Nimrud. part II: Laboratory studies’, Iraq, 40(1), p. 23. doi:10.2307/4200082.
(3) Bullen, A. (2008) ‘Microscopic imaging techniques for Drug Discovery’, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 7(1), pp. 54–67. doi:10.1038/nrd2446.
(4) Khodavirdipour, A. et al. (2019) ‘Microscopy and its application in microbiology and medicine from light to Quantum Microscopy: A mini review’, Avicenna Journal of Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 6(4), pp. 133–137. doi:10.34172/ajcmi.2019.24.
(5) Peckham, M. (2024) ‘What is a microscope? how the microscope has evolved over three hundred and fifty years’, Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2877(1), p. 012091. doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2877/1/012091.
Sayantika Ghosh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Professor Laura Machesky’s group in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the actin cytoskeleton and its role in cancer metastasis with a particular interest in how cancer cells sense and respond to the physical properties of their microenvironment. She completed her PhD in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Science at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, under the supervision of Dr Darius Koester. During her PhD, she developed a cell–bilayer-protein hybrid assay to study E-cadherin interactions and their role in shaping actin organisation. Outside her research, Sayantika enjoys reading and travelling, and is passionate about science communication, often using historical analogies to make complex ideas more accessible.