Large-scale beauty is often hard to overlook. But within Dr. Albert Folch’s laboratory, a whole new world of exquisiteness is found in what is normally invisible to the naked eye.

Under the lens of a microscope, hidden abstract beauty waits for the eyes of UW scientists to uncover.

Researchers witness orchestrated chaos as lines form erratic patterns. A piece of dust on a slide creates an underwater castle of cells covered in a spongy surface that seems to be straight out of a science fiction novel. A waterfall of colors ranging from peach to fiery orange explodes into an erratic procession of thick lines. Beneath the lens, a world of art as unknown as distant planets is found.

After swiping his security card, Folch unlocks the door and enters his domain. The lab, titled Folch Lab for the associate professor of bioengineering, can be found by climbing four sets of stairs and walking down a classy hallway with fancy wood trim and a seating area with large windows looking out on the north end of campus.

Not a single wall is bare. Shelves holding cardboard boxes and supplies seem to be overflowing out of the space they’ve been given. Microscopes, safety goggles, plastic gloves, test tubes and several computers cover the worktables in the middle of the room.

A few graduate students are working fervently, seated in computer chairs, conducting microfluids research. Their research is important to understanding what causes the nervous system to degenerate so that medical therapies can later be discovered.

“It’s hard to get people to look at a bunch of graphs or charts, but a fantastic picture can generate a lot of interest,” said Chris Sip, a graduate student who works in Folch’s lab.

The Catalan professor who hails from Barcelona is wearing jeans and a casual white button-up. Brown eyes, dark hair and an olive complexion give onlookers the impression the professor is much younger than he is. A few small wrinkles on the sides of his eyes are the only feature that date him. The wrinkles resemble the lines and patterns frequently seen in his lab when looking at cells under expensive microscopic equipment.

The 41-year-old has a Ph.D. in nanotechnology and two postdoctoral degrees, one from M.I.T. and one from Harvard Medical School. He doesn’t uphold the stereotypical look of a nerdy scientist. As a family man, with two young children and an adoring wife as well as his own research center to conduct technology development and cell-based studies, he stays busy.

In his free time he enjoys playing soccer on a team originally made up of scientists called “Bio Hazards” and keeping an online art gallery containing thousands of pictures of cells taken during the course of his research.

“I consider Albert first a scientist, but he also has an artistic eye which helps for arranging figures and conveying information to other scientists or general audiences,” Sip said.

Diagnosis Da Vinci

Folch said when he is taking a picture with the microscope, he is to make it as aesthetic as possible, but it still serves a specific purpose in the experiment.

Most people don’t get the opportunity to use technology that costs upwards of $50,000 to explore the art in cells. Folch began taking pictures of the experiments several years ago and continues to document his favorites. At first, Folch’s intentions for the online gallery he created were to advertise for his lab.

“But in the end, I went through my hard drives and spent a lot of time picking out the most beautiful pictures that caught my eye,” he said.

Folch has always enjoyed abstract art and color. When he was growing up, his parents were friends with a famous artist in Barcelona named Antoni Tápies.

“[Tápies was] the first painter in the world to paint with sand and marble dust, wood filings, varnish, etc. When I was 6 years old, we were at his house and I pointed at a painting I liked, and he asked me why. And I said ‘Because you can see the thing.’ I meant that it was not flat like all the paintings I had seen so far, but that it had texture,” Folch said.

The Web site has had over 4,000 hits since March of 2007. Many of the most attractive pictures were products of errors made during experimentation.

In a picture that resembles constellations in space titled “Life on a distant planet,” protein was deposited in the wrong place. A lot of mistakes occur in this science and the results must be discarded.

“It was an accident. It will never be published, but it’s still beautiful,” Folch said.

The secret to his art is derived from the genius of his technology and a good eye for color and shapes.

One of his photographs, a micrograph of a CD, was published in On the Surface of Things, a book by Felice Frankel, one of the world’s leading scientific photographers.

Folch said he might publish his own book of scientific art, but for now he plans to continue his research while snapping photos along the way.

Research Realism

The purpose of his research is to create a more realistic environment for cell research.

By placing cells on a Petri dish within a homogenous layer and covering them with fluids, biologists are putting them in an unnatural environment, Folch said.

He said his lab is working to do this by “replicating the complexity of living tissue in micro environments.”

“The general public may not directly see the sort of technological developments we make with microfluidics because they are best suited for basic research. But in our case, discoveries, or improved understanding, in neuron development could pave the way for better drugs or regeneration,” Sip said.

Using a computer program, the researchers draw designs that are etched into a delicate silicon surface. The surfaces are then sandwiched between two pieces of rubber, creating the microfluidic device.

In one experiment, Folch Labs created an artificial nose that used real cells. Their goal is to better understand the relationship between smelling an item and how neurons trigger a voltage to the brain relating to that scent.

Thirty small tubes carrying one different odor each plugged into the 2mm-by-4mm rubber chambers. Colored dyes were used to test and see different channels, but everything else was colorless, including the cells. In this experiment, however, a special dye was used that goes into the cell and became fluorescent when that cell reacted to a chemical scent. “The use of these dyes allows us to see the cells reacting,” Folch said.

Little valves in each tube that are controlled by computer systems give the scientists control over how much liquid flows through each tube. To study the cell reaction, the scientists used different scents like vanilla, mint and banana.

While the dyes flow within the chambers, different gradients run and mix, creating pleasing eye candy for scientists.

“The things pictured are so small that they are beyond our everyday reality,” Folch said. “Here it’s truer than ever that a picture is worth a thousand words: The picture suddenly impacts your mind with a big load of information about a world you didn’t know existed.”

[Reach reporter Chantal Anderson at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]