Moving Bacteria

For three minutes a motion picture camera played against a laboratory screen at Rochester, N. Y., last week. In the picture were what seemed to be animated sausages approximately one-fourth of an inch long and one-twelth of an inch in diameter. They unfolded, grew, multiplied. They were bacteria magnified 2,000 times and photographed in motion by an ordinary moving picture camera ingeniously fitted to an ordinary microscope.

To perfect the apparatus required three years of experimenting by Dr. Stanhope Bayne-Jones of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Clifton M. Tuttle of Eastman Kodak Co. research laboratories. The pictures they secured were like those of growing cancer cells recently reported from London (TIME, July 25). What had taken three minutes to show had taken 44 hours to photograph.