Felice Frankel, who was at the time an accomplished photographer of landscape

Collaborators Frankel and Whitesides. At top, inside the eye of the camera.

architecture, came to Harvard in 1991 as a Loeb Fellow. These open-sesame fellowships let professionals concerned with the built environment spend a year in mid career studying anything they choose anywhere in the University. Frankel straightaway took herself to the Science Center, trailing memories of an undergraduate degree in biology, and enrolled in courses taught by Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, and Mallinckrodt professor of chemistry George M. Whitesides. She invited herself to Whitesides's laboratory, and thus began an improbable collaboration, just the sort of coming together in unanticipated ways of people from disparate disciplines that is supposed to happen at Harvard.

Frankel "became enthralled by the possibilities of powerful imaging in science, and by the general ineptitude of scientists in exploiting those

The light-adjustment lever of a microscope.

possibilities," Whitesides explains. He and colleagues were about to submit an article to Science. Frankel looked at the photographs meant to go with it and didn't think much of them. She made substitutes, including an image of square drops of water (see page 45), and, for the first time in a productive career, an article by Whitesides was featured on a magazine cover.

Whitesides and Frankel, now artist-in-residence and science photographer at MIT, went on to collaborate on an eye-opening book. On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science will be published by Chronicle Books in October. On the following pages, Harvard Magazine is pleased to offer a preview.