Every silver lining has a cloud

We have entered the golden age of scientific imaging, thinks Russ Swan, but it’s possible to have too much of a good thing…

Of the armoury of instruments at your disposal in a modern laboratory, which do you think has seen the most rapid growth in use over the last decade?

We live in a time of rapid development in many technical areas, with devices such as mass spectrometers and electron microscopes now being routinely available, where not long ago they were considered pretty exotic. PCR machines are now so commonplace that their operation is often delegated to students, while chromatography and spectroscopy instruments have seen great improvements in their speed, resolution, and general usefulness.

Despite all these extraordinary advances, the device that has seen the most explosive growth in use recently is the digital camera. Ten years ago, you might be surprised to see one in the lab, while today they are everywhere – and I'm not just talking about those built into your phone.

Just as they have become ubiquitous in everyday life, digital cameras can be found on many lab benches – quietly waiting to be inserted into the nearest optical port. There they bring all their multimegapixel glory and electronic wizardry to bear on even the most mundane subjects, producing sometimes dazzling images that can be stored, shared, searched, enhanced, and entered into photo competitions.

It is startling to note that the first 'portable' digital still camera was created nearly 40 years ago in 1975. This brieze-block sized lump of electronics and Meccano produced 10 kilopixel images (that's a stunning 100x100 pixels) which each took 23 seconds to be written to storage on audio cassette. The device was created by a chap called Steve Sasson in Kodak's development laboratory but, according to legend, its development was blocked for fear of damaging the company's lucrative film business.

Remind me, whatever happened to Kodak?

Today, high-quality and relatively low-cost digital cameras are everywhere. Truly, this is the golden age of scientific imaging. But every silver lining has a cloud, and in the case of imaging that cloud has become the scientific imaging competition.

It seems scarcely a week goes by without the announcement of a new competition, and no scientific organisation's activities seem complete without their own version. Microscope manufacturers Olympus and Nikon have their own long-standing contests, called BioScapes and Small World respectively, and they are just as competitive in promoting these as they are their actual instruments.

They are joined by a positive plethora of alternatives. It seems that every instrument maker, publisher, research organisation, charity, learned society, and university faculty runs a scientific imaging competition these days, and a quick internet search confirms this. In 2000, as digital cameras started to become widely available, the Daily Telegraph and Novartis jointly promoted the Visions of Science contest. In 2007 New Scientist got in on the act with its Eureka prize. Three years ago the BBSRC launched its own scheme, while the Kroto Institute at University of Sheffield, the British Heart Foundation, the MRC, the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, the Institute of Cancer Research, the Royal Society are among the others offering some form of science image competition – and that's before you start looking overseas.

Now, I love digital imaging. I was a keen photographer in the days of 35mm, and I have no desire to return to the bad old days of limited exposures (maximum 36 per roll of film), expense (you had to pay to buy the film and to have it processed), and snail-like speed (an hour minimum, more often a few days before you could see the fruits of your creativity).

I also love scientific imaging competitions. I can think of few better ways of wasting an hour or two than considering the merits of the entries in these competitions, which demonstrate that we geeks and nerds can also have a highly-developed aesthetic sense.

But enough already. Where once I would eagerly click links to find details of entry requirements, and even more eagerly click to see the winning entries, by now I have grown jaundiced with the whole thing. If I never see another gushing press release containing the over-used phrase 'the art of science' again, it will be too soon. It is possible to have too much of a good thing, and I feel that science imagery competitions have long since passed saturation point.

Unless, of course, somebody were to organise a metacompetition, a sort of cup-winners-cup of science pictures, which selected only the best of the winners of all the other contests and became truly a worthwhile trophy to win. Let me know when you've got this together, and I'll be delighted to remove the scales from my eyes.