“Much of my work has been about what we see, what we don’t see, and what we think we see,” says Ellen Levy, artist and cocreator of the “Some Provocations from Skeptical Inquirers” art exhibit in New York City (pp. 35–36). Decades ago, when Levy’s zoology degree got her a microbiology job to fund her art, the now debunked cellular feature dubbed the “mesosome” was still widely accepted as real. Mesosomes were observed as folds in the plasma membranes of bacteria and thought to serve a function in cell replication. In the late 1970s, mesosomes were revealed to be artifacts of how cells were prepared for microscopy— specifically the chemical fixation process—when researchers realized they did not appear in cells that hadn’t been fixed.
“People could get the same results over and over again, but it didn’t really mean anything,” Levy says. Levy sprinkles some other bygone concepts such as “phlogiston” and the “luminiferous aether” into her animation “Anomalies and Artifacts.” They are depicted alongside genuine cell organelles, but not to lend legitimacy to those discarded missteps.