Telling the beautiful stories of our cells with print

Dr Rasha Msallam is a highly accomplished doctor, scientist and consultant, but something has troubled her for most of her career – and that’s how to bridge the gap between her world and everyone who benefits from it. She began as a dentist, where effective communication with patients is critical, but moved into immunology for her PhD. And it was here that she discovered a vast chasm between what was happening in labs and what people on the outside comprehended. Little did she know that she would stumble upon a solution, not in the lab, but surrounded by women and Canon printers in Dubai.

Originally from Syria, a scholarship meant that Dr Msallam’s PhD was undertaken in Paris and while learning a new language was a challenge, she quickly realised that the way medics and scientists disseminated information was very different indeed. “Because of my background as a clinician, I'll always think of the patient,” she explains. “But in basic research we didn’t do much that involved them. It was more about intellectual thinking and proving a hypothesis.”

It was a friend and colleague who put this into perspective for her. “She's really good at scientific communication and told me, ‘if no one can understand what you are doing in your research, then you are doing it wrong’”. It forced Dr Msallam out of her comfort zone and gave her the impetus to explore ways to communicate better with non-scientists. A stint with a start-up, debunking medical misinformation on social media, was also an eye-opening experience. “Social media companies are obliged to fact check and offer explanations in simple language that any user can understand,” she says. “And it’s difficult to say, in just a sentence, why a thirty second clip full of misinformation is wrong.”

Her thinking on this began to move in a new direction, which was less about imparting knowledge and more about how everyone can have access to scientific knowledge in easy and understandable ways. “The democratisation of access became more and more of an obsession for me,” she admits. And this new direction ran parallel with her move to Dubai, where she set up a consultancy, NextGen of Immunology (NGIg), helping post-graduate PhD students to begin their research careers offering “mentorship, strategy for experiments, training and help to manage projects.” As a new business owner, she immediately headed to the Dubai Business Women Council to meet other similarly minded founders and was welcomed by a huge community of “highly accomplished businesswomen with entrepreneurship in their DNA – some of them were running a couple of startups at the same time!” 

It was here that Dr Msallam was introduced to Canon Middle East’s Women Who Empower programme, where founders could learn essential skills in printing, photography and content creation to bring their businesses to life for their audiences. “I was very curious... I mean, what can you learn from printing?” she recalls. But she was thrilled to be accepted onto the programme (“I was on the waiting list and when I was selected, I was like a baby with my first lollipop!”) and quickly discovered that there was far more to print than she ever realised.

“My PhD was on imaging and we used a new generation of confocal microscopy for tracking and visualising the cells of live animals. And, like many others, I always thought this kind of visualisation in biology was not informative enough to the scientific community – ‘just nice photos’,” as some would comment when she presented the data. “Canon showed me that this isn’t true. It's very much part of the communication of science to a larger audience – to people.” So, when she had to pitch a business idea with print at the heart, she knew exactly what to do: “I went back to my PhD data.”

While lacking confidence as a photographer, the exercise presented her with an opportunity to show the world of scientific research in a new way. She was drawn to organ imaging and, in particular, one fascinating small animal model. From Dr Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, the rat hippocampus neuronal population, commonly known as the ‘brainbow’ is, simply, beautiful. “If you don't know the context, you will see just a rainbow – beautiful colours – shades of turquoise, red, yellow… it's a pure science and why I pitched the idea of scientific printing. Taking it out of the lab and into your hands. That’s the democratisation of science in action.”

She was particularly taken with Canon’s elevated print and could see a number of ways it could be used to bring touchable images of the skin’s immune system to schoolchildren from the very earliest age. For example, her work in RMB technology for her PhD, where there was visual data from immune cells in the ear-skin of a genetically modified mouse. She loved the idea of putting the realities of science under their fingertips – not just to inspire future careers, but to create a sense of connection to the stories written in our bodies, carried in our cells and echoed across the living world.

“When you understand the function of each organ, the structure, the engineering of each tissue, it’s beautiful. And to give a non-scientist access to seeing this without any judgement or context, it’s so surprising,” she explains. “After we used a red, fluorescent marker on the cells of a mouse’s skin, you could see a hair follicle in the middle of a red cell. If you didn’t know it was skin, you might think it was a candle surrounded by flowers.”

Dr Msallam hopes that her initiative, SciSnap, can be the bridge between communities, translating the language of science and creating greater trust and ownership of research in everyday life. “So much is publicly funded that I really want everyone to understand that they are part of the research and that this scientific innovation is for everyone.”

Learn more about Canon Middle East’s Women Who Empower programme.