--- title: Fritz Goro: Tribute to a a Great Science Photographer description: A selection of photographs by a great science photographer -- pictures that hint at the improbable scope of one man's achievement while paying tribute to the boundless range of human intellect, curiosity and imagination. canonical: https://time.com/3873292/photographer-spotlight-fritz-goro/ author: Liz Ronk article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2012-07-10T21:26:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:03:55.550Z og:title: Fritz Goro: Tribute to a a Great Science Photographer og:description: A selection of photographs by a great science photographer -- pictures that hint at the improbable scope of one man's achievement while paying tribute to the boundless range of human intellect, curiosity and imagination. og:url: https://time.com/3873292/photographer-spotlight-fritz-goro/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf3c0ba8599d4b419/6988479ce20a874449a8a651/01_1203614.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1500 og:image:height: 844 og:image:alt: 1965 cow fetuses og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Fritz Goro: Tribute to a a Great Science Photographer twitter:description: A selection of photographs by a great science photographer -- pictures that hint at the improbable scope of one man's achievement while paying tribute to the boundless range of human intellect, curiosity and imagination. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf3c0ba8599d4b419/6988479ce20a874449a8a651/01_1203614.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Photographer Spotlight: Fritz Goro > Sponsored content. 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Worth Your Time is TIME's culture newsletter, published Tuesdays and Saturdays to 40,000 subscribers as of August 2026. #### Who writes TIME's culture recommendations? Culture editor Eliza Berman writes Worth Your Time, drawing on TIME's critics and culture desk. #### Is Worth Your Time free? Yes. It is a free newsletter available at time.com/newsletters. by [Liz Ronk](https://time.com/author/liz-ronk/) ## Liz Ronk Jul 10, 2012 9:26 PM UTC  A pair of 90-day-old cow fetuses clearly visible inside an amniotic sac, 1965. A pair of 90-day-old cow fetuses clearly visible inside an amniotic sac, 1965. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images by [Liz Ronk](https://time.com/author/liz-ronk/) ## Liz Ronk Jul 10, 2012 9:26 PM UTC Capturing the utter weirdness and wonder of science through photography is a very tall order. After all, the most fascinating aspects of science (and its counterpart, technology) are often arcane, obtuse or downright incomprehensible to anyone besides …. well, _scientists_. Making science actually coherent and comprehensible through pictures, meanwhile — while also making the photographs themselves compelling and, if at all possible, beautiful — is not merely a tall order, but a near-impossibility. Row over Devyani Khobragade’s arrest and strip search caused an international uproar Or rather, it’s a near-impossibility unless the photographer making those pictures is named Fritz Goro. A LIFE staffer for four decades, the German-born Goro (at left, in 1955) approached every story he worked on with a creativity and a kind of inspired deliberateness that earned him laurels as one of the 20th century’s very greatest science photographers. In fact, for many photography critics and scientists, alike, he was at-once the most original and the most accomplished photographer of science who ever lived. Trained in the Bauhaus school of sculpture and design, Goro worked in Germany until the early Thirties, when he and his wife fled the country after Hitler gained power and, as Goro put it, the two of them “had to start a new life.” That new life, it turned out, would center around photography — including freelance work for a brand new magazine based in New York called LIFE. Goro liked to say that his expertise was due at least in part to his own ignorance. He photographed subjects that “more knowledgeable photographers might have considered unphotographable…. I began to take pictures of things I barely understood, using techniques I’d never used before.” He designed his own optical systems to capture (often for the first time, by anyone) everything from bioluminescence to the mechanisms behind the circulation of blood through a living body. He traveled the globe while shooting for LIFE — the Antarctic, Mexican jungles, the Australian outback — enduring brutal cold and searing heat; but more often than not, it was in the controlled, cool space of a laboratory or a studio that he crafted his most breathtaking, groundbreaking work. When he died in 1986, at the age of 85, a former science editor at LIFE named Gerard Piel said of Goro that “it was his artistry and ingenuity that made \[his\] photographs of abstractions, of the big ideas from the genetic code to plate tectonics” so effective and so utterly memorable. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs that hint at the scope of Goro’s achievement while paying tribute to the boundless range of human intellect, curiosity and imagination. — Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com  A pair of 90-day-old cow fetuses clearly visible inside an amniotic sac, 1965. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Fetus in an artificial womb, 1965. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Electronics, 1961. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Sheep that survived an atom bomb test are studied for radiation poisoning, 1949. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  An anesthetized monkey has its brain activity monitored, 1971. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  A scientist uses a quartz rod as a light conductor to observe a frog's organs, 1948. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  An astronaut tests noise levels (coming from giant speakers) that mimic the high-decibel sound of a rocket launch, 1967. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Inspecting machinery that forges a large magnet to be used in a cyclotron, or early atom smasher, 1948. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Reactor dome is lowered, by means of a huge crane, into the reactor pit of the under-construction Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, 1957. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Lasers, 1963. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  A radio telescope listens to sounds from space, 1951. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Two perspectives of a single hologram, projected on screens when a laser passes through the hologram at different places, 1966\. Hologram made by Juris Upatnieks. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  A scientist holds a plastic block that he blasted with charged electric particle while investigating the notion of lightning as a rain trigger, 1962. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  A speck of the world's first plutonium, 1946. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Blood circulating through a heart, 1948. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Shipboard laboratory equipment used for measuring sea water to detect any traces of radioactivity after an atomic bomb test in Bikini lagoon, 1946. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Representation of a segment of a DNA molecule, 1963. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Burning a candle in a sealed flask of oxygen on a balance shows that matter can not be destroyed, 1949. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  A model of a space capsule simulates the return to Earth in a NASA lab, 1961. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Research on cigarette smoking and lung cancer, 1953. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Demonstrating early fiber optics, 1960. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Newly hatched larvae of the Tubularia, a plantlike animal, primed to float away and lodge on a rock or a seashore piling, 1969. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  A leaf-cutter ant carries away rose fragments, 1947. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  A three-foot-long Caribbean octopus sucks the meat out of its favorite prey, the blue crab, 1953. Fritz Goro—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images  Fritz Goro on assignment off Bikini Atoll, shooting photographs for LIFE magazine, 1953. 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