Please sign and share: open letter to Nikon on the 2026 Small World in Motion winner

Dear microscopy friends and colleagues,

You may have seen that the 2026 Nikon Small World in Motion competition was won by a video captioned as showing ‘abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia‘. It has since been shared by major news outlets worldwide.

The submitter has said that the regions beneath the cilia were ‘rendered’ from a greyscale recording. Many cilia biologists, microscopists and PCD clinicians have questioned what it actually shows. The cell architecture, the proportions of cilia to apparent nuclei and the size of the field of view are enough to discombobulate even those who image airway cilia every day.

To many of us, the evidence points strongly to a video produced, in whole or in large part, with generative AI. Its selection for such a prominent award reflects poorly on Nikon’s judging and verification process. The competition’s own rules state that AI-generated videos are not permitted and that Nikon may request the original video for verification. Nikon has said it is re-reviewing the entry, but three weeks on the original recording has still not been made available for scrutiny. This is unfair to the hundreds of entrants who submitted real footage, and promoting images not grounded in what was recorded does real harm, both to public understanding of a rare disease and to trust in microscopy.

A group of us from the PCD, cilia and microscopy communities has written an open letter to Nikon. It is addressed to Nikon, not the submitter, and asks Nikon to:

• correct the caption and the ‘in a child’ headline while the review continues
• release the original greyscale recording and full methods for independent examination
• publish the outcome of the review, and withdraw the award if the recording cannot be shown to support what is displayed
• set clear rules on AI and image processing for future competitions

We all teach our students that microscopy images are scientific evidence, and that image processing must be transparent and faithful to the underlying biology. We should be reinforcing those standards, especially now, and insisting that Nikon uphold them in its awards.

We would also like to make some good of this. AI already does much of the heavy lifting in our field: denoising, segmentation, unmixing and reconstruction. But generative AI now makes it remarkably easy to create compelling biological structures that no microscope ever recorded. We hope the letter starts a wider discussion on how we can efficiently evidence the provenance of images, and where appropriate AI enhancement ends and inappropriate AI generation begins, in research as well as competitions. The letter makes clear that we are not against AI in imaging, and offers to work with Nikon to share genuine footage of PCD cilia.

Read the full letter: https://tinyurl.com/OpenLetterSWiM2026

Add your name: https://forms.gle/TyGRELnCxq5zCicS9

We plan to send the letter to Nikon on Tuesday 13 October 2026, so please sign by noon US Eastern Time (5pm UK) on Monday 12 October. The letter and the list of public signatories will be sent to Nikon Instruments Inc. and published on our websites.

Please forward this to microscopists, imaging facility staff, trainees and networks who might want to add their names. We look forward to the discussion.

With many thanks,

Pleasantine Mill

On behalf of Michele Manion (PCD Foundation), Lucy Dixon (PCD Support UK), Fiona Copeland (Ciliopathy Alliance), Heymut Omran (ERN-LUNG PCD), Jeremy Reiter (UCSF), Paul Guichard (University of Geneva), Robert A. Hirst (University of Leicester), Simon Cleary (King’s College London) and Amjad Horani (Washington University in St. Louis)