The Eyes Have It

Corey Nahman, the man behind the ultimate pharmaceutical news and information site coreynahman.com, has always been extremely generous in his support of The Eyes Have It. I’d like to return the favor in some small way by mentioning a contest he’s running that will test the depth of your biochemical knowledge and your visual acuity. Name That Molecule is also meant to “take a scholarly topic and make it fun.” Scroll down the left-hand column of coreynahman.com, check out the spinning molecules and give it your best shot. Cash prizes will be awarded. Good luck.

Pharma/medical/scientific art by San Francisco-based Laura Splan.

From the artist’s statement:

“My mixed media work explores perceptions of beauty and horror, comfort and discomfort. I use science and medicine a point of departure to explore our ambivalence towards the human body and its functions. I often combine anatomical and scientific imagery with domestic objects and materials. This juxtaposition creates a response that fluctuates between seduction and repulsion, comfort and alienation. This dichotomous experience is evoked by enticing and playful imagery that upon closer inspection reveals some uncomfortable truth about our cultural and biological conditions.“

A few years ago, I was a designer at a small company that produced sales training materials for pharmaceutical companies. One project I worked on was a deck of flash cards that sales reps would use to familiarize themselves with all of the different brands and versions of oral contraceptive currently on the market. There was a photo of the product and its packaging on one side and all of the details and dosages on the other. I was often struck by how the visual aspects of most of the products seemed to fall into either a nostalgically feminized or a coldly clinical aesthetic. Being male, I was kind of curious about this. Did the flowers, the butterflies, the pinks and purples on the dispenser make the experience of using the pill different? Did these “pretty” packages have a marketing impact?

I was also fascinated by all of the different schemes, both graphical and mechanical, designed to make sure the pills are taken correctly. In most cases, all the pills in a prescription are identical and anonymous. Each pill does the same job as all the others. Each pill in a course of contraceptives, on the other hand, has its own meaning and identity.

The PBS series American Experience did an episode about the Pill. As far as I could tell from a quick reading of the transcript (I didn’t get to see the broadcast), it doesn’t touch on any of these issues. However, there is an image gallery on the website devoted to the episode and it contains a fair amount of material about various designs of the Pill’s packaging. For instance, before the first version of the Pill (Enovid) was used as a contraceptive, it was used to treat menstrual irregularities and was delivered in a simple, small brown bottle.

BMLwalker is a motion visualization demonstration from the Ruhr-University-Bochum BiomotionLab. The user can adjust the walking animation for gender, weight, dispostion and mood. If you move the slider all the way to the male side, for instance, you somehow see “maleness” in the cues provided by the way the 15 simple dots on a plain black background move in relation to each other. The animation can rotate 360 degrees and there is a setting that connects the dots with lines.

“This animation demonstrates a framework for retrieving and visualizing biologically and psychologically relevant information from biological motion patterns. It is based on walking data from 40 male and 40 female walkers. Using a motion capture system their movement were recorded while walking on a treadmill.

The data were subsequently transformed into a representation which allows for linear morphing. The resulting “walking space” was then transformed using principal component analysis. A space spanned by the first 10 eigenwalkers was used to compute linear disciminant functions for the respective attributes.

Sex and weight of each walker were directly available from our records. The other two attributes were derived from psychophysical experiments. A number of observers were presented with point-light displays of the 80 walkers. For each of them they had to rate the attributes nervous/relaxed and happy/sad on a scale of 7 steps.

Parts of the procedure are described in:Troje, N. F. (2002) Decomposing biological motion: A framework for the analysis and synthesis of human gait patterns. Journal of Vision 2:371-387.“

[via nastystart]

New York Times article: “Researchers Get Their First Close-Up Look at West Nile Virus.”

To obtain the images, Dr. Kuhn and his colleagues at Purdue chilled the fragile virus to about minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit in liquid ethane, a hydrocarbon, then bombarded it with high-energy electrons. The deflection of electrons off the virus’s atoms produced the images….Detailed information about the structure of West Nile could help scientists understand its unusual life cycle. That information should help researchers pinpoint West Nile’s vulnerabilities and develop drugs to disarm it.

“The Anatomical Mission to Burma“, is a thought provoking essay in November’s Science by Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division.

Sappol begins by outlining nineteenth century missionary efforts to alter the belief systems held by “the Heathen” by developing in them a thorough, visual knowledge of the body’s inner workings. He then deftly draws parallels between the rationale behind these efforts and a similar conceptual journey undertaken by their ancestors that was facilitated by the wide diffusion of illustrated anatomical texts. All of this is, of course, useful in examining our own relationships with images of the body.

Today, we are the inheritors of Victorian popularizers like Alcott and the Baptist missionaries. We believe that anatomical images–artists’ illustrations and photographs of dissections and body parts, microphotographs, x-rays, magnetic resonance images (MRIs), and computer modeling–show us a true picture of ourselves, our inner reality. Our conception of ourselves as anatomical beings is secure. The anatomical image is our mirror. And there is something reassuring about that. Our bodies are mapped, explained, controlled. Anatomy is us.

But if we see ourselves in the anatomical mirror, we also see double. The science of anatomy is founded on the dissection of corpses. The skeleton and the opened body are emblems of human mortality and monstrosity. Anatomical images represent something we fear and deny: the undomesticated body, the body of desire, disease, deformity, and death; the body that, despite all efforts, resists our control.

Well worth a read.

There is a passage from the Book of Psalms that seems particularly appropriate to a discussion of these issues:

Even the darkness is not dark to You,
And the night is as bright as the day.
Darkness and light are alike to You.

For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.

I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;

Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them.

Psalms 139: 12-16

Article from Computer Graphics World:

“There are times when our perception of reality becomes “more real” to us than reality itself.

‘We found that a fetus at this gestation is very skinny and has translucent skin, so the veins are very prominent,” says Rob van den Bragt, lead 3D artist. “We wanted a baby that was aesthetically appealing; one that was more of an idealized version. We tried to copy reality as much as we could, but we kept an eye on the artistic side as well.’

The lighting, like the baby model, also appears plausible, even though it, too, is not based on reality. Medical images of real fetuses are usually acquired with a fiber-optic camera and are front-lit, making the overall image shiny and flat—”not very appealing,” van den Bragt points out. The Mill’s baby, on the other hand, was back-lit in Maya and bathed in warm yellows, oranges, and reds to lend a film-like quality to the imagery. ‘The shadows and lights contrast nicely for an artistic, rather than realistic look,’ van den Bragt comments.“