Biology’s Most Stunning and Strange Images of the Year.
Biology’s Most Stunning and Strange Images of the Year
The biomedical image award that shows the surreal beauty of the natural world
Few disciplines are as full of complexity and mystery as biology. But as with any science, public interest has to be earned. Directing public eyeballs toward the study of life is why the UK-based Wellcome Trust hosts the Wellcome Image Awards, presenting some of the most unbelievable, uncanny, and sometimes unnerving images from all of biological science.
This year’s overall winner, announced today, is a jaw-dropping frame showing a 5-month-old horse fetus. Floating above its opened womb, the delicate organic veil of the placenta parts just enough to reveal two diminutive hooves of a developing foal. It’s a stunning expression of the fragility of life, equally morbid and serene. It won because it meets the explicit aim of the award: to attract the public eye and inspire wonder.
“It’s not just spreading science literacy, it’s not just like a paternalistic approach where we want to ‘teach the masses about science,’” says Catherine Draycott, Head of Wellcome Images, “It’s more about engaging people and saying, my god this is amazing stuff, what could that possibly be a picture of?,’ and drawing them in.”
Other contenders include the cross-section of a cat tongue, a micrograph of a 2mm long Parasitoid wasp, and the back of an elderly woman afflicted with scoliosis. Not all the images are photographs though — included also are an illustration of pollen grains and a 3D-printed scan of a patient’s lungs and rib cage. Anything from hand drawn illustrations to the most advanced imaging technologies are considered. This flexibility in media means that the concepts or facts contained in an image can take center stage over the technical achievement, although the range and complexity of the submissions is definitely on the rise as imaging technology improves.
“We do find that the judges tend to be much harder on the straight photography and straight illustrations because they expect so much from fine art photography and illustration,” says Draycott. “With the science images they’re almost willing to accept maybe some blurriness here and there, because it’s the real thing, and they know it is and it’s something you can’t see with the naked eye.”
The award isn’t a competition, and anybody can submit, scientist or not. The winning image of a horse uterus wasn’t taken by a researcher, for example, but by a fine art photographer. In contrast, the sensitively framed and dramatically lit photo of a scoliotic spine was taken as part of a researcher’s regular documentation work.
Each image reveals a sublime perspective on things we may usually consider mundane — the fly that’s annoying you as you settle in to read a book is, upon close inspection, a living and rugged alien landscape; a tractographic MRI of the brain is hard to distinguish from a map of global shipping routes, only this one is for thoughts and actions instead of goods and materials. Such synesthetic shifts in perspective are the real power of images like these.
“It’s about understanding life, death, sex, and disease: the cornerstones of drama and art,” said scientist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford, while presenting the awards at this year’s ceremony.
The Wellcome Trust, established in 1936, has held the award sporadically since 1997 in accordance with the wishes of founder and pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome. He was himself a prodigious collector of medical artifacts, and saw to it that his immense fortune would continue to support medical research. The trust went public in the 80s, and maintains investments all over the world and in countless industries outside of the pharma realm. While Wellcome’s business ended up through various mergers as a part of the mega pharmaceutical company Glasko-Smith-Kline, the Wellcome Trust maintains an independent endowment of nearly $30 billion, making it the second largest private funder behind the Gates Foundation.
As such, it’s well situated to partner with other organizations in promoting medical science. Partnerships with MIT, the University of Texas in Galveston, and numerous other museums and organizations across the UK means images from the award will be on display at 11 such locations, in addition to the exhibition space in Wellcome’s London headquarters. They’ll also join the more than 40,000 images hosted on the Wellcome’s online collection.
As the volume of submissions increases and public interest broadens, the Wellcome Image Award may become an annual event. As the work of a charitable organization, it’s encouraging to see a channel opening ever wider for images that inspire curiosity, about a field that needs as much support as it can get. Whether or not they can show us a picture of it, Wellcome’s heart seems to be in the right place.
“It’s not intended to be in any way partisan, it’s intended to be engaging to anyone who might be interested in science or to get people interested in science,” says Draycott. “The idea is that we just want more people interested in order to have more bright young people going into the field.”
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