By Hyacinth Empinado
Armed with a wand and funky spectacles, Beatrice Steinert steps into a world of lush green mounds and bright blue dots.
“To me, this is literally sitting right here,” she says, as she strokes something mid-air.
This is not some hallucinogenic trip. Rather, Steinert was exploring a microscopic snail embryo in 3-D at the YURT, a virtual reality theater at Brown University.
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For her undergraduate senior thesis here, she dove into the past and future of scientific imaging. She was drawn to how beautiful and abstract these illustrations can be.
“I try to use my artistic practice as a way to further investigate the methods of creating images that have been so important to science for a very, very long time,” Steinert said.
It lead her to a scientist named Edwin Grant Conklin.
Conklin was part of a group of scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., who pioneered a line of research called cell lineage in the late 19th century.
He focused on the embryos of a snail called Crepidula fornicata and traced parts like a foot, the mouth, and intestines to the earliest stages of cell division.
To do this, he had to collect embryos at different stages of development, drawing each of them by hand, piecing the cells together like a puzzle.
“It was incredibly time-consuming, incredibly meticulous, and difficult,” said Jane Maienschein, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory History Project. “It’s the kind of work that the people would not do today.” Read more …
Source: Drawing life at its start, cell by cell | STAT