Today I will try to answer a question, a question about the importance of scientific illustrations and images.
One could ask: why do we need scientific illustrations, is it not better to take photographs?
And indeed, I agree that in the last decades tremendous progress was made in visualization methods and technique. Think about digital cameras, all kinds of advanced microscopic methods (electron microscopy, confocal microscopy, 2 photon microscopy,…), huge telescopes to explore space, medical visualization using scanners (PET, MRI, …), crystallography, and many more. And all of them can make stunning pictures and photographs, it is amazing and beautiful. Look at these examples!
You would almost think that scientific illustrators and animators are wasting their time. Why invest so much effort and time in drawing and modeling when you can picture it with one push on the button of your camera. I oversimplify it now, but you get the point, right? Well, in my opinion, scientific imagery is not dispensable for lots of reasons. I list a few:
There are still fields in science that are virtually impossible to picture. Imagine you want to visualize a cellular surface. An electron microscopic picture could give you an idea of a cellular surface. X-ray crystallographic images of the membrane bound proteins could give you an idea of the proteins that interact with the membrane. But there is no technique that does it all. Here we rely on scientific illustrations. I made an example of a cellular surface. Keep in mind that this is an artistic impression, it’s not meant to be exact. I also want to highlight the power of 3D with this picture, which is very difficult (impossible) to achieve with classical techniques. The same idea is true for other sub-cellular structures, like DNA in a cell nucleus or ribosomes for example.
Real pictures are not always as effective as illustrations for educational purposes. You have to be a specialist with months or years of training to be able to interpret a lot of this real life pictures. Think about MRI scan, electron microscopic pictures, etc. With illustrations it’s possible to make things easier to understand, to grab only the essentials and leave the ‘noise’ out. Moreover it is possible (and highly recommended) to use colors to make things even more understandable. As an example look at these images of a dividing cell, in both you can see the chromosomes lining up in the central plane, but which one is better to understand the concept, you tell me.
My expertise is mainly in the cell biology and microscopic world for scientific images, but lots of people illustrate animals or plants. Some animals or plants are so big that makes it difficult to have everything in focus with a normal photographs. In an illustration this is no problem. The same principle applies for super fast animals, try to picture them in focus. Not so easy. Other animals or plants are so difficult to find that you could look for them lifelong and still not be able to take a picture. And what about extinct species?
Another big advantage of scientific illustrations and images is to visualize concepts, like biochemical pathways or signal transduction pathways. No way to make photographs of this.
This is just a small and for sure not complete list of reasons why scientific imagery is essential and will always be. If you want to add comments, please do it in the comments section below.
Finally i would like to add a few thoughts. Personally I think that scientific images can be very artistic. For me it’s also a way to express my creativity. It’s not always obligatory to make functional scientific images. I also want to stress that we definitely need classic and advanced photography to be able to illustrate, we use them all the time as references.
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