Medically Illustrating the Virus: Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins

Alissa Eckert, Dan Higgins/CDC

Cara Giaimo  in the New York Times (April 1, 2020) reports on the team of digial medical illustrators at the Centers for Disease Control responsible for authoring the now ubiquitous image of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen responsible for Covid-19 disease, Using Autodesk 3ds Max software, Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins in late January 2020 created a so-called 'beauty shot"-- showcasing a single, ominous spherical image of the virus. This digital simulation is now reproduced in thousands of mass media illustrations and artistic projects around the world, and has entered into the shared global economy of images. It has even appeared in people's dreams and nightmares.

The team made the highly effective choice to illustrate in red, the instantly recognizable signifier of danger, the spike proteins (S proteins) that protrude from the virus' surface and allow it to attach to the surface of cells.  These spikes, which resembles a crown or "corona," are responisible for the name of this class of viruses, "coronaviruses" .Yellow is used to highlight the envelope proteins (E proteins) that facilitate entrance into cells. In turn, "membrane proteins, or M-proteins, shown in orange, give the virus its form," writes Giaimo. 

My sense is that over the past months  our collective readings of this image have subtly shifted. The choice of gray to convey the body of the virus, the report suggests, was originally made to allow the red spikes to "pop" in design terms.  But now that we are so aware of the virus' assault on the pulmonary system, I think there's a tendency to read the gray yarnlike texture of the inner sphere as the dying or necrotic tissue of the lungs. When I first saw the image, I assume the red colored spikes referenced the red blood coughed up advanced sufferers of Covid-19. 

In turn, the black background of the image may have been chosen primarily for effect, to foreground the colored features of the single virus, and to show distantly other viruses. Yet now that Covid-19 has become a truly global pandemic, the surrounding darkness takes on, to my eyes at least, a deeply ominous sign of encroaching darkness. One might even read the image as our imperiled planet isolated in space, under assault from all directions by this relentless opponent, with faint stars twinkling in the background.

Some viewers, consciously or otherwise, may even be inclined to a Christological reading, informed by thousands of works of Medieval and Renaissance art. We might see our entire globe as now mocked with a "crown "of thorns and suffering a latter-day crucifixion,  as spike after spike is pounded into our collective body politic. The 1968 Apollo 8 photograph of "Earthrise" famously gifted humanity the capacity ot conceptualize the Earth itself as a single entity, a fragile organism spinning in space, inspiring the first Earth Day in April 1970.  A half century  later Eckert and Higgins present to us, in effect, a new vision of our spherical planetary home, bleeding from innumerable wounds, as our once joyous "Blue Marble" stands to lose all color and vitality, in the seemingly endless age of the lockdown.