CDC rendering of SARS-CoV-2

The disease that has put the entire world on pause is easily communicable, capable of stowing silently away in certain hosts and killing others, and, to the human eye, entirely invisible. In media parlance it’s become our  “invisible enemy”: a nightmarish, oneiric force that can’t be seen, heard, or touched. But with the use of modeling software, scientists and illustrators have begun to visualize coronavirus, turning it into something that can be seen, understood, and, hopefully, eventually vanquished by science. Many of us imagine the virus as a sphere radiating red spikes—but why? Certain elements of these visualizations are based on the way coronavirus appears under a microscope, and others are choices that were made, an exercise of artistic license.

On January 21, CDC illustrators Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins were asked to illustrate the novel coronavirus for use in press briefings and other media materials. Eckert came up with what she called a “beauty shot” of the virus molecule (referred to in the scientific community as a “virion”), a round globule with the crown-like array of spiked proteins that give the virus its name. Eckert and Higgins experimented with a number of color schemes until they settled on red and gray with orange and yellow accents. “It just really stood out,” Eckert told the New York Times. Since then, the illustration has saturated news outlets around the world.

“Their illustration kind of looks handsome,” said Dr. Timothy Mastro, former deputy director for science in HIV/AIDS prevention at the CDC. “It has a certain symmetry to it, an appealing design … [a virus like] Ebola’s just this twisted-up piece of spaghetti, not nearly as attractive.” Mastro recalls having seen artistic renderings of the HIV molecule on posters at the conferences he attended and on the covers of journals. The image, a sphere studded with spiked proteins, similar to the CDC rendering of coronavirus, gave a certain “character” to the disease he was researching. But in the lab, Mastro concerned himself exclusively with images of the actual virus taken by means of a process called X-ray crystallography. The process, in which the crystalline structure of the virion causes a beam of X-rays to diffract in many directions, allows researchers to construct an image of the molecule. The result is a ghostly black-and-white tracing of the invisible.

Mastro showed me the basis for all the colorful renderings I’d seen online: an electron micrograph of the virus, obtained by bombarding virions with a finely focused electron beam. The molecules looked like the cartoon amoebas you’d expect to see in a fifties film reel about germs. But they were the virus qua virus, with its spikes and spherical body. Mastro explained that the spiked proteins connect to receptors on the outside of healthy cells so the virus can overtake the cell body and use it to replicate itself. A variation of these proteins, produced over years of replication, enabled the coronavirus to evolve from a harmless common cold into something capable of devastating the upper respiratory system. I asked Mastro why so many of the illustrations of the coronavirus look different from the CDC version, and one another, given that everyone was working off the same micrograph. “Artistic license,” he said. Read More

Jon McGregor. Photo: Jo Wheeler.

I have been thinking lately of a verdict given to the adult world by a young girl in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows. “Mary had once said … that the adjectives which really suited grown-ups were ‘lily-livered’ and ‘chicken-hearted.’ ” At the risk of making a disputable comment, I wonder if, compared to the West characters from a century ago, we may be more than ever afflicted by this disease of lily-livered-ness and chickenheartedness, at least in our literary taste. Oftentimes a reviewer feels the urge to warn the readers that such and such a book is “not for the fainthearted”—as though it’s literature’s job to put a cautious finger on the readers’ pulses. Woe to those sacrificed maidens in Greek tragedies and lopped-off heads in Shakespeare plays that fail to bear a sign: TRIGGER WARNING.

The Greeks and Shakespeare, of course, are still being read, perhaps for the reason that it’s easy to forget that they wrote about real people who once lived. Thank goodness we have books like Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs, a reminder that true literature does not avert its eyes from anything difficult.

The novel is narrated by a group of characters, some named, others unseen but to themselves. Together they are known—because society must offer a label for them—as drug addicts, alcoholics, and homeless people. It may be easy to compare the group “we” to the chorus in a Greek tragedy, but the novel does not allow the readers to find a retreat in the realm of myths, fairy tales, or fantasies. We are, of course, familiar with the gritty and gory images, which are often seen these days on screen—with perfect makeup and the right music so well done that the audience can keep an aesthetic and psychological distance. But McGregor’s novel, with its uncompromising gaze at unadorned details of life and death, eliminates that safe distance between the characters and the readers. Who can say he or she is guaranteed to be free from the characters’ fates? A reader who waves a white flag of lily-livered-ness and chickenheartedness even before opening the book, perhaps. Read More