Seeing is believing
Some 17,000 years ago, on a cave wall in Spain, a person drew a picture of a mammoth with a dark shadow where the animal's heart would be. Some believe this is the earliest example of anatomical drawing.
Today's science illustrators are still expected to know where to place organs and other major structures, but they're also expected to convey the intricacies of living beings' insides — down to the molecular level. Doing that well requires specialized knowledge, often acquired formally.
We spoke to three science illustrators about their career paths.
Academic beginnings
Luciana Giono's family has interests in architecture, music and graphic design, but she ended up studying science, completing the equivalent of U.S. bachelor's and master's degrees in biological sciences at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. The school's architecture/design and science departments were in two almost identical buildings next to each other on campus.
"I used to joke that I went to the wrong building," Giono said. She did graduate work at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, with research focused on gene expression, cell cycle and DNA damage response. While studying for her Ph.D. qualifying exam, she made a big figure summarizing all the cell cycle details she had learned — and realized how much people rely on diagrams and visuals to communicate scientific knowledge efficiently.
Kate Patterson always has enjoyed doing art but said she put it aside to study veterinary science. During her undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney in Australia, she was intrigued to learn that certain breeds of dogs are prone to specific types of cancer. In practice, she treated many boxers with mast cell tumors (a type of skin cancer) and German shepherds with hemangiosarcoma (cancer arising from cells in blood vessels). Thinking this must have a genetic basis that also might apply to human cancer, she enrolled for a Ph.D. at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research at the University of New South Wales, where she studied how a dual specificity phosphatase called DUSP23 affects ovarian cancer progression.
Cell Observatory.
As a graduate student, Patterson enjoyed making graphs and figures to communicate her work clearly, and she realized this was not something that came easily to everybody. "A component of being a scientist is to be able to communicate your work clearly," she said. "I was one of the weird ones that really enjoyed writing up my thesis and making posters."
Radhika Patnala's mother was an interior designer. "The world of art and design was quite prevalent in my household as I was growing up," Patnala said, "so I developed an interest in fine arts, design concepts and design software from a very young age, even before I was exposed to the wonderful world of science and biology."
Patnala completed her bachelor's and master's degrees in biotechnology from Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management in India and the Australian National University, respectively, and then earned a Ph.D. in neurosciences from the National University of Singapore. "My research was focused on neuroinflammation and epigenetics in the context of a fascinating cell type called microglia," she said. "I did a lot of microscopy during my Ph.D., which exposed me to the visual beauty inherent in life science."
Turning an interest into a career
As an extension for their love for arts in science, both Patterson and Giono eventually found themselves making figures for colleagues' papers and posters. "I really enjoy making them, which means I take the time to do it carefully, both in terms of content and looks," Giono said.
She worked as a career investigator and teaching assistant for many years and then began asking journals if they would be interested in having someone dedicated to figure production. Her very first work for a Journal of Biological Chemistry review article consisted of illustrations showing ways of studying RNA–protein interactions at the molecular level. Now a freelance illustrator, for several years she has prepared many cover illustrations and figures for JBC and the Journal of Lipid Research. Her illustrations also have been on the covers of other journals including Cell, Nucleic Acids Research and the Journal of Hepatology.
Patterson took an equally indirect route to becoming a science animator. She started out working as a science writer at the National Breast Cancer Foundation and a freelance illustrator through her website, . "In Australia, there is no formal training to become a science illustrator, so there aren't many people in this