Microkillers: A gallery of pestilence

Roger Highfield, magazine editor

Clockwise from top left: Smallpox, plague, anthrax, Ebola virus, cholera and SARS coronavirus (Image: Martin Miller)

They are microscopic, beautiful and deadly too. Organisms responsible for the demise of millions of people down the generations have been turned into art.

This gallery of pestilence - smallpox, plague, anthrax, SARS coronavirus, cholera and Ebola virus - was created by Martin Miller, an artist who has shown an enduring fascination with 20th-century warfare. Because hydrogen bombs, atom bombs and other advanced weapons and machines of destruction that permeated popular culture during the cold war were mostly unseen by the general public, Miller says he wanted to make "the invisible visible".

He took a particular interest in biological warfare and came across a vast archive of images of infectious agents in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. They had, he explained, "an abstract, sinister beauty, similar to that I had experienced with war machines".

Using Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the images, Miller gave them a consistent look, while "taking care to preserve their grim authenticity".

Since the end of the 1960s, when President Richard Nixon terminated the US's offensive biowarfare effort, American research has focused on defence. Aware of the dangers of handling these killers, the CDC administers the Select Agent Program, which regulates the 318 US laboratories that are registered to carry out research with agents that include anthrax, Ebola virus, plague and smallpox (the programme does not include cholera or SARS coronavirus) to develop medicines and vaccines.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/177c495f/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A110C0A80Cmicrokillers0Ea0Egallery0Eof0Epest0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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