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Biomedicine in museums

Viruses and their visualizations

Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of virology and visualizations of viruses will enjoy Frederick Murphy‘s powerpoint slide set ‘The Foundations of Medical and Veterinary Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technology’ (downloadabe here).

The set contains a large number of images of viruses and virologists taken from his own and his colleagues’ image collections, other internet sites, and library collections (I hope he hasn’t breached too many copyrights :-).

The slideshow is a chronologically organized catalogue of names, portraits, major inventions and scientific objects and not a history of virology as such — but the image material is very interesting and sometimes stunning (the image above is a colorized micrograph of a Ross River virus, an RNA alphavirus responsible for a disease called epidemic polyarthritis). A very useful introduction to the myriad of actors and objects in this exciting biomedical field.

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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