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Biomedicine in museums

Is the microarray replacing DNA as the icon for biomedicine and the life sciences?

It looks like microarray patterns are gradually replacing the DNA double helix as the central icon for biomedicine and the life sciences. For example, the new Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen—funded for a ten-year period with 600 mill. DKK (~120 mill. USD) by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and fully operative some time in 2009—has just presented their logo:

thereby adding to the growing iconicity of microarrays, the new wonder tool of life science research. Martha de Menezes famously turned it into art a couple of years ago, we put it as a wall-paper on our blog about a year ago, and many others are beginning to employ the dotted pattern as an icon of the power of bioinformatics and systems biology in the life-sciences.

This particular logo has been worked out in co-operation between Søren Brunak, Michael Sundström and L. N. Jørgensen at the Center together with a graphical design company (‘daugbjerg + lassen’, which I cannot find on Google). Read more in the Center’s last newsletter.

Actually it’s more readable when it’s downsized!

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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