This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
David Goodsell, an artist and Scripps Research Institute professor of molecular biology, won the 2016 Wellcome Image Awards for his hand-painted watercolor depiction of the Ebola virus. Goodsell says that sometimes computer models fail to tell us what we want to know about complex structures. In this video he describes the problem and how he chose to paint the biological world the way he paints it. He is now illustrating molecules for the RCSB Protein Data Bank.
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