The New York Times has a great article about the growing field of biomedical animation, specifically Molecular animation. They talk to some of the big names in the field like Rober Lue, Janet Iwasa, and Drew Berry to learn how they do it and what the benefits of molecular animation are to researchers.
“All that we had before — microscopy, X-ray crystallography — were all snapshots,” said Tomas Kirchhausen, a professor in cell biology at Harvard Medical School and a frequent collaborator with Dr. Iwasa. “For me, the animations are a way to glue all this information together in some logical way. By doing animation I can see what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense. They force us to confront whether what we are doing is realistic or not.” For example, Dr. Kirchhausen studies the process by which cells engulf proteins and other molecules. He says animations help him picture how a particular three-legged protein called clathrin functions within the cell.
via Molecular Animation – Where Cinema and Biology Meet – NYTimes.com.
