Over the course of an intense week in January, two University of Georgia graduates who now work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created what is now one of the most fearsome images around the world.
Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, medical illustrators at the CDC, were charged with designing an image of the novel coronavirus that would both show its complexity and also convey how dangerous it is.
“We didn’t want it to look like a toy,” Eckert told the University of Georgia Alumni magazine recently.
According the alumni magazine, Higgins and Eckert graduated more than a decade apart, Higgins in 1993 and Eckert in 2004, from what’s now the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The imperative of the pending pandemic brought them together at the CDC where they worked as illustrators. They were charged with designing something that would look as foreboding as the actual virus was proving to be, but to render it so people could actually see it. The virus is invisible to the naked eye. So, Eckert and Higgins set about making a 3D graphic model that would pass the approval of scientists studying the actual virus and emphasize the complexity of the coronavirus.
They used a combination of three images representing the main proteins of the virus. Then they colored the images, making the spikes that attach to healthy cells in the body red, and the body of the virus, which houses the nucleus of the virus, gray. Remaining proteins of the virus were colored in orange and yellow.
The image, along with face masks and body bags, is likely to remain one of the pandemic’s most indelible.
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