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Antimicrobial Resistance: Seeing the Problem at Hand
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: Lydia-Marie Joubert, Stanford University Medical Center
You’ll be relieved to know that this is not a real hand, swarming with exotic species of microbes. But this eerie image does send a somber message: antimicrobial resistant bacteria (green) are becoming more common and more resilient, while the numbers of vulnerable bacteria (red) are dwindling.
The artist is Lydia-Marie Joubert, an electron microscopy expert at Stanford University Medical Center. She created this image by overlaying a photograph of artist Francis Hewlett’s sculpture of a human hand, five feet tall and emerging from the grounds of a garden in Wales, with epifluorescence micrographs of Pseudomonas bacteria growing on the surface of a glass tube. Her imaginative image earned her the People’s Choice award from The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, run annually by Science magazine and the National Science Foundation.
