The Starving Microbe

See, this is precisely why you should never leave a scientist alone with a pencil and a pad of paper.

For the record, I'm generally an apathetic rotter who really couldn't care less about organic meatbags. I don't like kids or babies, pictures of murder and vivisection don't faze me (in fact, I like reading forensic medicine textbooks), and I've never been compelled to pledge myself to a charity organisation or campaign. That being said, I seem to have this disproportionately enormous amount of sympathy for the 'light' of microbes, because each and every time I come across sentences in journal articles such as, "Little is known concerning the ability of immunological and nucleic acid techniques to detect injured, starved or nonculturable cells" or "Chloroquine induces human macrophage killing of Histoplasma capsulatum by limiting the availability of intracellular iron", my immediate reaction is to go, "Aww poor thing." ("Thing" referring to the microbe, of course, not the infected host).

So yeah, a picture of a starving microbe. A Helicobacter pylori to be exact. A cookie for anybody who can tell me why I chose to draw this bacteria, instead of any other. And those are not hairs, people - they're pili (plural for pilus). In bacteria-speak, that translates to "sex organ/s". The quip, "It may be skinny, but at least it's LONG, man!" comes to mind. And no, microbes don't have hands, eyes (well, photoreceptors are an entirely different thing, when present) or tongues - and, to the best of my knowledge, they don't come in glorious technicolour. That's called artistic licence. And yes, I know the bubbles are strangely shaped. That's because I can't draw circles to save my life.

You know, I wouldn't mind having this on a T-shirt.