The Statement
Social media users are sharing a striking image of what they claim is "the most detailed image of a human cell to date".
A July 1 Facebook post1, shared by users in Samoa, features the image with the caption: "This is not a beautiful woven tapestry. It is not a painting. It is the most detailed image of a human cell to date, obtained by radiography, nuclear magnetic resonance and cryoelectron microscopy."
The image has been published elsewhere on Facebook, including here2 by an Australian user, while another post has gathered more than 12,000 shares. The image has also circulated on Twitter, including this example from November 2020 which has been retweeted more than 5,000 times.
The Analysis
The image in the post is a digitally-rendered model of a eukaryotic cell3 designed as an interactive scientific learning tool, its creator says. He told AAP FactCheck it is "extremely misleading" to suggest it is an image of a real human cell as it would exist in its natural state.
The model was developed between 2009 and 2015 by US scientific animator Evan Ingersoll4 with concept and art direction by Gael McGill5 at visual science firm Digizyme6.
Mr Ingersoll told AAP FactCheck in an email the image is "an illustration of molecules involved in various processes inside a cell" to help tell the "story" of how those molecules relate to each other.
He said the illustration was never intended to represent a real cell.
The various features of the cell are provided "for orientation and context", Mr Ingersoll said, but are not necessarily illustrated to scale. Instead, the cell features have been simplified and "squashed together" to help users make sense of the scientific story.
"Imagine getting a group of friends into a selfie; they wouldn't ordinarily be that close, but it makes a better picture," Mr Ingersoll said.
"Also, it's not a picture of a particular cell; it's a backdrop to explore as many pathways as possible, so for example this one cell has both breast cancer and Alzheimer's."
An interactive version7 shows each component in greater detail.
Mr Ingersoll said the style of the animation was inspired by the art of David Goodsell8, a professor of computational biology at San Diego's Scripps Research Institute, who is known9 for his colourful watercolour paintings of viruses and cells.
The image was part of a project commissioned by Cell Signaling Technologies10, which owns the copyright to the work. An interactive version of the image can be found on the Cell Signaling Technologies website here11.
It is also untrue to claim the image was "obtained" by radiography12, nuclear magnetic resonance13 (NMR) and cryoelectron microscopy14, as stated in the post, according to Mr Ingersoll.
"In the context of the caption, I think it's extremely misleading - I'm particularly irate about the word 'obtained', which leaves a strong impression that the image is a neutral 'capture' of the state of nature, erasing the artist," he said.
"In that context, to imply that the image as a whole was captured or obtained from nature by (random science tools) is plainly false."
Rather, parts of the image have been digitally rendered using datasets collected through those scientific processes.
"The image has a sliding scale of accuracy," Mr Ingersoll told AAP FactCheck.
"Hero proteins15 are modelled on the best data that were publicly available at the time - which might mean a complete crystal structure, or an incomplete structure with some modelling, or the structure of a related protein. That's where the x-ray crystallography, NMR, and cryoelectron microscopy comes into the image."
Partly False – The content has some factual inaccuracies.
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