Imaginative artwork should have a long and healthy life span. It should “go viral,” as one might say today, infecting the minds and imaginations of many admirers. Ironically, one of my scratchboard pieces illustrating a viral attack on bacteria has served to embellish several articles I’ve written over the years, and lives on as an attractive print yet today. A case of a virus illustration going viral? Perhaps.

As a life-long student of biology, viruses have always intrigued me. They are too small to see without incredible magnification, yet harmful ones can kill you. They are protein capsules containing naked genetic code requiring the infrastructure of more complex life to reproduce. Biologists argue about whether viruses are really alive or not. Do they represent an early kind of proto life form, or are they the parasitic remnants of a microbe once more complex? Whatever they are, they serve as conduits for DNA transfer between more familiar multicellular organisms, and their codes linger within our bodies, providing a pool of genetic blueprints for assorted chemical assemblies, some of which are nearly as old and as vital to our survival as the Earth herself.

I first created this scratchboard in 1981. The T4 bacteriophage (“bacterium-eater”) is a virus looking like an alien space probe with a faceted head containing genetic payload, a long neck-like delivery system, and spider-legged landing gear. It attaches to E. coli bacteria (mostly friendly denizens of our digestive tracts), and then injects its genetic code into the bacterial cell to highjack its metabolic machinery for manufacturing more virus particles. Clever scientists, however, learned how to add their own codes to the viral message, thus transforming the virus into potential tools for genetic engineering. Back in 1984 I sent a copy of my illustration to various children’s magazines pitching an article called “Viruses: some day you might want to catch one.” A magazine called Fusion (now sadly extinct) published the article in 1985.

So, artwork can sell articles by visualizing a topic in a dramatic way for an editor thirsty for new copy.

In 1998, I used the artwork as one of the illustrations in my first book, Dinosaurs in the Garden. One chapter dealt with the world of microscopic life forms first formally discovered by the Dutch lens maker, Antony van Leewenhoek in 1674. His lenses were so well ground that he was able to see creatures as small as bacteria.

In 2020, I had occasion to use this illustration yet again for an article I wrote for Colorado Gardener magazine entitled “The viral life of plants—and everything else.” (See https://online.publicationprinters.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=1fffb732-8845-4346-9e68-52d67ee408fb) In that piece I had a chance to show the symbiotic side of viruses, as when they form liaisons with plants that sometimes makes those plants more attractive to pollinators or less attractive to potential herbivores. Sometimes, even when viruses cause disease like Tulip break disease, they create extremely beautiful—even if ultimately fatal for the tulip—flame-like color patterns on tulip petals.

Revisit old artwork that still makes your heart beat faster when you look at it. If it still pleases you, other will like it as well—maybe in a variety of different settings.

Your work just might go viral.