Science for Art?s Sake

DNA Under Glass (click on image for close-up)
by Eric Suchanek

This image was created using the POV-Ray raytracer (http://www.povray.org) on a Silicon Graphics R10000 Indigo II. The molecular structure is a piece of double-stranded of B-DNA taken from the Brookhaven Protein Databank; the structure represents a DNA dodecamer and was solved by Holbrook et al. The Brookhaven format molecular file was converted to POV-Ray format by pdb2pov - a shareware program I've developed. The bell jar was created by hand, and the index of refraction chosen to simulate lead crystal. Finally, the image was post-processed with Adobe Photoshop to add the text and lens flair effect.