Biomedical Image Awards 2005

When you've had time to blow your nose, wipe your eyes and stifle another sneeze take a look at what's causing your hay fever misery.

As the summer pollen hits you it causes this little ball of histamine granules to explode into action, irritating the upper respiratory passages and making them swell. Then follow the typical hay fever, or 'seasonal allergic rhinitis' symptoms that have been making life a misery for millions of sufferers in recent weeks.

The image of this mast cell was taken by scientific researchers at the University of Edinburgh and is one of many stunning pictures currently being displayed by the Wellcome Trust biomedical research charity.

And if just the thought of a hay fever attack doesn't start to make you itch, what about this microscopic head louse acrobatically scaling three strands of hair, taken by Garry Hunter and Dave Randall at The University of Sussex.

The next image, by microscopist Spike Walker, could well be wallpaper from the psychedelic Sixties but in fact shows tiny kidney stones, so small they are nicknamed 'bladder sand'. The concentric ridges show successive layers of calcium oxalate crystallising to form the grains. The oldest bladder sand recorded was found in a 7000-year-old Egyptian mummy.

Malaria is a deadly disease which kills up to 2.3m people a year, many of them children and pregnant women. And this is how it proliferates.

What looks like an old piece of knitted jumper is the gut of a mosquito with parasites about to burst from the bulging sacs. When they do, they pass into the insect's saliva which it then injects into a human's bloodstream as it bites.

This close-up of the killer disease in action was taken by Hilary Hurd from Keele University using a scanning electron micrograph.

And finally we show how scientists are trying to combat malaria through the study of the fruit fly. This one has been given the green fluorescent protein gene from jellyfish, which makes it even more bug-eyed than normal. Derric Nimmo and Paul Eggleston, also from Keele, created this.

These images, and more, have been chosen from many submitted by scientific researchers and are show at the Wellcome Library foyer, 210 Euston Road in London from tomorrow (Thursday). The 2005 Biomedical Image Awards exhibition is being officially unveiled tonight (Wed 13 July) by neurophysiologist Dr Mark Lythgoe from the Institute of Child Health at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The award winners were: Robert Dourmashkin from Queen Mary, University of London, who sent in an image of flu viruses; Spike Walker's picture of the head of a dog tapeworm; and fruit fly egg chambers created by Teresa Niccoli and Daniel St Johnston from Cambridge.

Catherine Draycott, head of the Trust's Medical Photographic Library, which has over 180 000 pictures dating back almost one thousand years, said: "These images give an astonishing insight into amazing things going on around and within us which we can't normally see but which have a tremendous impact on our lives. They really show just how incredible science is."

Media contact

Barry Gardner, Wellcome Trust Media Office
Tel: 020 7611 7329
Mob: 07711 193041
Email: b.gardner@wellcome.ac.uk

Some of the award winners