A Window on Life Sciences

The Wellcome Image Awards 2011, celebrating the most striking and technically excellent images acquired by the Wellcome Images picture library in the past 18 months, were presented at Wellcome Collection in London on 23 February.

This year’s winners have used techniques ranging from clinical photography to brain tractography to capture the wonder of medicine and the life sciences in all of their glorious splendour.

The winning images can be viewed on the Wellcome Image Awards website. Each of the 20 extraordinary images and one animation was been selected by a panel of judges including Alice Roberts (anatomist, author and science broadcaster), Adam Rutherford (TV presenter, science writer and multimedia editor at ’Nature’), Fergus Walsh (medical correspondent at the BBC) and Eric Hilaire (Picture Editor at the ’Guardian’).

The selected images are on display at Wellcome Collection until July 2011. Each image is accompanied by ’the story behind the picture’, to explain how it was created, what it adds to scientific understanding and why the judges felt it stands out.

From a stunning photomicrograph of a zebrafish retina to a reconstructed CT scan of a patient’s aneurysm, the winners showcase the diversity of images that are made available for public use through the Wellcome Library’s image repository,