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By its very nature, multiple sclerosis (MS) is disruptive. It’s disruptive at the cellular level, where the body’s own defenses attack the nervous system, stripping the protective myelin sheath that covers the nerve cells, causing interruptions in communication between the nerve cells and a deterioration of brain tissue. It’s also disruptive at a personal level. Sufferers not only deal with debilitating symptoms that can affect movement, vision, and speech but also face an unpredictable disease path that varies from person to person.

At first glance, the two tumor subtypes seem to have little in common: one takes root in the ovaries and the other, in breast tissue. Conventionally, tumors like these are referred to by their organ of origin and other basic characteristics such as the cell type that spawned them. But through projects like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), researchers from the ӳý and elsewhere are taking a deeper look at cancer’s many forms and finding genomic similarities that cut across these classifications, as well as great diversity within single classes of cancer.

A layer cake? No, not interactive enough. A spinning wheel? Too mechanistic. What about a film strip? No, that’s not quite right either.

ӳý researcher Nir Yosef and scientific illustrator Sigrid Knemeyer were in search of the perfect metaphor to communicate the complex scientific concepts encapsulated in a paper by Yosef and his colleagues. The two spoke by phone and over email, exchanging ideas about how to capture the paper’s main messages