A new exhibition in London, Invisible Body, has drawn together the worlds of art and medicine. It pairs 12 contemporary artists with 12 specialists in medical science, to examine the role that medicine plays in contemporary culture. The artwork pictured right is the result of one of the partnerships, between Dr Robert Whittle, a developmental geneticist in BIOLS, and artist Julia Wilson.

Robert's collaboration with Julia is their response to the work of Anna Dumitriu (a Brighton-based artist) who is influenced, according to Robert, by "ideas of immortality and has a fascination with the 'invisibility' of microscopic structures like the detail of human skin". Robert's focus was on heritability and biological continuity, which is his area of interest in developmental genetics.

Robert and Julia started working together in June 1999, exchanging an enormous range of ideas and information as well as novel artwork. Robert said, "We became interested in the difference between heritability and immortality, about the transition between intimacy and clinical ultrastructure as one examines a body at increasing magnification."