On Stuffed Venereal Diseases

I’m currently visiting my parents, and my female spawner, always keen to spoil me, presented me with a couple of biology-related presents (including this novelty t-shirt). One particularly cool thing, picked up in CyberDog in Camden Market, is this stuffed toy:

For those of you who have yet to be admitted as a Doctor of Stuffed Microbiology, this is a stuffed toy HIV molecule, at 1,000,000x magnification. For comparison, this is a electron microscopy image of HIV molecules breaking away from a T-cell (taken from Wikimedia Commons):



Not a bad likeness, I think.

The company that manufacture the toy make a huge number of different microbes, including a terrifying cute Common Cold, and an oddly forlorn looking malaria parasite. Particularly cool is the stuffed version of the theorised martian lifeform from the ALH84001 meteorite, giving the best justified toy alien lifeform I’ve ever seen.

All of the toys come with a nice little card explaining what the microbe is, how it spreads, and what it can be used for, as well as the original image (generally an electron microscopy image) that they based the design on: I like this, since it makes it all the more geeky, and makes it feel connected to the biology of the organism (rather than just being a flippant toy).

The toys are all available from the ever-wonderful ThinkGeek, if you feel like buying one too. Incidentally, when I was in Camden I picked up a stuffed T4 Phage for Lab Rat: if you’re reading this, tell me when you’re back in town so I can get it to you.