For over three decades, Dr Berry has been creating biomedical animations that blend cinematic storytelling with scientific accuracy to illuminate the hidden worlds within the human body.

He began his career as a cell biologist and microscopist. Using this knowledge, he immerses himself in data, technical reports and models from scientific journals to ensure his work is precise as well as beautiful.

Blurring the line between artist and scientist, his work has been exhibited globally including at the Museum of Modern Art (US), the Guggenheim Museum, the Royal Institution and the University of Geneva.

His animations have earned widespread acclaim and awards, and his collaborations have included artists such as Björk, who hailed his work as “magic”, and White Night Melbourne.

In honour of being named Fellow, Dr Berry shares his favourite animations from across his career.

This is my best-known animation, which continues to reach large global audiences. I created this animation for the ‘DNA’ documentary series, which won an Emmy in 2005.

The animations were distributed as a free education DVD for science classrooms in Australia, the UK and the USA, which won a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award in 2004. The animations were exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world.

Because these animations have been freely used in science education for decades, most incoming students to WEHI have already encountered them at school or university, no matter where in the world they’ve arrived from.

The very first animations I made for WEHI were on the malaria lifecycle, created with Professor Alan Cowman AC back in 1998.

The 2016 version reconstructs malaria infection of a human child via mosquito bite, through invasion of cellular tissues including liver and blood.

All features are to scale, including mosquito, blood vessels, human cells and parasite. The visualisation is the first of its kind to present live-behavior models, including the mosquito’s bite technique, parasite invasion method and patterns of blood flow.

This animation is designed to support outreach about WEHI’s research into breast cancer and to provide world-class educational materials on foundational cell biology topics.

It highlights the role of BRCA1 and BRCA2 in DNA break repair in homologous recombination, a process which enables the cell to access and copy intact DNA sequences, particularly to repair DNA damage.

I really enjoyed the science, technical challenge and art of producing this animation.

As a story, Apoptosis is a horror film about a cell’s self-destruction. Reflecting this, the animation’s sound design by Franc Tetaz was inspired by the sound from Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’.

Originally, the production was intended to explore BCL-2 blocking apoptosis, but unfortunately, in 2006 it wasn’t entirely clear what BCL-2 looked like or precisely what it did at the mitochondrial membrane.

Consequently, the animation shifted to apoptosis activation via the Fas ligand signalling pathway, a key extrinsic pathway of apoptosis, which was better understood at the time.

Professor Donald Metcalf was my primary customer when I arrived as ‘the Photoshop guy’ at WEHI in 1995.

For many years, I assembled his figures from microscope films, digitised them with a scanner and assembled them in very early Photoshop. With Prof Metcalf I also created a number of animations, including G-CSF and its receptor, one of my earliest WEHI molecular animations.

The original G-CSF receptor animation was lost on a dead hard drive, but a version appears in my early wehi.tv animation ‘Body Code’, created for gallery and museum exhibitions.