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The current in London by the British artist Damien Hirst has stirred the debate about the extent to which art and science inform each other. Among Hirst’s new works in Beyond Belief is a series of “biopsy” paintings, based on high-resolution images of different forms of cancer and other diseases.

The image on the left, selected by Hirst from the , is a coloured scanning electron micrograph of a biopsy from the intestine of a child with small bowel cancer. When printed at 9 centimetres wide, it provides a 45-fold magnification. Hirst’s painting based on this…