I rarely click banner ads. Until one New York Times ad caught my attention.

It wasn’t the headline. It was the picture. I had never seen anything like it in a public advertisement before. To most readers, it was probably nothing more than an abstract swirl of pink and purple. They likely scrolled right past it without a second thought.

I couldn’t. It was a photomicrograph, a photograph taken with through a microscope.

For forty-five years, this had been my world. While other physicians examined patients or interpreted X-rays, I peered through a microscope, searching for the subtle variations that separate healthy tissue from disease.

The reproduction wasn’t especially good. The image was small and lacked the crisp detail I was accustomed to seeing through a microscope. Still, I recognized it immediately for what it was: a photomicrograph of a tumor.

In forty-five years of pathology, I had never seen a photomicrograph used to draw the attention of the general public. So I took a screenshot.

Only later, did I follow the link to a story about a clinical trial for women with resistant ovarian cancer. The research was interesting, but it wasn’t what stayed with me. The image did.

For the past month, every time I came across that screenshot on my desktop, I found myself wondering why it had affected me so much. Eventually I realized it wasn’t really about my evaluation of the images.

It was about seeing one of the tools of my profession in a setting where I never expected to find it.

During my career, photomicrographs were tools. They appeared in pathology textbooks, medical journals, conference presentations, and tumor boards. They helped physicians make diagnoses and decisions, teach students, and communicate discoveries. I never expected to see one used as the visual hook in an online advertisement.

I thought I had taken a screenshot of an unusual ad campaign.

It turned out I had taken a screenshot that inspired this blog.

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