In a gallery in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, balanced delicately on mirrored surfaces and quivering slightly with each passing truck, is a lineup of history’s greatest killers: smallpox, influenza, H.I.V. They are all beautifully rendered in blown glass, their shining, spiky capsids encasing their destructive RNA or DNA cores, which are rendered as spiraling dots of milky glass. They are beautiful hand grenades, the illusion heightened by their precarious perches over a hard floor.

Medical journals have cooed over them, and a rendition of the virus that causes AIDS, by the artist Luke Jerram, is in the collection of the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s equivalent of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But as someone covering infectious disease, I found myself offended: I’ve watched people dying of these things now rendered as $10,000 paperweights. There’s something unseemly about celebrating the beauty in something that does such ugly things .

Mr. Jerram defends his work by arguing that it is in the tradition of today’s young British artists contemplating death aesthetically - he cited Damien Hirst’s dissected animals.

But Mr. Jerram is also on an educational mission. Science journals, he complained in an interview, always color their pictures of viruses . As a partly colorblind person, he feels that inserts bias. After all, electron microscope photographs are black and white . Viruses, most of which are 10 to 300 nanometers long, are actually smaller than a wave of visible light.

His renditions, he argued, are in the “natural colorless state.”

However, Mr. Jerram’s renditions are adjusted, too - they are not to scale. The outer spikes that pierce cells (the hemagglutinin “H” of the H1N1 flu virus, for example) are exaggerated into medieval battle maces. Did he, I asked, do that to make them look scarier? Real viruses, in electron microscopy, resemble fuzzy, irregular balls.

That thought - viruses as irregular, fuzzy balls - suddenly raises the question of whether I am being a pious hypocrite. Maybe it’s the price tags I find irksome, more than the idea of swooning over a killer’s beauty - though I would be offended by, say, a portrait of the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer celebrating his good looks.

After all, I don’t mind anthropomorphized viruses when they’re rendered as $8 plush toys with googly eyes. I even have hepatitis and chikungunya on my desk (hep’s yellow, chik is white with a red faux-hawk ). And, as a colleague noted, I sometimes wear a bubonic plague necktie .

No, Mr. Jerram said, there was no plot to make them scarier. His limitation is glass’s fragility; if they were to scale, they would crumble.

And to judge from the rest of his work, he’s nowhere near as in love with death as his contemporaries. When he has blended art and science before, it has either pulsed with life - a concert using the sounds made inside plants - or has been filled with wonder - another concert played on squeaky water-filled globes he swears were tuned by the pull of the moon.

And he has an armada of pianos coming to New York City to be left on street corners for anyone to play.

Clearly, it’s showmanship he loves. But then he groused in a way that would endear him to any grumpy science-journalism hack.

“I’m just now on the front page of one of the Nature journals,” he said. “But they used one of my swine flu sculptures to illustrate H.I.V. You’d think they would have known better.”


DONALD G.MCNEIL JR