A thousand words? Try 2,000.

I'm still writing. Nearly done, though, which is good. I'll let you all know the moment I get this draft out to my second reader. (I think I explained that process already...)

A fair amount of the writing process isn't even writing, but rather putting together figures of data, or cartoons/schematics to illustrate current knowledge or a hypothesis. Data figures are fairly straight forward, and usually are composed of some labeled photographs arranged in a grid (columns and rows), each photograph taken from the outcome of different experimental conditions and the whole thing properly labeled.

Cartoons/schematics/illustration/diagrams, or whatever name you prefer, can take a lot more time than data figures. If you are skilled at producing such things, you get them done fairly quickly if you just want a simple representation. If you are not skilled, then combining ellipses and rectangles into a recognizable biological structure could be daunting and time consuming. Again, simple representations are the quickest.

However, if you really want to produce an illustration that truly is "worth a thousand words", then that could take time. Even if you are skilled. In fact, especially if you are skilled, because then you know you can do anything, given time. For a highly skilled illustrator like myself (modesty? where?), the time consumption problem is compounded because I know that "a picture is worth a thousand words", and I could easily create figures for every few paragraphs of my thesis. Heck, I could probably put together my thesis in illustrations and data figures alone. (Which is sort of what my presentation will be, now that I think about it...)

To better illustrate my point (nyuk nyuk), I am including in this blog post (without permission) a few diagrams showing "neural crest migration", which were published in peer-reviewed journals. Exhibit A:There you are. Simple indeed, but it gets some relevant information across. (Just to orient you, so you have some idea what is going on here, you are looking at a cut away section of an embryo. Chick, mouse, human, they're almost identical at this point in development. Just pretend it was cut in half somewhere between the shoulders and hips, a "transverse section" such that the top of the diagram is the embryo's back, and the bottom is its front. The "neural tube" is what will become the spine, the "dermomyotome" is part of a structure called a "somite" that gives rise to the muscles, and the orange circles on the top are the neural crest cells, which can become many cell types.)

However, this diagram is not as good as it could be. The illustrator tried to cover up the fact that they possess shoddy skills by using gradients. Even the boxed labels have gradients. I can see right through their tricks.

Let's present some other illustrations from other published papers that are a bit better. Exhibits B, C, and D:
Excellent! The top figure (Exhibit B) has two parts. The first part is three-dimensional. (Clearly we are witnessing the workmanship of a much more experienced illustrator.) The second part is just like Exhibit A. Some new information is imparted here (besides all of the labels), but some information is also lost. Note that we now see the the neural crest cells don't migrate in a two-dimensional pattern as we would believe by looking at Exhibit A, but migrate only through the rostral (towards the head) half of the somite. However, the second part of Exhibit B leaves out two of the migratory paths in Exhibit A. (And I still don't care for the gradients.)

Exhibit C is better still, more clearly showing the migratory patterns in a three-dimensional aspect, but I think the real bias of the migration in the anterior (same as rostral) half of the somite over the posterior is lost. There's something about seeing those waves of cells. Also, the direction is reversed (the 'head' end of the embryo is away from us), and that seems counterintuitive to me. Perhaps it is because I have seen many, many diagrams that were 'head towards the reader and tail into the page'.

Exhibit D yields even more information: It illustrates the migration of the neural crest cells into the rostral sclerotome only, as opposed to the cells migrating into the whole somite (the sclerotome is a part of the somite, just like the dermomyotome). However, the migratory path between the neural tube and somite is not shown, and it just isn't a pleasing illustration.

Additionally, none of these diagrams shows the migration of neural crest cells in the space between the somites, nor do they show the fact that the migration initiates rostrally/anteriorly (toward the head), and happens later caudally/posteriorly (towards the tail). The illustrators could've tried to show this, but didn't.

So when I made my diagram (let's face it, this process is a lot easier to understand with a picture, rather than just a paragraph, and I can't steal someone else's illustration), I tried to incorporate as much of the information as possible. As you'll see, my diagram is heavily influenced by all of the ones above. Note that I didn't label where every gene is expressed, like in Exhibit B, although I might add that information rather than just put it in the text, unless it clutters the diagram. So without further ado, here is my diagram illustrating the migration of the neural crest:
Comments/criticisms are welcome. I don't consider it entirely complete, but I've put a few hours into it and need to focus on other aspects of thesis writing right now. In fact, I just realized something that was anatomically incorrect, but is not entirely wrong, so it can wait to be fixed. Regardless, I think you can see that

1. With more than a measly 5 minutes effort *coughcoughExhibitAcough*, much more information can be conveyed with an effective illustration
2. A diagram can be both informative and aesthetic
   
3. A picture is truly worth a thousand words, unless I drew it, in which case it is worth two thousand words. ;)

Thus concludes this post.