Science and art continually intersect in complex and productive ways. The exhibition Mechanical Virtue provided a historical perspective on the collaborations between artists and scientists that is also explored in another 2002 Henry exhibition Gene(sis). Featuring images from scientific atlases — brain slices, pathogens, bullet wounds and eye ball — Mechanical Virtue draws from the collections of the UW Medical Library and the Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, to illustrate the emergence in the 1800s of the concept of “scientific objectivity.”