Metaphors are essential to writing about science. Even scientists themselves use metaphors all the time, drawing from their familiar experiences to describe the unfamiliar. Building proteins is known as translation, for example, because the sequences of DNA and proteins are akin to words written in different languages. The cell has to translate one language into another using–another metaphor–the genetic code.

Metaphors can be powerful, but they can also trip us up if we mistake them for an equivalence. DNA isn’t really a human language, for example. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at another tricky metaphor: the eye as camera. Some scientists are actually making that metaphor real, by building video cameras that can let blind people see. As I point out, however, eyes are not cameras, and the differences are fascinating. They’re also crucial to the future success in treating blindness with technology. Check it out.

Originally published September 16, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I have a profile of Arthur Horwich, a medical geneticist who has spent a quarter century trying to figure out the workings of this beautiful molecular box. Today he won the Lasker Award, a prize for medicine that has often gone to scientists who later won the Nobel. Why all accolades for a little box? Because without it, you’d be dead. And as Horwich and others have discovered what goes on inside, they’ve helped change the way we understand the biology of the cell. Check it out.

[Image of GroEL from Molecular Chaperone Group, Birkbeck College]