Circle of Life: The Beautiful New Way to Visualize Biological Data

When Martin Krzywinski took a systems administrator job at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Center, he didn't plan on becoming a pioneer of 21st century biological data visualization. Now his distinctive aesthetic is synonymous with the informational richness of our moment.
Circle of Life The Beautiful New Way to Visualize Biological Data

When Martin Krzywinski took a systems administrator job at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Center, he didn't plan on becoming a pioneer of 21st century biological data visualization. In fact, he didn't even have a biology background: He'd done his graduate studies in physics and math. But it was the late 1990s, and he could handle a computer.

Krzywinski built the Center's first IT system, beefed up their security, designed optimized keyboard layouts, and generally geeked out. Along the way, he started helping researchers with their projects, getting to know their data and its possibilities. The rest is design history.

Falling DNA sequencing prices and a growing appreciation of cellular complexity soon unleashed a torrent of genetic data. The tools for gathering data, though, had outpaced those for portraying it. "I was frustrated, reading a lot of the scientific papers and not understanding what they were saying. I just wanted them to be simpler," said Krzywinski. "There's nothing I can do to make biology simpler, but I started telling people to make clearer figures."

To do this, Krzywinski developed Circos, an open source visualization tool that arranges tabular data in circular form. It was a simple idea, but transformative: It's since been used for thousands of visualizations, and its distinctive aesthetic is synonymous with the informational richness of our moment.

Today at 4 p.m. ET, Krzywinski will talk about his work and ethos at the WIRED Data | Life conference in New York City. Get a preview on the following pages and watch the live webcast below.