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Artist Angela Palmer and Professor Sarah Gilbert, pioneer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, with 2020: The Sphere that Changed the World

The pioneer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, Professor Sarah Gilbert, unveiled Angela Palmer's sculpture of the original Wuhan coronavirus particle, which she has been created on a scale eight million times its size

2020: The Sphere that Changed the World was unveiled on Monday, 17 May, at the re-opening of the Oxford University Natural History Museum in Oxford, just two miles from the laboratories where Professor Gilbert and her team developed the vaccine, which is now protecting millions of lives. Dr Maheshi Ramasamy of the Oxford Vaccine Group and Lord Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University, joined Professor Gilbert at the launch. A second work by Palmer was also unveiled: ‘The Spike’, a dramatically upscaled representation of the virus’ deadly protein spike which enables the particle sphere to invade the human cell.

Professor Sarah Gilbert said: ‘Angela’s powerful and thought-provoking sculpture is a beautiful yet fragile representation of the virus that has become our mortal enemy. The separate image of the spike protein represents the weapon that we have used to fight back, using that part of the virus to make the vaccines to protect us all.’