An artist’s rendition of the interior of a eukaryotic cell. Depicting a cell’s interior is difficult because electron micrographs provide detailed pictures of only a thin slice of a cell, while the cell itself is a three-dimensional object with a very complex interior structure. Thus an artist can create a special sense of the cell’s inner workings by using color and shading. Here the artist rendered the organelles inside the cell as he imagined them rather than as a faithful reconstruction from electron micrographs. The blue object is the cell’s nucleus with the DNA visible inside as a coil. The red strands emerging from the nucleus are RNA molecules. In the rest of the cell is the cytoplasm, which contains many organelles like the red, kidney-shaped mitochondria and the sectioned orange vesicles. The green stack of flattened vesicles near the nucleus is the Golgi apparatus, and the other flat vesicles represent the cell’s endoplasmic reticulum. All of these cellular elements are described in later chapters. [This picture, drawn by Tomo Narashima, originally appeared on the cover of the second edition of this book.]