The huge picture on the wall shows what looks like an erect earthworm next to a big yellow golf ball with a rough surface -- it is a photograph taken just before a human sperm fertilises an egg.

"I call it 'Would you like a date?'," said Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson in a delighted voice, adding that a copy would soon be presented as a gift to the Swedish king.

Now 81, Nilsson shot to world fame in 1965 when the American magazine Life ran 16 pages of pictures from his book "A Child is Born" showing the development of a human foetus in the womb.

All eight million copies sold out in four days and the article was published simultaneously in Britain's Sunday Times and Paris Match. An amateur photographer sent Nilsson a picture from a village in central Africa.

"The village women were sitting in a small hut, looking at a copy of Paris Match and for the first time they could see what happened in their bodies when pregnant. It was an incredible feeling for me to see that."

SARS PHOTOGRAPHY

Booking an interview with Nilsson is not easy. Despite his age, his days are crammed with work and travelling. For 30 years he has worked in the laboratories of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, home of the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

A few months ago Nilsson was the first person in the world to photograph the deadly virus causing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS, which surfaced in southern China last year. The pictures of the virus after having killed a human cell prompted China's health ministry to send Nilsson a letter asking him to explain how he caught the tiny particles on film.

Using a microscope from Japan wired up to a Hasselblad camera, Nilsson enlarges a medical sample up to half a million times. The black and white picture is then coloured to show the contrasts better.

Demonstrating his work, Nilsson pours liquid nitrogen in a tube and grey steam fills the room.

"This is a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," he chuckles and sits down to zoom in on his latest project: photographing small dirt particles from the air which can enter the lungs and penetrate blood vessels.

The next step is to go up in a hot air balloon to take air samples from the clouds but Nilsson said weather conditions had not been quite right yet.

STARS TO EMBRYOS

Nilsson started out as a magazine photographer and his portfolio includes celebrity shots of 1940s stars Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman and jazz musician Louis Armstrong.

His fascination with medical photography began in the early 1950s when a magazine assigned him to do a story on abortion. At a hospital clinic he saw embryos in small glass jars.

"I was not even a father myself at that time. I thought an embryo would look like lump of cells but they had faces, hands, everything. I was hooked," he said.

Aided by new technology Nilsson connected his camera to an endoscopic instrument and took the world's first pictures of a living foetus.

Since then he has followed hundreds of expectant couples, documenting new technologies such as ultra sound and in vitro treatment for infertility. His book, now in its fourth edition, has been published in 20 countries.

"I want to show issues which we feel close to and reproduction concerns everyone," he said. "I still get letters from American college girls saying they want to get pregnant after having seen my pictures."

It may not be only humans who get to see Nilsson's pictures: the twin Voyager spacecraft sent into space in the 1970s carry his pictures as part of a greeting to any life form they may encounter.

Despite rising each morning at 6:30 a.m. to work, Nilsson vehemently denies his energy is anything extraordinary for a man his age. Neither does he see any reason to slow down.

"My father died very early," he said gravely.

"He reached the age of ninety-six-and-a-half and went on at full speed until the end. I hope I can continue at least that long. There are so many things I want to do," he said, listing enough projects to keep him busy for decades.

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