Biomedicine on Display

During the medical garbage collecting day in late May, we brought in a number of wonderful and interesting medical artefacts to our collections, including this plastic mannequin from the Department of Odontology (it’s Camilla to the left).

Now Vanessa tells us that Steve Erenburg (a.k.a. radio-guy), a New York based artefact dealer, has this dental mennequin called Dentman — an aluminum head sittoing on a cast iron lab stand — for sale for $750!

Those $750 would have financed the whole medical garbage collection day!

Which gives me an idea. The Ministry of Science in this country wants its universities to engage more in private enterprise. So maybe we should begin to think in terms of collecting medical items for sale!

Actually, as a university museum under the Ministry of Science, Medical Musieon is not formally regulated by the Danish museum law (which is a Ministry of Culture thing). So we could easily begin a two-tiered acquisition strategy. Some artefacts could be collected for lofty heritage reasons, others for the medical antiquities market.

Maybe it’s time to start a Medical Museion Medical Antiquities shop as a PPP (public-private parnership) on the premises here in Bredgade?

The other side of the story is that private dealers in medical antiquities constitute a huge unexplored source of artefacts for medical history museums. The growth of an internet-based medical-historical artefact market is a new situation for our kind of museums. Are medical history museums moving towards a situation like that of art museums, which have always lived in the shadow of private dealers, collectors and galleries? For better or for worse, blogs like Vanessa’s certainly contribute to this tendency.

The Imagine Science Film Festival will be held 16-25 October in New York. The objective of the festival is to showcase films (especially fiction films) that “effectively incorporate science into a compelling narrative while maintaining credible scientific groundings”. The public will join scientists in learning and imagining science through visual storytelling. Films with bio/medical content include ‘A Biometric Tale‘ (2003), ‘In Vivid Detail‘ (2007; about prosopagnosia, i.e., inability to remember faces), and ‘A Fruit Fly in New York‘ (2007). See more here.

Science dancing goes back at least to the classic “Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level” performed at Stanford in 1971. And as the organizers of the 2009 Science Dance Contest say, the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science, “perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting”!

This data-poor but body-rich contest is open to anyone at the postgraduate level in any scientific field and in science-related fields like bioethics, history of science or medicine, etc. — in other words this is a great opportunity for all historians of contemporary biomedicine — and the procedure is quite simple:

• make a video of your own science dance.
• post it on YouTube; and don’t forget to include any relevant information.
• mail the url of your video to: gonzo@aaas.org together with your name, current affiliation and status, the title of your Ph.D., the university where it is earned, and completion date, not later than 16 November.

An independent panel of judges appointed by AAAS/Gonzo Labs will then select a total of four winners from the following categories:

• graduate student: best among those currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program
• post-doc: best among those who have a Ph.D. but not tenure at a university
• professor: best among those with Ph.D. and tenure at a university
• popular choice: the video with the highest YouTube viewcount by the deadline

Note that this is a dance contest, not a video contest, so the judges will focus on the quality of the dance rather than any fancy editing you do. The winning dances will be those that most creatively convey the scientific essence of their respective Ph.D. theses.

The winners will be honored guests at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago in February — and are supposed to work with choreographers and dancers to perform live at the meeting.

Read more here (and thanks to Attila for the tip).

A couple of weeks ago we asked for a guide to restaurants and bars with medical motifs.

Øystein Horgmo has kindly sent us an article in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet about a new theme restaurant in Riga, Latvia, owned by medical doctors, called Hospitalis, with a pronounced medical motif.

Says my new favourite guide to Latvian culture, ‘Fucking Latvia: alternative guide to Latvia’:

It is a must-see place if you like gore things. The restaurant looks like a medicine cabinet, while you are treated as a patient and taken good care by the long-legged waitresses in nurses uniforms. The food is served in flasks and operating-room’s dishes and isn’t that cheap (7 and more lats per meal), but this is a bizarre experience that is worth breaking the bank. Besides, the place is owned by local doctors, but unfortunately, the president of Latvia, who is also a doctor, declined his appearance at the opening once he realized how weird this place actually is.

In other words, more raw and bizarre than the utterly sophisticated The Clinic in Singapore. Isn’t there one in Berlin too?? 

‘An unbelievably romantic prize with beautiful colours’ [’ett otroligt romantiskt pris med vackra färger’] — that’s how an inorganic chemist at the University of Gothenburg characterizes today’s news about the Nobel prize in chemistry.

I’m not sure I understand what he means by ’romantic’. I would rather call it a ‘medical’ prize in disguise, like most chemical Nobel prizes these days. Because the green fluoresent protein (GFP) and other GFP-like proteins in a variety of fluorescent colours are widely used in basic and clinical medical research.

(glial cells expressing GFP among red neurons: credit: RICCARDO CASSIANI-INGONI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

And the colours are beautiful indeed. They’ve been a standard illustration theme on bioscience journal covers for years now.

The press release and the excellent scientific background information material contains all that needs to be said about the importance of GFP and GFP-ish proteins at the moment (historians of contemporary biomedical sciences will undoubtedly add more later).

Just a couple of more images. First the playful signature of the Tsien lab webpage painted with different GFP and GFP-like proteins.

And then the so far best publicly known GFP art work — Eduardo Kac’s ‘GFP Bunny’ (2000). Not great art perhaps, but a creative use of one of the most displayable chemical Nobel prizes in many years.

A recent announcement for a lecture by Tim Hunt, joint winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain tomorrow, Thursday 9 October, reminded me of the problems with using scientists as sources for biographical stories.

Tim Hunt will be talking about the inspirations behind his life in science. Says the announcement:

It was in his weekly science lesson at the Dragon School near Oxford that Tim grew to find biology an easy subject, and from then on he felt he never really had to make any more career decisions. When he was 14, Tim moved to another school where science played a much larger role in the curriculum. He loved Chemistry in particular, and the class were allowed considerable freedom, on more than one occasion started fires from distilling volatile flammable solvents.

Well, this may be true. Or it may not. It’s difficult to say, because autobiographical stories are notoriously problematic as sources of what ‘really’ happened, for example what was ’really’ the inspirations behind someone’s life in science. Having written the biography of another (then still living) medical Nobel laureate (Niels K. Jerne) I know all to well how shaky autobiographical reports turn out to be when you are able to compare them with the written record. By and large, autobiography is better understood as a fictional genre.

That said, autobiographical stories can be great fun and good entertainment. And like great novels, they can be used as ‘mirrors’ for us to compare ourselves in. For that purpose it doesn’t really matter if they are true or not.

So from that point of view the lecture at the Royal Institution could be interesting. In London tomorrow at 7pm — find it here.

In July we reported how ten editors of some of the leading international journals for history and philosophy of science and social studies of science had issued a joint declaration against the current attempts, initiated by the European Science Foundation, to establish a European rating system for humanities journals (ERIH).

Now, two and a half months later, almost all editors of international journals in this area of the humanities have joined the declaration:

• Hanne Andersen (Centaurus)
• Roger Ariew & Moti Feingold (Perspectives on Science)
• A. K. Bag (Indian Journal of History of Science)
• June Barrow-Green & Benno van Dalen (Historia mathematica)
• Keith Benson (History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences)
• Marco Beretta (Nuncius)
• Michel Blay (Revue d’Histoire des Sciences)
• Cornelius Borck (Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
• Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (Science, Technology and Human Values)
• Massimo Bucciantini & Michele Camerota (Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies)
• Jed Buchwald and Jeremy Gray (Archive for History of Exacft Sciences)
• Vincenzo Cappelletti & Guido Cimino (Physis)
• Roger Cline (International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology)
• Stephen Clucas & Stephen Gaukroger (Intellectual History Review)
• Hal Cook & Anne Hardy (Medical History)
• Leo Corry, Alexandre Matraux & Jörgen Renn (Science in Context)
• D.Diecks & J.Uffink (Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics)
• Brian Dolan & Bill Luckin (Social History of Medicine)
• Hilmar Duerbeck & Wayne Orchiston (Journal of Astronomical History & Heritage)
• Moritz Epple, Mikael Hård, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger & Volker Roelcke (NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin)
• Steven French (Metascience)
• Willem Hackmann (Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society)
• Bosse Holmqvist (Lychnos)
• Paul Farber (Journal of the History of Biology)
• Mary Fissell & Randall Packard (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
• Robert Fox (Notes & Records of the Royal Society)
• Jim Good (History of the Human Sciences)
• Michael Hoskin (Journal for the History of Astronomy)
• Ian Inkster (History of Technology)
• Marina Frasca Spada (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science)
• Nick Jardine (Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
• Trevor Levere (Annals of Science)
• Bernard Lightman (Isis)
• Christoph Lathy (Early Science and Medicine)
• Michael Lynch (Social Studies of Science)
• Stephen McCluskey & Clive Ruggles (Archaeostronomy: the Journal of Astronomy in Culture)
• Peter Morris (Ambix)
• E. Charles Nelson (Archives of Natural History)
• Ian Nicholson (Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences)
• Iwan Rhys Morus (History of Science)
• John Rigden & Roger H Stuewer (Physics in Perspective)
• Simon Schaffer (British Journal for the History of Science)
• Paul Unschuld (Sudhoffs Archiv)
• Peter Weingart (Minerva)
• Stefan Zamecki (Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki)

In other words, almost all journal editors in one of the central and established fields of the humanities clearly distance themselves from the ongoing European bureaucratic scientometric project.

Next year is 50 years since C. P. Snow delivered his famous lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, suggesting that as cultured citizens we need to know as much about the second law of thermodynamics as the plays of Shakespeare.

To celebrate this event, and to raise the question whether Snow’s notion has any relevance today, Science Museum and Tate Modern are organizing a two-day event on the theme ‘Art and Science Now: The Two Cultures in Question’:

In a world of increasing disciplinary specialisation in which there has been exponential growth of sub-disciplines in both science and the humanities, it will also ask whether the distinctions between and indeed within the two cultures might have become further entrenched. The most fundamental question this celebration of 50 years since Snow’s lecture will ask, though, is how the terms of the debate may have changed.

There will be an academic conference at Science Museum on 23 January and a more public meeting at Tate Modern the day after. The Science Museum conference will consider questions such as:

• How have new technologies such as the internet and new resources like Wikipedia reconfigured our sense of disciplinary boundaries, hierarchies of knowledge and the places where cultural capital is held?
• Has the new dominance within general culture of ideas drawn from the ‘life sciences’ — molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry, ecology, epidemiology — and their unpredictable pressings upon fundamental questions of how and why humans and other organisms should find themselves and their relationships defined in particular ways, led to an ever more complex and porous boundary between science and the humanities?
• How are Snow’s notions of disciplinary and national cultures to be rethought through the paradigms and politics of globalisation?

Good questions, especially the second one. I guess you could say that parts of medicine has always been a meeting ground between science and the humanities.

If someone would like to present, then send a 200-word abstract by 1 November to Laura Salisbury, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, l.salisbury@bbk.ac.uk

Today’s most interesting medical history news is not that Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier have been awarded half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for ”their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus”. The interesting news is that Robert Gallo doesn’t share the prize, and that he is not even mentioned in the press release (only in the technical appendix).

In hindsight, both scientists and historians probably agree that the French group made the actual discovery of the virus which was later named HIV. Yet, Gallo and his group at NIH played a significant role both before and after the actual discovery, especially in determing the causative role of HIV for the development of AIDS. Asked about his reaction to the news, Gallo reportedly says it was ”a disappointment” not to be included.

I guess it’s very much a question of what is meant by ‘discovery’ and also which discovery we are talking about. Nobel’s will emphasized ‘discoveries’ (Swedish: ‘upptäckter’), which speaks in favour of awarding Barré-Sinoussi and Montaigner alone. On the other hand, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet could have chosen to award the establishment of HIV as a causative agent of AIDS rather than the discovery of the virus itself — in that case Gallo would probably not have been excluded (but then again Harald zur Hausen would not have been awarded for “his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer”, since only three people can be awarded each year).

Camilla’s post about Robert Wilson’s recent lecture at Stanford reminded me of David Pantalony’s essay in the July issue of the History of Science Society Newsletter:

Why does a control panel for a computer from 1950 attract several viewers in the architecture and design galleries of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, while similar objects rest unnoticed in storage rooms and science museums around the world?

Referring to Joshua Taylor’s Learning to Look (1981), David reminds us that we too often stop considering objects as soon as we have recognized them. Putting them in other surroundings (like the control panel in MOMA), however, makes it easier to reconsider them. Thus, the main challenge with recent technological artifacts, David points out, “is to prod researchers, the public, and students to move beyond recognition, and to stimulate alternative perspectives and inquiry”.

One way of doing this is to teach history classes about material history. David shares his experiences from teaching an artifact-based historical seminar for University of Otttawa students at the Canada Science and Technology Museum (where he works as a curator in physical sciences and medicine). He begins the artifact sessions´— which take place in the aisles of the storage facilities — by asking the students to examine the basic properties of the artifacts: ”materials, colors, finish, markings, modifications and manufacturing labels”, followed by questions about their history, design, and function. Then follows more analytical questions about the identity of objects and their aesthetic qualities, etc:

The key to this exercise is a careful and wide-ranging interrogation of artifacts. The more the students examine, the more questions appear. With persistent questions, they begin to transcend the traditional narratives determined by the artifact’s name and classification. They start thinking critically about specific features and how these features represent choices and context of makers and users. Where there is choice there is culture, context, and history. Why these kinds of markings? Why this construction? Why this style of container? Why this kind of component over another? Why this kind of material?

The cultural analysis of artifacts requires students to ask about “hidden beliefs, values, associations, and meaning”. They also learn to examine artifacts from a different culture, for example, contrasting Western post-war medical technology with healing artifacts from aboriginal cultures.

Not only are David’s experiences useful for curators in sci-tech-med museums — they are also an inspiration for those of us who try to integrate university teaching with museum work. Read the whole essay here.

PS: David sends a nod to the discussions on this blog about the use of MRI scanners in exhibitions; see Søren’s post here and Hans’ post here.

On 21 February 2009, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT, are organising a one-day graduate symposium that will explore ways in which art overlaps with science, and with a focus on material objects. Possible topics are:

• networks of artists and scientists
• artist/scientist collaborations
• art and the natural world
• the philosophical concept of the sublime
• theology, art, and science
• the influence of scientific discoveries on the arts
• artistic and scientific approaches to epistemology
• dialogues between art and science in the Enlightenment
• art, science, and education
• science museum displays
• scientific illustration
• travel accounts
• art and exploration
• amateur practice
• photography as science or art
• artistic and scientific concepts of truth

The organisers invite proposals for 25-minute papers across the arts and sciences. Abstracts of max. 300 words by October 14, 2008 to imogen.hart@yale.edu. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Read more here.

Kostas Arvanitis at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester, draws attention to the proliferation of museum blogs at the Manchester Museum. More and more members of staff are creating blogs “to reflect upon their own work, offer a glimpse of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ and invite people to voice their views about all these”.

Currently Manchester Museum staffers run seven: Egypt at the Manchester Museum, Lindon Man blog, Myths about Race, Our City blog, En-quire blog, Palaeomanchester and Frog blog. More might come.

As Kostas points out these are not part of the museum’s official website, but individual blogs, hosted on different platforms. Vice versa, visitors to the official website are invited to visit the staff blogs. In Kostas’ words, they open

‘new spaces’ where the Museum takes place; online spaces that escape the ‘digital walls’ of the official website of the Museum.

Kostas’ comment relates to the question about the relation between individual blogs and institutional communication that I raised in an earlier criticism of Batts, Anthis, and Smith’s paper on bridging the gap between blogs and academia. In other words, the issue here is not ‘blogs vs. website’. It’s not a question of platform. What’s at stake is individual vs. institutional online presence.

Would be interesting to see how other museums have solved the balance. For example, the staff at the National Museum of Health and Medicine run a joint private blog (A Repository for Bottled Monsters) which, as far as I can see, isn’t acknowledged on the museum’s official website. And here at Medical Museion we are currently runnng two joint staff blogs: this one in English and Museionblog in Danish, but maybe some staff members wish to start on their own — in that case I guess we would link to these from the official website.

Yesterday the acclaimed director, stage designer, performer, writer, furniture designer and draftsman, Robert Wilson gave a presidential lecture at Stanford University. With equal parts performance, show and lecture Wilson told about his life and his art: ‘My theater is, in some ways, really closer to animal behavior. When a however stalks a bird his whole body is listening …. He’s not listening with his ears, with his head, it’s the whole body. The eyes are listening’. Wilson said that he tried to work with parallel universes in his art: the side scenes shall not illustrate the text, but speak their own ‘language’. Mime and movement shall not illustrate the lines, but form their own terms. How would an exhibition look like, if the objects did not merely illustrated the (textual based) points of the curators, but worked on their own? It would probably be a language of colors, forms, repetitions, weights, surfaces, lenghts, materials, qualities, etc. In the exhibition ‘Anna didn’t come home that night,’ which was shown at The Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen in 1996, Wilson himself gave an example of such kind of ’thing-language’. In one room for example some of the museum’s finest crystal glass were set up as menacing cones in a bowling alley. Their delicate frailty was so overwhelming that I had to stop myself from trying to rescue them. The crystal glasses were no longer just a beautiful sight. Their fragility crept into my body. Could our upcoming exhibitions on the biomedical world also reveal the plasticity of plastic, the weight of an MRI scanner or the perishableness of disposables? Is it possible to feel what it is?

Our high season for visitors is week 42, when Danish school children have a week off. If the weather is bad, this is particularly good for our visitor statistics, so we are looking forward to some heavy autumn rain storms that will drive hundreds, nay thousands, of young visitors to our museum.

In week 42 we are open every day between 11am and 5pm. The 7-12 year old can attend special roundtrips in the museum at 11am to see how broken legs were treated in the ”good old days”, what a dentist’s clinic looked like around the turn of the last century, etc. Our student docents will show skulls and bones and other body parts and tell somewhat uncanny stories about our bodies.

Grown-ups can attend special guided tours at 12.30, 1.30, 2.30 and 3.30pm. Take this opportunity to see Oldetopia before it closes.

(adopted from Bente’s post on our Danish blog, Museionblog)

Good news for all friends of sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard (see earlier post here), and for all fans of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) in Culver City — Jacob has just given a sold-out performance of his inner-ear sound work ‘Labyrinthitis’ in the MJT’s Tula Tea Room. Read Jacob’s impressions from the MJT here. The Athanasius Kircher connection is obvious! Not only does the MJT have a permanent exhibition about ”the last Renaissance man”, he has also been a great inspiration to Jacob’s sound works. Another example of how Renaissance and early modern culture connects with contemporary concerns.