Biomedicine on Display

The awe-inspiringly active philosopher Graham Harman recently wrote a blog post on Thomas Metzinger’s book The Ego Tunnel, in which the author interviews neurophysiologist Wolf Singer. Metzinger asks Singer why he is interested in philosophy, to which he replies that he believes neurophysiology can solve the problems of philosophy.

This view — that the neuroscience will soon scientifically settle once and for all the questions of consciousness, culture and meaning — is surprisingly common in today’s overhyped neuro-culture and is a problem all on its own. But there is another issue in Singer’s view, which has to do with the role that he assigns to philosophy — and even to the humanities more generally — which is that of an ethics department. The argument goes that the neurosciences produce a lot of “profound ethical issues”, which will require ethical debate.

Thus, the old stomping grounds of the humanities — culture and meaning — are being overtaken by the new neuro-overlords, who claim to be able to explain these phenomena scientifically, and the tiny reservation given to the humanities is that of ethics.

But we should not so readily herd ourselves into this encampment. Observing that human phenomena have neural correlates or that our actions have evolutionary roots do nothing to place them in our lives, in the felt experience of the world. To counter this extensive neuro-reductionism, we need, I think, a new material existentialism. Philosophers and cultural theorists never should have accepted the role of primarily engaging with culture and meaning. As Harman says, we “have to get out there and deal with the stones, trees, dust, and sunlight, or we are going to end up as Wolf Singer’s ethics panel.” We have to reacquire the material world as a subject of study and reassemble our position in it.

In a museum setting, this reacquiring and reassembling is done quite literally. Employing a materialist perspective in the museum means not focusing so intently on what scientific developments might ‘mean’ or what the possible (ethical) ‘consequences’ might be. Instead, we should openly embrace materialism and show the complex relations that objects and humans, as part of the same material spectrum, enter in to — a line of thinking that is currently being outlined in a number of philosophical works, such as Jane Bennets Vibrant Matter or Graham Harman’s The Prince of Networks. The object-based practices involved in museum activity offer a unique position from which to speak about the materiality of human existential experience. And what we can see from that unique vantage point is a field that cannot and should not be reduced to a discussion of possible ethical problems arising from the ‘real’ work of neuroscientists.

In August, the Danish Initiative for Science, Society and Policy (ISSP) will arrange a ‘discussion of the broader implications of living technology’ that might be interesting to anyone who thinks the boundary between inorganic and organic, living and dead, or technology and humans is exciting. Or to anyone who wants to get a glimpse of the future of science and medicine, maybe?

As the organisers write on their webpage:

Today, genetically modified organisms are designed and used in the laboratory to allow pharmaceuticals to be synthesized with precision in large quantities; autonomously working robots acting on the same principles thought to underlie insect behavior are increasingly introduced not only in industrial production but also healthcare; and adaptive network traffic controllers are currently being developed to control the flow of the ‘arteries’ of working life.

I first wondered at the scale of this technology — is this ‘just’ another word for nano-technology or are we talking robots of the more impressive kind (in terms of size)? And is it then robots like the robotic seal used for Alzheimer’s patients or something more science fiction-like, as the picture above, taken from the ISSP website, implies? The answer, according to ISSP, is that it is all of this:

Three examples of living technology are synthetic biology attempts to make living systems from scratch in the laboratory, ICT systems exhibiting collective and swarm intelligence distributed across the world wide web, and robots currently cleaning our households, providing companions for the autistic, and the like.

The preliminary programme for the discussion does not seem to emphasise healthcare, though the need for “thinking through the implications” of this technology looks to me to be particularly important in this field. The concept of living technology might appear to be a contradiction in terms (just like ‘synthetic biology‘), but maybe it will become the next big thing in healthcare.

Erik has taken some great images of new library buildings around the world, “the last cathedrals built for a dying medium”.

Instead of saying that we investigate an object, we often use the verb ‘inspect’. According to my dictionary, the ‘in-’ prefix is an intensifier and the ‘-spect’ suffix is derived from the Latin verb specere, meaning ‘to look at’, ‘to see’.

To ‘inspect’ then is more than just seeing or looking at something. It means to look intensely, carefully and closely.

This is of course what museum curators do all the time when they get new objects into the collections. They look carefully at the objects and often document the inspection by means of photography (or drawing or painting).

But sometimes curators investigate objects through other senses than vision. For example, they may touch and smell the objects, sometimes deliberately, or at least accidentally in the course of looking at it. They may even taste it.

In these cases, the verb ‘inspect’ is obviously insufficient, even misleading. For example, when I handle or finger an object to investigate its texture, its temperature, its dry-/wetness and its soft-/hardness, I obviously don’t ‘inspect’ it. I may do so in parallel with the handling and fingering, but the primary activity (handling, fingering) is not covered by the verb ‘inspect’.

Speaking in terms of ‘inspection’ when one listens, touches, smells or tastes an object intensely and carefully is an instance of what is sometimes called the ‘hegemony of the visual’. The unique experience of other senses are reduced to that of vision.

What verbs can be used for listening, touch, smell or taste objects intensely?

My dictionary doesn’t have any intensified synonyms of any of these sensory activites. One has to use phrases like ‘intense smelling’, ‘attentive listening’, ‘intensive touching’.

‘Intense touching’ has unintended erotic rather than curatorial connotations. So what about ‘inhapt’ (from Greek hapto, I grasp; cf. haptics) as a straightly curatorial term?

‘Inhapt’ isn’t in the OED and is also a clumsy combination of Latin and Greek. But it’s new and sounds nice: “I’m going to inhapt the new collection of plastic syringes today”.

Founded in 2002, the Association for Medical Humanities (AMH) aims to promote, within the UK and the Republic of Ireland, the medical humanities in education, healthcare and research. It has links with the BMJ journal Medical Humanities and has organized annual academic conferences since 2003. Courses on Medical Humanities are increasing in the UK and can be found at University College London, Durham University, King’s College London, University of Aberdeen, University of Leicester, University of Glasgow, University of Bristol, Birkbeck College University of London, and University of Swansea.

On Monday 5th July the AMH 2010 conference titled ‘Humanities at the Cutting Edge: Conversations between surgery, pathology, the humanities & the arts’ opened in Truro, Cornwall, with an evening reception and talk. There were already two options, either attend a keynote talk by heart surgeon Francis Wells on his research into Leonardo da Vinci at the ‘Knowledge Spa’ Truro, or attend artist David Cotterrell’s keynote talk about medicine in conflicted spaces at Tate St Ives. I wanted to go to both.

After a plenary and coffee on Tuesday morning, presentations were split into workshops and papers. The choice was between two workshops and a dizzying array of 21 presentations grouped into three themes. Theme 1 was Surgery, pathology and identity; Theme 2 was The ‘pathological’ and the ‘normal’; and Theme 3 was Humanities and arts as health interventions. Each theme had two or three groups of three speakers in each group. So already before lunch on the Tuesday, 21 people had presented papers and two groups of people had run workshops.

Some of the interesting presentations I missed included art in hospitals, patient communication through theatre, the wonder of pathology and workshops on drawing the body and documentary filming of surgery. I listened to three very good papers in a group from Theme 3. After lunch I attended a useful practical workshop run by the editor of Medical Humanities and missed hearing any of the 18 papers presented that afternoon. On Wednesday the same problem occurred with two workshops running at the same time as 18 speakers’ presentations. The workshop I wished to attend the most ran at the same time as my presentation. It was about pop up surgical theatres and allowing surgeons not just to practise but to rehearse.

There were just too many parallel sessions, too many themes and groups within themes and simultaneous workshops. Some delegates gave presentations to empty rooms with no one else but the other two speakers present. At least people came to my talk. There were many interesting themes, viewpoints and areas of research but too many to hear.

At the plenary on Tuesday morning a psychiatrist presented research on coding and categorizing that was welcomed by medics and greeted with dismay by artists. Her method of labeling patients in distress using a process of narrative writing had the appearance of berating creativity and imagination by placing patients within a negative category of behaviour. Perhaps this is where the notion of subjectivity and adaptability to take into account the uniqueness of people in different situations may have helped.

However two papers given by medics saw creativity and subjectivity as positive. One, a mature graduating medical student discussed the tricky subject of finding cancer beautiful. Emotive and well researched it was fascinating to hear concerns from a medic that would usually be heard amongst artists. In another talk a GP discussed art being so important in his life he took a PG Cert in Fine Art and then an MA in medical humanities. He confessed to having spent years using a pseudonym and creating an underground comic depicting the dark humour and cruelty of his experiences in his surgery. Believing art to be a great way to express and communicate medical issues, he has left his job to become a full time artist. He recently organized the ‘Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels’ conference at UCL and runs a website dedicated to Graphic Medicine.

The best part for me was the Wednesday plenary presentation. This was a performance by Peggy Shaw, a cross dressing, lesbian grandmother in her sixties working in collaboration with the Clod Ensemble, three musicians playing violin, cello and keyboard. Her show, ‘Must: the inside story’, saw Peggy dressed in a man’s suit and intoning poetic dialogue, some in beat with the accompanying music about her body’s history and experiences. Her deep New York accent described her mother’s mental illness and treatments, her own experience of giving birth, and sensations of touch and significance of bones. She lyrically chanted and sometimes sang in front of screens depicting cells and X-rays and other medical imagery. Engaging and vulnerable I had not expected to find her performative method of description and exploration of the body so powerful and enjoyable.

The AMH 2010 conference gave an opportunity for disciplines across the breadth of medical humanities to meet and talk and importantly listen to research and work undertaken from within fields of surgery, visual arts, pathology, clinical practice, creative writing, poetry, history, sociology, philosophy and general practice. Sometimes this worked and sometimes there were slight clashes or moments of misunderstanding. Medical doctors and artists and writers expressed concerns. Some felt incapable of reading arts & humanities articles without adequate knowledge of the art cannon or knowledge of Heidegger for example. However, researchers and practitioners in arts & humanities have often had to immerse themselves in the language of medical articles and find out the meanings for themselves.

There were diverse practical workshops, a breadth of visual and literary arts on display and a wide range of academic papers. I really wanted to see more as the papers I saw were good and the people I spoke to where diverse and fascinating. I wish I hadn’t missed other presentations and workshops which also sounded really interesting.

In four earlier posts (# 1 here, #2 here, #3 here, and #4 here), I’ve argued for a more proactive practice with respect to the preservation of the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. The posts were provoked by Christian Sichau’s negative attitude (quoted here). There is no space for the new acquisitions, he claimed, and the exhibition curators receive all the museum money anyway. So forget about collecting.

I don’t agree. In my last post I made an argument for distributed curatorial expertise as a way of solving the space problem. Here I’ll argue for another way to overcome the space and resource problem, namely to strengthen the co-operation between museums across the European borders.

Sichau’s pessimistic view is quite understandable as long as museums think of themselves as regional or national actors. From this point of view, not even giants like Deutsches Museum, Science Museum in London, or the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., have the staff, time, and money to embark on systematic (or even systematically selective) collecting programs to cover all or most of the contemporary science, technology, and medicine. As long as they think of themselves as national actors, they will continue to have a space problem.

It’s not made easier by the fact that museums of science, technology, and medicine have very little tradition for working together on collections (except for occasional collaborative projects at the interpersonal level). Museums act as if they are international competitors rather than collaborators and as if each is in principle responsible for the preservation of the entire scientific, technological, and medical heritage.

So as long as you think in terms of a national museum, I guess it is quite difficult to avoid the kind defeatism that Sichau expresses (unless we develop very radical distributed collecting procedures, as outlined in the former post).

But if we think in European terms, the space problem would be more easy to overcome. Why shouldn’t we be able to establish a co-operative collecting program in which national and regional museums agree on how to divide the scientific, technological, and medical heritage between them? One museum specialising on, for example, biomedical laboratory equipment, another on solid state physics, a third on imaging technologies, and so forth. 

After all, there are plenty of historical precedents for doing this. Hundreds of local and regional collections of science, technology, and medicine all over Europe have, throughout the last couple of hundred years, developed rather specialised collections — for example, the collection of surgical instrument and medical instrument catalogues at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, or the collection of eighteenth and early nineteenth century pathological specimens in the Hunterian Museum in London.

True, there are so far no examples of national museums that have deliberately divided the collecting of the late twentieth century and contemporary science, technology, and medicine heritage among them. And admittedly, this is not an easy task. No museum, especially not a national museum, would probablty give up its ambitions to comprehensiveness easily. Even if they do not have the resources today to collect in a comprehensive way today, their ambition is still to cover everything (in some unforeseeable future when they get that precious extra storing space). Without binding agreements of co-operation, no museum will abstain from some areas of acquisitioning and let one of its national or regional competitors take over that particular domain of artefacts.

So to give chunks of the potential artefact acquisition spectrum away to other museums, be they national or regional, is not something that comes easily. Would Science Museum just abstain from collecting nanotechnological and nanomedical objects and let Deutsches Museum take over this burgeoning field? Would Medical Museion stop collecting artefacts from contemporary protein research even if we realised that another European museum maybe had better resources and a more skilled staff to do this?

There are also big administrative and logistic problems involved — how, for example, to develop a continuously updated prospective collection list of the enormous number of artefacts in fields like medical device technology, where a new patent is granted every hour or so?

Yet I believe these are problems that need to be overcome if the development of the contemporary scientific, technical and medical culture over the last decades shall not end on the garbage dumps. If we want to preserve more than infinitesimal parts of the contemporary scientific, technological, and medical heritage, we need to work out a co-operative collecting policy on the European level.

As this blog, among others, have claimed for some time, a ‘material turn’ is currently being added to the seemingly never-ending row of ’turns’ in the humanities and social sciences. An increasing number of scholars are switching their attention to materiality, material objects and material artefacts.

History, philosophy and social studies of science and technology are no exceptions. Forty years ago, the classic interest in the theoretical and conceptual development of science and technology was supplemented by studies of changing social practices; twenty years ago, studies of visualisation and images in science and technology came to the forefront; now, intellectual interest is increasingly invested in material objects.

If the notion of a ‘material turn’ in the history, philosophy and social studies of science and technology is supposed to be more than a superficial terminological redressing, however, it needs to take the material properties of objects ‘as such’ seriously. This is in fact more radical than it sounds. Because much of what has so far been understood as studies of material objects in science and technology has been by proxy only, i.e., textual description of objects or images of objects or, even worse, textual descriptions of images of objects.

Rarely, however, have the physical objects themselves been put into the center of immediate scholarly attention; furthermore, the emerging ubiquity of digitalised texts and images has added to the tendency of an ever-increasing de-centering material objects ‘as such’; it is only museum curators that have insisted on the direct handling and investigation of scientific and technological objects, unmediated by digital textualisation and visualisation.

Sherry Turkle is one of those scholars who does not want to reduce material objects to what is googlifiable. In a series of three small books, published on MIT Press (Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008), and The Inner History of Devices (2008), Turkle summarises decades of interest in her own and others’ emotional fascination with and attachment to objects (a fourth volume has been published as well, but I haven’t read it yet). She argues that we are way too distracted by our digital dreams and that we should instead pay more attention to developing our passionate relationship with material things, be they everyday, scientific or technological objects.

Not least for educational reasons. Turkle suggests we have gone too far in believing that digitalisation and simulations will help solve the crisis in science and technology education, and advocates interaction with pre-digital physical objects as an alternative route for recruiting science and technology students. Playing with real physical things rather than playing computer games.

To many, this may sound nostalgic, even reactionary. But Turkle is not a romantic anti-digitalisation freak. As professor in social studies of science and technology at MIT, having decades of research into computer interaction and internet identity behind her, Turkle is eminently placed to evaluate the pros and cons of interacting with scientific and technological objects via the screen versus by close-up and personal inspection.

Evocative Objects contains 34 short autobiographical essays by scientists, artists, designers and humanities scholars, who tell stories about how everyday, scientific and technological objects have been powerful companions in their daily life experience. For example, technology writer Annalee Newitz writes about her laptop (her “irreplaceable … brain prosthesis”) and philosopher Robert P. Crease pays homage to Foucault’s pendulum, what he calls a “deep object”: “a thing that “guides and disciplines curiosity and fascination into interaction and self-transformation”.

Turkle concludes that “we live our lives in the middle of things” and indicates that true cross-disciplinarity between scientists, philosophers and artists becomes possible by focusing on objects which makes us able “to find common ground in everyday experience”.

The major part of the second book in the series (Falling for Science) is devoted to 51 even shorter autobiographical essays written by Turkle’s MIT students over the last 25 years, spanning from everyday things like radios, stuffed bunnies and sand castles to lasers, computers and vacuum tubes. The former student writings are supplemented by eight essays by senior researchers and designers, who were asked to look back to their childhood years to identify an object of ultimate importance for their future careers.

The Inner History of Devices, finally, is collection of twelwe reports written by scholars associated with MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, led by Turkle. Based on interviews with people about how they feel about important objects, like prosthetic eyes, cardiac defibrillators and dialysis machines, they are seen by Turkle as ‘intimate ethnographies’ infused with the self-reflective “sensibilities of the clinician and the memoirist”.

Together these 100+ essays give a rich insight into the wide range of possibilities for how scientific, and especially technological, objects enter into our emotional lives and help us think. In Turkle’s understanding, objects bring together intellect and emotion: “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (Evocative Objects, p. 5).

By focusing on how scientists, engineers and designers engage concretely, personally and affectively with objects, Turkle introduces a healthy common-sensical approach to the ‘material turn’ in the history, philosophy and social studies of science and technology. She carries her assorted theoretical background (some French structuralism, some Piaget, a pinch of Freud, and especially Lacanian psychoanalytical thinking) lightly: The many concrete cases largely speak for themselves, giving the reader a feeling of being close to the authors’ actual cognitive and emotional experience.

I have two problems with these otherwise delightful and edifying collections. First, one of the consequences of Turkle’s psychoanalytic leanings is that the material objects tend to be reduced to mere props in the narrative unity of the subjects, whereas the particular materiality of the objects themselves tends to be under-examined. These books are then, slightly paradoxically, better at explaining the life of the inquiring mind than they are at examining the materiality of life.

Second — although I devoured the 900 pages in one long uninterrupted reading session — I ended asking myself whether the immediate experiential feel reflects the authors’ actual experiences or to what extent these are post hoc reconstructions. For example, in her essay ‘Microscope’ (Falling for Science, pp. 220-6), neurobiologist Susan Hockfield (presently MIT President) claims how, from early age, she “wanted to see inside things”, magnified them and took them apart. But I cannot see how this ‘memory’ gives the reader (or Hockfield herself) any clues to understanding her later scientific career. It’s either banal (what kid doesn’t like taking things apart to see what’s inside?) or a standard trope for scientific autobiographies (a neuromicroscopist ought to have such a childhood).

This points to a pervasive problem in the three volumes under review. Autobiographical memories and witness reports are notoriously unreliable. It’s difficult to say whether all these delightful stories about childhoods full of Lego bricks (the popular Danish toy bricks loom large in these retrospective accounts), bubbles, card decks and Atari computers stem from memories generated in childhood or whether they are the result of later fantasies, free associations and cultural expectations.

But maybe it doesn’t really matter. The question of their veracity doesn’t add or subtract to the charm and power of seduction inherent in these stories. So even if there weren’t any evocative objects in the childhoods of the authors of these essays, they and their editor have surely produced a great set of evocative stories, which may help historians of science and technology intensify the current ‘material turn’.

In three earlier posts (here, here and here), I’ve argued in favour of a more proactive acquisition practice with respect to the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage.

Against some curators who believe we need to restrict acquisitioning (for economic, space etc. reasons), I suggest that we should rather open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

Immediately, this sounds like an impossibility. All science, medical and technology museums have limited staff and resources. How could we ever dream of acquiring, keeping and managing the tsunami of images, documents and used artefacts that would arrive from the contemporary world of medicine?

The solution, as I see it, is to begin re-thinking museum acquisition and curating practices in terms of distributed curatorial expertise.

Distributed expertise is a variety of crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a Wired magazine article in 2006. Wikipedia defines it as a ‘‘distributed problem-solving and production model’’:

Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. […] Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Crowdsourcing is only one of many social technologies for participatory knowledge production that have emerged in recent years. In analogy to the notion of ‘web 2.0’, museologists like Nina Simon have coined the notion of ‘museum 2.0’. Simon’s idea is not primarily to employ social web media as tools in museum outreach, but rather to rethink the physical museum in terms of the conceptual apparatus of ‘web 2.0’; that is, a participatory museum, in analogy to the participatory web.

The ambitious task of museum 2.0 is to reconceptualise all activities of the museum — research, acquisitions, curating, exhibition making and other kinds of outreach — in terms of user participation, user creativity and distributed knowledge.

To think about the acquisitioning of scientific, technological, and medical artefacts in terms of museum 2.0 implies that everyone who deals, in his/her daily work, with objects which could become potential museum artefacts is a potential curator.

The goal for the participatory museum would be to transform such potential curators into active participants in the acquisition and curating of collections (I call it ‘crowd acquisitioning’).

Social technologies like distributing, curating, and crowd acquisitioning do not by themselves solve the space problem associated with the collecting of the contemporary scientific, technological and medical heritage. However, one of the implications of the participatory museum is that its collections do not necessarily have to be physically located in a central museum building. If curating and curators can be distributed, so can collections.

The idea of a distributed museum collection is not a central museum with peripheral repositories to which only professional curators have keys and access. It should rather be understood as a network of local collections. each managed by its local adjunct curator.

Most departments in most universities have their own small collections, sometimes just a small cupboard with a few objects kept for commemorative and nostalgic reasons. The governing role of the central museum vis-á-vis the distributed museum collection would then primarily be to offer advice in the form of guidelines for ‘best museum practice’ in acquisitions and curating.

To think in terms of a network of distributed museum collections not only promises to solve some of the problems with lack of storage space. It may also become a powerful instrument for raising the historical awareness and responsibility of practitioners-curators. Instead of employing more professional staff to collect, curate, and register artefacts in the central museum repository, scarce resources would be better used by training practitioner-curators to become gatekeepers that build relations between the museum and the rest of the university.

In this scenario — what would the role of the curator be? Instead of doing all the curatorial work themselves, professional museum curators would rather develop guidelines for how the network of distributed curators shall curate and preserve; the professionals would also distribute protocols for registration in a wiki-based central database; and, most importantly, they would spend much time and energy raising discussions among the practitioners of why the scientific, technological, and medical heritage is worth keeping and its role in the creation of cultural identity. In short, the main role of professional museum curators would be to build a distributed curatorial experience.

Much of this is hardly new. Many local and regional museums have worked along these lines long before the concept ‘museum 2.0’ was coined. Many science, technology, and medical museums once started as participatory collecting projects initiated by enthusiastic practitioners, who created small local collections, some of which still remain in the custody of departments and scientific societies.

Medical Museion is a case in point. Today the museum has one of Europe’s largest, richest, and most varied collections of medical artefacts of all kinds — but actually it once started as a private initiative by Copenhagen doctors on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Danish Medical Association (DADL) in 1907. Initially conceived as a collection of contemporary medical devices for a temporary show to commemorate the progress of medicine since the founding of DADL in 1857, the collection was made permanent and the museum continued to grow, largely thanks to the enthusiasm of the contributors, and it continued to do so for at least two or three generations.

Today, such participatory acquisition practices have largely been abolished. The progressive professionalisation in science, technical, and medical museums throughout the twentieth century has made such practices look amateurish and antiquated.

However, I believe it is time to rethink the advantage of bringing practitioners of science, technology, and medicine into more active roles in the work of acquisitioning and curating. Citizen-science projects such as fold.it and Galaxy Zoo are excellent examples of how this can be done in principle — although the specific features of museum knowledge production, that is, its material artefact, is an extra challenge to overcome (affter all museums cannot be run in the virtual space only).

I and my family made summer vacation plans quite some time ago, so I’m going to miss Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine’s swan-song conference titled ‘The Future of Medical History’, to be held at Goodenough College, London, 15-17 July.

The preliminary programme lists a long array of interesting papers. Those interested in displaying recent biomedical science display might for example be interested in hearing Sander Gilman speak on ”Representing Health and Illness: Thoughts for the 21st Century”,  Monica Green on ”Letting the Genome Out of the Bottle: On Creating Alliances Between Medical History and the Historicist Sciences”, Sammy Lee on “Where are the clones?: A brief history of human cloning” — and listen to Roger Cooter’s (autobiographical?) confession “Why Bother? So What?”

It’s hard to escape the impression that the humanities (including medical history, medical humanities, etc.) are living a wobbly existence, balancing on a fine line over the two abysses of social reductionism and biological reductionism. Are patients and their diseases social constructions or bags of biochemical reactions? Do these reductionist trends have any room left for the kind of books reviewed in the TLS ?

A forthcoming conference at the University of Copenhagen 16-17 September on ‘The Humanities Between Constructivism and Biologism’ will “explore the options for a coherent conception of Man as neither a mere biological species, nor a mere social construction. It is a conception of Man as both a producer and a product of history and culture, and thus as a shaper of himself”.

Not an entirely new or radical conception, I guess, but it deserves being repeated as an antidote to the two usual reductionisms (and I should remind the organisers that some women also feel they should be included in this coherent conception :-):

Humanistic studies as traditionally conducted are currently under pressure from two sides within academia itself: On one side, by a constructivist stance, which declares man to be a social construction. This robs the humanities of the natural focal point of their activities, the study of Man, and leaves them as an odd motley of disciplines with no unity and no shared vision. From the opposite side, the humanities are under pressure from evolutionary biology, which has no reservations about accepting the existence of such a thing as Man, who after all is a natural, biological species among others. In combination with affiliated approaches within neurophysiology and cognitive science, evolutionary psychology purports to explain every aspect of man’s behavior as a result of his genetic inheritance, as manifested in his brain and other cognitive apparatus. This leads to a heavily reductionist picture of man.

Speakers include: Ronald Schleifer (University of Oklahoma), Steve Fuller (University of Warwick), Robert Markley (University of Illinois), Nikolaj Zeuthen (University of Aarhus), Torben Kragh Grodal (University of Copenhagen), Finn Collin (University of Copenhagen), and Jan Faye (University of Copenhagen). Shall be interesting to see what position the unpredictable Steve Fuller will take on this!

No registration is needed. For complete programme and location, contact David Budtz Pedersen: davidp@hum.ku.dk

Travel guides and leisure sections in the newspapers regularly list museums you just “must” see. But I’ve never actually seen a list of museums that I’m supposed to be discouraged from visiting.

Until now — here’s one that covers “the most unnecessary museums in the United States”: 

The Museum of Bad Art: The justification for this one was thin at best when it launched in the early 1990s, but at this point, it’s safe to say that the Internet’s a much better repository of terrible and useless art. Why not use this building to showcase, you know, good stuff?
The Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health: Case in point: This website is devoted to the history of menstruation, for those who just can’t live another month without knowing what tampons were like in the 1940s. Totally random and completely unnecessary.
The Washington Banana Museum: It’s a museum. About bananas. Any money you spend getting here is money you deserved to lose.
Frank and Jane Clement Brick Museum: It’s literally rooms filled with old bricks. And just in case you want to pop in on a lark, it’s “by appointment only.” I guess brick fans are hardcore people.
The Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum: If you’ve ever wanted to see dead roaches posed in a variety of scenes and costumes, this is the place. Seriously, though: How is there a demand for this kind of thing?
Leila’s Hair Museum: Started by a former hairdresser, this Missouri museum is devoted to hair, and features rows and rows of hair wreaths in frames. More than a little creepy.
The Hammer Museum: I refuse to believe there are enough different types of hammer — you know, a stick with a weight on the end — to justify the existence of an entire museum dedicated to their history. There are more than 1,500 hammers on display at Alaska’s Hammer Museum, which is 1,499 more than you need to know about.
The Giant Shoe Museum: It’s not a giant museum of shoes; it’s a museum of giant shoes. Dedicated to oversized footwear, this oddball museum in Washington ranks as one of the most superfluous in the country.
Kansas Barbed Wire Museum: I am sure that the proprietors of this barbed wire museum are wonderful people, but there is no more unnecessary field trip for local schools than a day spent looking at old hunks of twisted metal.
National Mustard Museum: This Wisconsin museum has been around for a quarter century, during which time nothing about mustard has changed at all. It’s still yellow and made for hot dogs. That’s it.
Bergstrom-Mahler Museum: Don’t let the vaguely normal name fool you: This museum is devoted to paperweights of all shapes and sizes. Pretty? Sure, if that’s your thing. But a museum dedicated to hunks of glass and metal used on coffee tables is a bit much.

(Quoted from here).

Good idea. There must be many more around the world. But — on the other hand — what’s “unnecessary”? Some of these museums actually sound quite interesting. Full of curiosities. Curiosities themselves. So maybe this is the list of museums I’d really like to visit when I get to the US next time :-)

So please make our day — send us nominations for the most unnecessary science, technology and medical museum (globalwise).

Namely the new journal Philosophy & Technology, which “aims to publish the best research produced in all areas where philosophy and technology meet”.

The editors welcome “high-quality submissions, regardless of the tradition, school of thought or disciplinary background from which they derive”, etc.

The range of coverage is pretty broad and interdisciplinary — original approaches to classic problems in philosophy of technology, theories of technology, methods and concepts in technology, etc- — and particular attention is paid to new areas of philosophical interest:

such as nanotechnologies, medical, genetic and biotechnologies, neurotechnologies, information and communication technologies, AI and robotics, or the philosophy of engineering – and the philosophical discussion of issues such as environmental risks, globalization, security, or biological enhancements.

So all us who philosophise about medical technology, science communication and the aesthetics in museums now have a perfect outlet for our urge to publish in peer-reviewed journal in addition to this and other blogs.

Scientometrics is a Sword of Damocles hanging over anyone who wants to come to fame and fortune in the field of biomedicine. Coming of age (it’s exactly 50 years since Eugene Garfield started publishing Science Citation Index, now Web of Science), methodologies for the alleged quantitative measurement of ’scientific excellence’ have proliferated in the last decade — promoted by national science agencies who want to get knowledge value for tax money.

Nature magazine has just published a fairly balanced special issue on the phenomenon, its pros and cons (especially the cons), but also about the difficult trade-off between real, qualitative peer-review evaluation and the fact that the armamentarium of scientometrics after all is there to be used by science bureaucracies. See all the links to the editorial and feature articles here. 

One question that nobody seems to ask is: Why would a clever young man or woman today go into science with the risk of having such Swords of Damocles hanging over your head?

If I were an intelligent, creative high-school student today, and had the choice between an unsecure job in an increasingly tightly metrically regulated work culture (as science is turning into) and a career in a field where quantitative measures of performance are meaningless (like most of the arts in the wide sense), I would definitely chose the latter — even if it meant less conventional social status.

Is that why the smartest kids I meet all tend to be in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts?

We’d love to see a long meeting series under the title “How Matter Matters: Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in X Studies”, where X could be alternatively Science Studies, History of Science, History of Medicine, History of Technology, etc. But first out was ”Organization Studies” — to take place 16-18 June, 2011 on the Greek island Corfu. More info here.

Being invited to join a drawing workshop usually elicits one of two reactions. Either enthusiasm because the person likes to draw or they think the idea sounds interesting or different. The other response is to dismiss the idea completely.

This reaction seems to be prompted by two main preconceptions about drawing. The first is that it is arty or simplistic, a bit of fun so would have no relevance to other more serious research activities.

The other preconception seems to stem surprisingly from fear. ‘But I can’t draw’ or ‘I haven’t drawn for years’ come the plaintiff explanations for foregoing the chance to partake in any workshops. The fear of being seen to be unaccomplished at the seemingly simple yet daunting task of drawing has caused a surprising lack of takers to participate in the project. Yet the response to outcomes, to evidence of the activity of drawing offering a valid method of investigation, and to the activity itself once a person engages in the process is encouragingly positive.

So what is going wrong?

I think the answer is the ‘D’ word, as in the word ‘drawing.’ Drawing is both an outcome and an activity. It is probably most common upon hearing the word drawing to think of it as describing an accomplished object consisting of an artistic convergence of lines, marks and shapes that form something visual on a surface which can be recognized in some way as being what one thinks of in general terms as a drawing.

This ‘drawing’ is a noun. Perhaps less considered is the use of the word ‘drawing’ as a verb, the doing word, drawing as an action, an activity something to participate in. If the first definition, the noun, is the more prominent and the one that sticks in the mind of someone invited to participate, then the expectations that are associated with this noun come into play. These expectations of the outcome of drawing can be unrealistically huge. They tend to start with Leonardo da Vinci and work their way down.

So it seems that when I think I am asking someone to join in a drawing workshop, they think I am saying ‘come and try and draw like Leonardo da Vinci in front of your peers.’ I see the problem.

The workshops focus on drawing as a phenomenological activity. By this, I mean that the activity, the act of looking and drawing as you look at an object, forces you to engage more fully with the object. This takes time and means a relationship has to develop between the viewer and the object. The time allows more attention to be spent looking and drawing. More detail is observed, more things specific to the object become noticed and the experience becomes richer and more personal. Understanding of the object, as an object grows and by ‘drawing your way into understanding’ the encounter, new insights can be achieved. The object is experienced and understood more fully through the activity of drawing it.

But this whole process is a practical and tacit methodology. The skill of looking and ‘touching’ the object or ‘seeing’ it through the tip of the pencil is not always easy. It is one that is best explained by doing. It is a kinaesthetic activity where the information and knowledge gained comes through doing rather than from instruction. In this way, the act of drawing allows someone to participate in actively gaining their own information for themselves rather than passively receive information via information panels or verbal instruction etc.

Spending time drawing a closely observed object is not a hugely complicated idea. It is actually a very simple notion. To begin at the beginning, with the actual object before you and just look and record and interpret your experience of this as it occurs by drawing, is a very humble action. Yet it is one that is often overlooked. Maybe because it is so basic an idea it can be seen as less important than other methods. Technology moves forward and the type of images we are now able to produce through scientific imaging are incredible. But these are not images we as individuals can make. They require training, understanding of equipment, experience knowing how to decipher the shapes and colours created to formulate clear data. We can all however, look at something and make marks on a page with a pencil at the same time. The traditional technology of hand/eye coordination and observational skill combined with the action of moving a pencil across a surface is one that is sometimes seen as being too old fashioned, too boring and simple to warrant consideration. Yet when it is suggested, there is something about the process that causes some people to become anxious and back away.

The outcomes of the activity may vary depending on skill and practice but the phenomenological activity of drawing can offer a valid way for a viewer to engage with, investigate and gain insight into an object in a different way. If the ‘D’ word must be avoided, what can replace it? How can the activity of drawing be explained in terms of a practical valid alternative method for investigating and engaging with objects?