Biomedicine on Display

The NSU Press is planning to publish an anthology about “Things” — not about “things” in general, but about “the pursuit of filtering away human experience from the thing — possibly to give it back to the world, or to let it speak for itself”, or, in other words, “all attempts at omitting human experience for the sake of things” (see below). Here is their call for abstracts:
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The current issue of leading U.S. weekly newspaper The Onion carries a groundbreaking feature article on the upcoming season for transplant organ harvest
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Finn Kamper Jørgensen, direktør for Statens Institut for Folkesundhed, har taget initiativ til en temadag den 7. juni om “Sundhedspolitiske erindringer fra min ministertid”, hvor otte danske sundhedsministre og en departmentschef fortæller erindringer fra deres embedstid. 40 minutter hver. Det er en interessant seminarform, på grænsefladen mellem mundtlig politikerselvbiografi og “vidneseminar” (witness seminar), som vil kunne give interessante meldinger, om ikke andet en række vidnesbyrd om, hvad en minister kan tillade sig at sige i dag, mange år senere, om hvad det skete den gang, de befandt sig i begivenhedernes centrum. Og sundhedsministre har, som bekendt, tit været ude i stormvejr. Her er programmet for temadagen:
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A good seminar idea worth emulating: post-graduate students in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science (Cambridge) have a joint seminar where they present their research based on objects from the collections of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. In today’s seminar, Friday 19 May (why do they always announce these events so late?) the following will present their object-research projects:
- Melanie Keene, ‘Every boy & girl a scientist’: instruments for children in inter-war Britain
- Sophia Davis, The pocket electronic calculator in advertising: touching numbers
- Salim Al-Gailani, Twentieth century toy chemistry sets: Cultures of magic, science and masculinity
- Margaret Olszewski, Papier-mâché flowers, fruits and seeds: the botanical models of Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux.

A 1-day-conference on biobank governance is held at University of Vienna’s political science department, organized by the interdisciplinary research platform “Life-Science-Governance” (LSG): “Biobank Governance in Comparative Perspective: Strategies – Ethics – Resistance”

This is from their announcement:

This interdisciplinary conference focuses on the governance of biobanks. Biobanks constitute a new challenge for governance, and can themselves be understood as new forms of governing bodies and populations. Biobanks are an important element in the new biopolitical order in which self-guidance through active citizens is as significant as state-led strategies of population politics, body monitoring, the rise of the new bio-economy, and the redefinition of citizenship. Continue Reading »

A forthcoming symposium — “The making up of organisms: Mapping the future of biological models and theories”, which will be held 8-10 June 2006 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris — illustrates the fascinating possibilities for mobilising the history, philosophy and social studies of biology and medicine for more future-oriented studies and as a conversation partner in the theoretical development of biology and medicine. It is organised by Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques in Paris (part of the CNRS-complex) who have invited an impressive array of historians and philosophers of STM etc. to speak about the history-philosophy-biomedicine -future interface. Quote from the symposium website:
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Udstillingsmediet er jo meget mangfoldigt og kan derfor bruges i mange forskellige sammenhænge. Fx. den kombinerede konference og udstilling om nanoteknologi, som Innovation Lab arrangerer i Århus den 1. juni i samarbejde med iNano centret på Aarhus Universitet og det danske nanoteknologiske netværk (NaNet).

Mødet plus udstillingen (”Smallscapes”) er tilrettelagt for skandinaviske virksomheder, der ønsker at vide mere om nanoteknologiske muligheder. Der kommer ti ind- og udenlandske foredragsholdere og en håndfuld danske virksomhedsledere, der vil fortælle om deres erfaringer og visioner for teknologien. Og som sagt laver de også en udstilling. Det man kan læse om udstillingen på deres hjemmeside er ret ukonkret, men det ville være interessant at se den: dels fordi det ikke præcis er overproduktion af udstillinger om nutidig biomedicin, dels for at se om Innovation Lab kan skabe noget mere innovativt end en ordinær salgsudstillingspavillon á la Bella Center.

Good news for historians of medicine, viz., we are now having free online access to back issues of a number of biomedical journals at http://www.pubmedcentral.gov

Here’s a excerpt from the press release from Wellcome Trust:
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The Max Planck Research Network “History of Scientific Objects” Wandering Seminar has just finished a week’s intensive course at the Medical Museion.

The group — 16 pre- and postdocs from a number of European universities (plus Harvard) — came to Copenhagen after a week at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

We (i.e., Anders, Camilla, Hanne, Ion, Jan Eric, Sniff, Susanne, Søren and myself) gave them a full four days program (see details here), which included presentations of our research and curatorial projects — on the recent history of kidney transplantions, on the minipig as research animal, on the visualisation of epidemiology, on the recent history of microarray technology, on multiple practices in handling the foetus, and on cybersurgery — demonstrations of the collections, and round-table discussions about issues such as: the notion of the ‘curious’ in the display of recent biomedical objects; scientific ’subjects’ and queer theory; the challenges of non-tangible scientific objects for museums displays; and problems in acquiring recent scientific objects, etc. We probably learned as much from the discussions as the wanderers learned from our presentations. Mutual inspiration at its best!

Now the group has left us for Cambridge (UK), where they will spend a couple of days at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, before continuing to the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, the Science Museum in London and several other interesting places in Europe, where they will meet many more historians and curators interested in the material history of science, technology and medicine.

Gigabytes of photos were taken. Some of them will appear below a.s.a. the participants have found out how to put them They are beginning to appear now in our user-area on flickr and we publish them as soon as the appear, like this one (you can see many more if you click on the title of this post and then go to the bottom of the page and click “2″):

(Participants in Max Planck Research Network “History of Scientific Objects” Wandering Seminar, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, 8 – 12 May 2006 + some of the Medical Museion staff. For better resolution: click the title of this post, go to the bottom of the page, click “2″)

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A symposium with the titillating title “Historicide and reiteration” (and the more pedestrian subtitle “Innovation in the sciences, humanities and the arts”) will be held 9-10 February, 2007 at Maastricht University (nice town, worth a visit!). The meeting promises to touch upon some rather fundamental topics for science, technology and medical history museums. The dead-line for submission of abstracts is next week — i.e., Monday 15 May is extended to 1 June 2006, so hurry up! (They don’t seem to have a website yet, or I haven’t looked closely enough). Anyway, here’s the cfp-text:

“Unlike art, science destroys its own past”, or so Thomas Kuhn argued in his ‘Comment on the Relations of Science and Art’ (”The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change”, 1977, 340-351, p.345). In the arts, older works continue to play a vital and formative role in contemporary innovations. In the sciences, however, out of date theories and practices are generally thought to have no use whatsoever to the development of new insights: science continually destroys its own past. Hence, museums are crucial to art (but not to science), while five-year-old books become obsolete in science (but certainly not in literature). Poetical and aesthetic themes, motifs and representational strategies are forever undead, it seems, ready to reappear on the cultural scene at any time.
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I sidste nummer af Weekendavisen (nr. 18, 5. – 10. maj, Ideer, s.9) gengiver Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen og Henry Nielsen de argumenter imod en naturvidenskabelig kanon, som bla. Helge Kragh og undertegnede udviklede i et temanummer af tidskriftet BioZoom for en måned siden.

Men selv om det på overfladen ser ud som om Nielsen & Nielsen køber argumenterne imod naturvidenskabelige kanoner, så kan de alligevel ikke holde deres sti ren. For de ender alligevel med at hævde, at der er gode grunde til, at kanonisere danske videnskabelige helte som fx Niels Bohr og seismologen Inge Lehmann.

Hvorfor denne slinger i argumentvalsen?
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If you are in London on Thursday 25 May, you’re invited to attend my talk at the South Kensington Institute for the history of Technology (which is a collaborative enterprise of the Science Museum and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College), titled “Microarray Technology and Regimes of Biopower: a Problem for Museology”.
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The Universeum network annual meetings gather people working in university owned museums. The next Universeum meeting is held in Strasbourg 22-24 June, 2006. Contact Sebastien Soubiran, Mission culture scientifique et technique de l’Université Louis Pasteur, 7 rue de l’Université, 67000 Strasbourg, France (Sebastien.Soubiran@adm-ulp.u-strasbg.fr) for further info.
Program:
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Remember Ivan Illich, the heckler of modern institutions? He was quite well-known in the 1970’s and 1980’s for his severe criticism of modern education (Deschooling society, 1971), and for his analysis of the problems of the medical institutions, especially the hospital system. In Medical Nemesis (1976) he suggested that the greatest threat to human health was in fact the medical establishment itself (i.e., iatrogenic disease).

(Courtesy: Amazon.com)

At the time Illich was never really taken seriously by the academic community, but his thoughts have formed a sort of subtext to much of critical history of medicine in the last decades. Maybe it is time to re-read Illich’s work in the present biomedical and postgenomic era, which sometimes seems to be characterized more by economic and bureaucratic rationality than by a disinterested search for scientific ‘truth’ or for the ‘authentic’ care of the patient.
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Ingemar Nilsson og Margareta Hallberg, Institutionen för idéhistoria och vetenskapsteori, Göteborgs Universitet

(Institutionen för idéhistoria och vetenskapsteori, Göteborgs Universitet)

planlægger en konference på temaet “Samtidshistorisk medicinhistoria” mandag den 23. oktober 2006. De vil have forslag til præsentationer senest den 31. august (titel + kort abstract). Sendes til ingemar.nilsson@hum.gu.se
(Nærmere detaljer kommer nok på dette website senere under sommeren)