Biomedicine on Display

What is blogging about? Is it just another form of web publishing? Letters to the editor by other means? An electronic speakers’ corner? Or what? The pre-announcement of Michael Keren, Blogosphere: The New Political Arena (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2007), suggests that it is a form of “terrorism”:
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MEDICINHISTORISK SEMINAR I LUND
Fredag d. 8. december 2006 kl. 13.00-16.00
Sted: Sal F-1, Blocket, Universitetssjukhuset, Lund.
Kaffe serveras.
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Kidney transplantation are one of the most spectacular and controversial treatments in recent biomedicine. The history of kidney transplantation is one of the area studies within the framework of the “Recent Danish Biomedicine”-project at Medical Museion. In order to include not only written sources and archival material in this study we have invited ten medical doctors to participate in a witness seminar on the subject.
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Another on-line exhibition — “Visible Proofs - Forensic Views of the Body” — produced by the National Library of Medicine is much more impressive. It is almost as reluctant to use hyperlinks as “From ‘Monsters’¨to Modern Medical Miracles” (see my earlier review here), but the curators have made some serious efforts to use the web-medium optimally. The images are fascinating. It can be seen IRL on the first floor of the NLM (on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md) until 16 February 2008.

The National Library of Medicine has just launched an on-line exhibiton about conjoined (’Siamese’) twins called “From ‘Monsters’ to Modern Medical Miracles“. It contains a number of fine images from the 15h century to the present, with short accompanying texts, based on a careful selection of the most autoritative primary and secondary sources.

Yet I’m not that impressed, because it is far from using the potential of the medium. After all, the strength of web-based exhibitions, compared to IRL exhibitions, is the possibility of using hypertext links. This NLM product does not even make use of internal links to its own bibliography. One has to guess which image is taken from which source.

“From ‘Monsters’ to Modern Medical Miracles” sustains my general impression that libraries are good at finding books and images, but often poor web-designers. Please, send it back to the web curator and ask him/her to revise it!

DeWitt Stetten, Jr., Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health seeks to encourage historical research and writing about biomedical sciences and technology by providing a postdoctoral fellow, at the beginning stages of the professional career, with a year’s research experience in residence at the Office of NIH History.
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A notice in the September issue of the Economist, reminds us of the impact of biotechnology on contemporary culture. With the global spread of genetic information and steadily falling prices on computers and other hardware devices, biotech is finding new user groups among biology graduates and computer aficionados who turn their living rooms into veritable dry labs and carry out experiments in silico. Basic biotechnological aid is already out there on the web, check websites like www.dnahack.com, and magazines such as Biotech Hobbyist, report on amateur attempts at creating skin-tissue cultures and cloning trees. Seen from a historical viewpoint, the emergence of biotech hobbyists is not surprising. As the amalgamation of two revolutions, the scientific and the industrial, once gave rise to amateur scientists in redingotes, toy steam engines and chemistry chests, so is the networked society and biomedicine, providing amateurs with the means to conduct biotechnical investigations on their own. Hobby anatomists are already dissecting the human body virtually and kids can map the DNA in the form of games such as Discovery DNA Explorer. What will come next? Toy PET-scanners, the teeny-weeny laparoscope or the youngsters portable biobank?

Her er en tilbageblik på et studieforløb fra en af de medicinstuderende, som hvert år skriver opgaver på Medicinsk Museion. Mikkel Myatt skrev sin OSVAL II-opgave (en 8 ugers skriftlig opgave på lægestudiets 10 – 12. semester) om ”Psykiatriens historie fra 1970’erne til i dag – oplæg til en udstilling”. Ideen var at undersøge hvilken slags genstande, billeder og dokumenter der vil kunne indsamles fra psykiatriske afdelinger, hvis man vil give et billede af psykiatriens nutidshistorie, som jo i høj grad er præget af den såkaldte ’psykofarmakologiske revolution’.
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After trying some of the free online English-English dictionaries on the net I’ve concluded that the one I like best is Free Dictionary. Maybe because you can hear many words in a ‘real’ (?) voice recording, an excellent feature for all of us who want to know how useful words like armamentarium and anthropomorphize are pronounced in standard American English. (But why not Australian or Scottish voices? I would have loved to hear some Sean Connery-sound-alike pronounce ‘armamentarium’.) Has anybody found another good English-English dictionary?

How shall we relate to ‘reality’ of the recent biomedical past? Is there a ‘real’ past or a narratively constructed past? And which past is most ‘real’? Or is the concept ‘real’ out of of question here? Fredric Jameson indirectly makes a nice point with reference to Hegelian dialectics in his recent review (in the last issue of London Review of Books, 7 September 2006, p.7) of Slavoj Zizek’s The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2006) when he says that

There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all.

The argument, as transferred to the problem of historical past, then goes:
1) ‘thesis’: there used to be a stupid stereotype about the ‘past’, namely that it appears as ‘real’.
2) ‘antithesis’: then new historicist ingenious corrction is that the underlying reality/essence of history is that it is a non-essentialist cultural construct
3) ’synthesis’: finally, after all, we return to the reality of the appearance, which is: what the historical past appears like, (i.e., real) was true after all.

A reading group/PhD course with the title “Towards a New Materialism? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine”, is starting next month in Copenhagen and Lund.

The seminar is arranged by the History of Technology Division at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, and the Research Policy Institute at Lund University. Here is the announcement:
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Remember Michael Crichton’s science fiction thriller Prey (2002)? In which the bad guys created swarms of nanorobots, and the good guy lost his wife (but saved his kids) in his struggle to counter the swarms that left their secret lab environment somewhere in the Nevada desert to start replicating in a Darwinian fashion and thus potentially threatening to take over the earth. The book had no special literary qualities, but it was efficiently narrated, and too close to real biology to be dismissed as pure fiction.
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(Denne post var oprindeligt publiceret den 16. august, men er genopslået, pga den debat som har udfoldet sig i mellemtiden, se kommentarerne)

Invitation til stiftende generalforsamling i faglig forening for STS i Danmark, 16. november 2006. Tema: Bredden og synligheden i dansk STS

Science and Technology Studies er et internationalt, multidisciplinært felt, som er i rivende udvikling. Mange danske forskere og forskningsmiljøer beskæftiger sig med STS og STS-relaterede emner. Der er mange gode eksempler på formelt og uformelt samarbejde blandt danske STS-forskere, men med den støt voksende interesse og den stadig bredere anvendelse af STS i Danmark, er der basis for at etablere et nyt forum.
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Her er programmet for afholdte Museion-seminarer fra december 2005 og frem.
Seminarer inkl. evt. abstracts og materiale flyttes til denne side, når de er afholdt.
For abstracts, klik på side 2
(for tidligere seminarprogrammer, se her)
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Contested categories, 2nd Annual Symposium of the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network, 14-17 January 2007, hosted by the Medical Museion, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

The symposium will focus on how the recent biosciences challenge and reconfigure formerly stable categories: The social and the biological, the nature/culture dichotomy and the human/animal boundaries are increasingly blurred and become populated by hybrids, cyborgs and boundary objects. New material objects, visual and virtual representations produced and circulated in biomedicine and biotechnology challenge and disrupt the analytical categories of the historiographical and social studies of science. The new categories emerging in this empirical field of the biosciences raise a host of questions:
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