Biomedicine on Display

One of the central features of museums is that they are venues for the visitors’ emotional confrontation with the past. Material objects add a new affective and aesthetic dimension to the relation between spectator and ‘representations’ of the past which can be described in terms like ’authenticity’, ‘presence’ and ‘lived experience’. Those interested in such problems of historiography and museology may want to take a trip to Cambridge (UK) on 21 March to participate in a meeting on ‘Re-enactment History and Affective Knowing’ organised by Peter de Bolla and Simon Schaffer.

The last decade has witnessed the growth of a new kind of academic historical inquiry, re-enactment history. This inquiry has something in common with older traditions of historical empathy, approaches familiar from debates about history teaching in schools and about the appropriate ways of dealing with and exploiting national heritage. But in these newer approaches historians do not only seek imaginatively to enter the minds of historical agents but rather to act out the past so as to know it better. This enterprise raises fascinating questions about affect or emotion, currently topics of great interest in related fields in intellectual history, philosophy, aesthetics, cognitive science and the human sciences: it has even been suggested that a new branch of knowledge may be appearing, called by some the affective sciences. This conference will contribute to this growing field by discussing the conceptual structure of the historical modes of understanding based in affective experience. Speakers will discuss the kinds of knowledge involved in re-enactment history and explore the relations between memory and re-enactment. They will ask how a simulation can produce new knowledge and how notions of lived experience and authenticity work their effects here. Key areas where re-enactment history have been put to work, such as histories of experimental and field sciences, within museums, and in the media, will be addressed by participants. A group of internationally distinguished historians and literary scholars has been invited to present papers, each of around twenty minutes. There will be ample time for discussion and debate.

Speakers include John Brewer, Jim Chandler, Elizabeth Edwards (University of the Arts), Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt), Iain McCalman (Australian National University), Vanessa Agnew (Michigan) Otto Sibum (MPI Berlin), Jim Secord (Cambridge), Alison Winter (Chicago), and Mark Phillips (Carleton). For more info check out CRASSH’s website.

Reminder: the dead-line for abstracts to the “Science & Public”-conference at Imperial College, London (19 May 2007) is next Thursday, 1 March. Write to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com . For earlier announcement, see here.

Susanne’s recent comment to Søren’s post on the collection of MRI scanners a few weeks ago raises an important question about the ‘aesthetics of decay’. I.e., how do we handle incomplete, pillaged, delapidated etc. machines and machine parts, or as Susanne puts it: ’ruins’? There is a lot of discussion about ’the aesthetics of decay’ and a lot of photo material to illustrate it, e.g. this image that I found on Google Pictures, titled ‘rusted ambition’ — taken from this webpage: http://photos.revjim.net/decay/dsc_1036_r).

The ‘aesthetics of decay’ is not limited to machines. When Ion, Sniff and I were visiting the Tornblad Institute in Lund a couple of months ago to evaluate the scientific and cultural historical value of their embryo collection, we were utterly fascinated by a shelf filled with broken jars and glasses with embryos in different stages of decay (drying-out) etc., and we immediately thought of collecting, preserving (how do you preserve something that is a state of decay — do you stop the decay process, or do you let it continue?), and displaying it.

So I think such ‘medical ruins’ are potentially very fascinating objects. Should we reconsider the pillaged MRI scanner we were offered? And in case, how far should we go in collecting such decaying machines and bodies?

The discussion of decaying museum objects feeds into the topic of ‘biotrash’ and ‘bio garbage’ that Julie Kent, Naomi Pfeffer and Sarah Hodges are organising a meeting about in Warwick in two weeks from now, see program here.

The Danish electronic research database has decided to co-operate with Google Scholar, The national universities are continually feeding the DEFF data base which is then automatically updated to Google Scholar. A small step in the direction of balancing the bias towards US/UK science and scholarship which, among others, the head of Bibliotheque National de France complained about a couple of years ago.

The Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation and the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick are inviting to a one-day workshop on “Health, Governance and the Global: Cultural Histories and Contemporary Practices” on 9 March, 2007.

Increasingly, the ‘global’ has become an ever-more regularly invoked term—both in popular anxieties about health (such as SARS or Avian ‘flu) as well as in the world of public policy. What has been less clear, however, is what exactly the object of governance is in the ‘global governance of health’. Is it a set of regulations? Is it bodily practices of individuals or groups? Or, is it the bio-health phenomena themselves? Finally, what is the relationship in the global governance of health between the governance of commerce, on the one hand, and the governance of infection, on the other? This one-day interdisciplinary workshop seeks to begin to map out the practical and epistemological terrain produced by the global governance of health—both as a set of contemporary practices, as well as their historical antecedents.

Program includes:

• Julie Kent, University of Western England & Naomi Pfeffer, London Metropolitan University: ‘Regulation and governance of the collection and use of fetal stem cells in the UK’
• Julie Kent & Naomi Pfeffer, ‘The debut of the fetal cadaver’
• Dan O’Connor, Warwick, “This Shit”: Abjection, Horror and Biotrash
• Sarah Hodges, Warwick, ‘Biotrash: The Global Traffic in Medical Garbage in a Post-Genomic Age’
• Mohan Rao, Jawaharlal Nehru University, ‘Roshomon’s Truth: NGOs and the Health Sector in India
• Sophie Harman, Manchester, ‘Contemporary Practice, Old Rules: Understanding the World Bank’s role in shaping the HIV/AIDS response through a Historical Institutionalist lens’

For further information, contact Sarah Hodges (s.hodges@warwick.ac.uk).

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in collaboration with the Branco Weiss fellowship “Society-in-Science”  is inviting to a workshop in Berlin on March 1-4 (organizers: Christina Brandt, MPIWG Berlin, and Giuseppe Testa, IEO Milan):   

This workshop is intended to further an interdisciplinary and international discussion on historical, cultural, social and philosophical issues of cloning and stem cell research. Hardly any other research field has evoked such controversies during the last years. In contrast to the vivid ethical debates, there are so far only a few contributions to the history of cloning and stem cell research. Thus, we will pay particular attention to elucidating historical aspects. Not only does the concept of the “clone” itself have a very multiplicitous yet unexplored history since the beginning of the 20th century, but the different trajectories of cloning research practices, their scientific contexts as well as politics, are just as poorly understood from a historical perspective. By analyzing cloning and stem cell research against the background of 20th-century life sciences, the overall aim of the workshop is to arrive at a better understanding of today´s research practices and concepts as well as the debates and politics related to them.               (Thanks to: Christina Brandt) 

For more information, s. http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/workshops/en/cloning.html

For a preliminary programme: Continue Reading »

Wait a second … Dad? Is that you dancing there?

This 20-minute long educational video “Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level”, was made in 1971, and has since become a classic to generations of high-school and college science students.The dance event was filmed on an open field at Stanford University. Most of the dancers are ordinary biology students while a few are trained dancers. The narrator is the later Nobel prize winner in chemistry Paul Berg (1980), who explains the protein synthesis in a short prologue that also introduces the “collective players”, including a 30s ribosome, mRNA, and an initiator factor. Enjoy — and remember this in 26 years ago!
The comments that follow the YouTube release are almost as interesting as the video itself, ranging from amused fascination to outrage and disgust (some people just seem to hate anything that has the slightest association with the hippie generation). I think it is worthwhile viewing it as a document of “biomedicine on display” in the very far past.

Thanks to Benny Thaibert at bit2b we have now got our new design. Hopefully the blog is much more functional now. The big issue was the wallpaper: some suggested a yellowish grandma pattern, others hated the whole idea about wallpaper, so this was the compromise: a hardline biomed-iconic pattern (microarray analysis repeat pattern = sort of symbolises translational medicine). Enjoy or dispise, but remember — everything can be changed, even this blog design.

The New Media department of the Science Museum started a blog called “Science Museum Dev” (short for development, I guess) last July to spread news “about some of the work we do, developing websites and interactive exhibits for one of the most famous museums in the world”. Unfortunately they haven’t updated it since November — please keep up the good spirit: we’d like to know more about what’s happening on the media front on Exhibition Road.

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research funds a Summer School course on ethical, legal and social aspects of nanobiotechnology and nano-medicine, which will be held by the Centre for Bioethics, Muenster University, 21 - 28 September 2007 in Muenster.

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The Museum of Science of the University of Lisbon will host the next Universeum Meeting (www.universeum.de), 6-8 July, 2007.

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The organizers of the International Committee for the History of Technology’s 34th Symposium in Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-18 August 2007 are extending the deadline for proposals until 15 March 2007. The theme of the symposium is “Fashioning Technology: Design from Imagination to Practice” — which, by default, also includes the fashioning and design of medical technologies.

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Pillcam chic

Whether one has undergone a gastrointestinal examination or not, most of us would agree that there’s nothing particularly cool about having your stomach examined by means of long tubes. Rather, we tend to find such exams unpleasant, distressing and embarrassing, not to mention what we think of the close-ups of our exposed bowels. However, thanks to capsule endoscopy, gastroenterology may be on the verge of becoming hip. At least that’s the message behind this advertising video for the next generation of pill cameras. Catchy disco, smart graphics and laid-back instructions, makes it hard to believe that the pill camera actually is modelled on the missile technology that was used in the Persian Gulf War. Okay, it’s plain to see that images of flying missiles and ruined cities won’t promote medical technology. But it’s just as evident that all the fleshy parts – malignant outgrowths, inner bleedings, inflammations etc. – have been deliberately left out. In this slick version, capsule endoscopy is presented as a lifestyle product, something to go along with your new espresso machine, flat screen or other wearable computing.

We (that is, the “Biomedicine on Display” group) were invited to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, Monday January 31, to give a minisymposium on our project (see program here). Here is the travel party, i.e., the research group plus our department administrator plus our department’s outreach officer, after arrival at Arlanda airport:

From left to right: Søren Bak-Jensen (curator), Jan Eric Olsén (postdoc), Camilla Mordhorst (asst. prof; head of exhibitions), Sniff Nexø (postdoc), Susanne Bauer (postdoc), Bente Vinge Pedersen (outreach officer), Stine Skipper (administrator), Thomas Söderqvist (professor; head of group), and Hanne Jessen (PhD scholar). Photo: anonymous traveller.

The audience was an assorted group of historians of science, technology and medicine from the regional universitites and the Nobel Museum, a group of public understanding of science scholars from Gothenburg, and a single participant from the Science Museum in London, who was apparently sent out to do some friendly intellectual espionage.

After the two-hour presentation the audience was engaged in a one-hour long discussion about the challenges in representing contemporary medicine in a museum context today. All in all it was a great experience to present all sub-projects in one single package. Definitely worth trying again. Next stop Washington, DC? Thanks Eva Åhrén and Svante Lindqvist and all the other staff at the Nobel Museum (Eva, Ulrika, Aron etc.) for your hospitality and the fine arrangements.

Jim Spadaccini, director of Ideum, has created a special search engine (a Google Co-op) for museum blogs. Try it here.