Biomedicine on Display

Wish I were in Cambridge today! At 1pm, Nick Hopwood will speak about ”Anatomist holds model embryo: A marble portrait from 1900″ at the Natural History Cabinet’s bag lunch:

Embryo images have in the last few decades acquired extraordinary and controversial prominence in biomedicine and the wider culture. Yet an art work from a century ago can still surprise. In 1900 the Leipzig sculptor Carl Seffner made a marble bust of the anatomist Wilhelm His, the founder of modern human embryology, holding a model embryo in his right hand. Rather than straightforwardly signalling the subject’s achievements, the unusual accoutrement doubtless puzzled many viewers more than did the professor himself. The talk will discuss the design of this double portrait and reconstruct its display in art exhibitions and other settings. This should suggest some relations between embryology and portraiture and shed light on how the identities of embryologists and embryos have changed.

A wonderful item for any medical museum!

Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick (and sometime visitor to Copenhagen) is inviting everyone to participate in a cyberconference on the ‘emerging/converging technologies’ research agenda, i.e., the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science into a common interdisciplinary framework for the alleged betterment of the human condition.

The cyberconference — which is sponsored by the EU’s 6th FRP ( ‘Knowledge Politics and New Converging Technologies’ – will start on Monday, May 7. It is organized around a number of opening statements (see below), and a week later, Steve will intervene for ‘real time’ discussion, before the conference resumes for another week’s discussions.

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National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) History of Medicine Division has launched a new web exhibit called “Diseases of the Mind: Highlights of American Psychiatry Through 1900″. It covers the 18th and 19th centuries only and thus falls outside the period limit of his blog, but since web exhibits are always interesting to learn from I thought I would mention it anyway.

Unfortunately, however, there are not many positive lessons to draw from this site. The texts are factually okey and there are some well-chosen and evocative pictures from the library’s Images from the History of Medicine collection. But the historiography is traditional at best, and the site architecture is far from what one would expect from a 2007 web exhibit — there are no references to the history of psychiatry literature, there are are few internal links, but no external links, and overall the website reads like a pretty traditional introductory historical chapter to a psychiatry textbook.

In other words, this exhibit does not live up to the usual standards of NLM’s History of Medicine Division. Any other opinions on this?

The Nordic Network for Visual Social Science arranges its second conference in Stockholm October 25-27, 2007 (please note, dates have been corrected by the committee).

First announcement and call for papers and presentations (abstract submission before June 15)

The conference will be held during three days with a program combining

• Presentations by and meetings with Nordic and international scholars
• Workshops on subjects and questions central to visual studies
• Seminars where doctoral students and established scholars present visual research

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In a chapter titled “Primary suspects: reflections on autobiography and life stories in the history of molecular biology”, Rena Selya, lecturer in the Dept of History, UCLA, describes some of the challenges of writing biographies of contemporary scientists who have “a strong received history, complete with heroes, occasional villains and victims”. The chapter appears in The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography which the author of this humble blog post has edited for Ashgate (UK) and which hopefully will be in print next week.

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In the last issue of Nordisk Museologi (Journal of Nordic Museums and Museology), Kristian Hvidtfeldt Nielsen from the Steno Institute in Aarhus argues that science museums today are caught in a paradox.

On the one hand museums wish to establish two-way interactions with the public about science and its relations with culture and society in a mode-2 fashion, á la Gibbons et al. (1994) On the other hand, he says, science museums are often based on a mode-1 understanding of science, i.e., as academic, investigator-initiated and discipline-based knowledge production.

Nielsen finds this problematic, and — since he is apparently a supporter of mode-2 knowledge production — suggests that science museums ought to be recreated ”in interaction with similar transformation processes in the mode-2 society” (p. 40, my transl.) to emphasise the close interaction between science and society.

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I think the three-day symposium on presence and meaning cultures in museums held at the Medical Museion last week worked quite well. Jens Hauser’s seminar has already been reported here. Sepp Gumbrecht’s Wednesday guest lecture “Do Productions of Presence Yield a Presence Culture? A Retrospective” was attended by about 75 scholars and students who were treated with a 1hr45min impassioned tour-de-force by one of the most gifted lecturers in the humanities today.

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‘Systems biology‘ is the label of the new interdisciplinary field of study of organisms as integrated and interacting networks of genes, proteins and biochemical reactions. In an essay in the 8 February issue of Nature (vol 445, 2007), MIT historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller discussed the clash between a traditional physics and a traditional biology culture as they meet in this new scientific trading zone.

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Science Museum already has two educational websites: www.ingenious.org.uk and www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk. Now (as announced last Tuesday) they are going to build a new multimedia website based on their medical history collections aimed at high school and undergrad student (and the general public, of course).

The goal is to place images (supplemented by a series of interactive tools) of around 4,000 “interesting, sometimes beautiful but also occasionally macabre objects” online — objects that range ”from carefully decorated 16th century maiolica made for pharmacists to ingenious 20th century prosthetic devices to help soldiers damaged in the First World War”. Hopefully they will also put images of some contemporary biomedical objects online, even if these are usually much less macabre than some classical blood-and-gore objects.

The first batch of object images will go online in 2008 and the whole project (which is supported by the Wellcome Trust) will  hopefully be completed in 2011. Congratulations to the grant — we’re looking very much forward to see the final result, including some crisp images of gene chips and transgenic mice!

Jens Hauser’s seminar last Tuesday (17 April) was a very inspiring overview of the field of bioart as wet art. 

Based on a precirculated paper (’Observations on an art of growing importance: Towards a phenomenological approach to art involving biotechnology’) Jens developed his idea that bioart as wet art is a phenomenon of increasing re-materialization in art and that it needs to be analysed in its phenomenological oscillation between meaning effects and presence effects.

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As contemporary biomedicine — the use of molecular and digital biological and medical technologies — is coming of age, its pioneer practitioners are passing away. As a consequence ‘life writing’ (biography) becomes increasingly important as a genre for understanding its development and workings.

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Next week is a busy ’presence’ week at Medical Museion. As already announced we are arranging three public events — 1) a seminar with Paris-based author and curator Jens Hauser on Tuesday at 2pm; 2) a guest lecture with Sepp Gumbrecht, Stanford University on Wednesday at 3pm; and 3) the  workshop ’Making Sense or Sensing the Made’ on Thursday morning. For details, see here. We’ll be back with more details in the next couple of days.

Traditional Danish university freedom was severely restricted by a new university law introduced by the present conservative-liberal (in the European sense) government in 2003. A group of Copenhagen university professors are now opening up for blog discussions about the law and its consequences. The new blog was initiated last autumn by Curt Hansen, an associate professor in education, under the (slightly ironical?) name Professorvældet (’Professorial power’), but it was recently renamed Forskningsfrihet? (’Freedom of research?’) to strengthen its legitimacy as a serious forum for discussion of current issues in Danish university and research politics. (Frankly, I think I like the name Professorvældet better — in the long run irony is a better weapon against populist politics than seriousness.) Anyway, good luck!

Dutch medical science and technology studies scholars Annemarie Mol og Jeanette Pols are giving talks under the joint title ”Care in practice: notes about good and bad technologies” at Center for Health and Society, University of Copenhagen (Ø. Farimagsgade 5, CSS room 2.1.12) tomorrow, Thursday 12 April @ 3.15 PM. Annemarie Mol (Uni of Twente) is best known for The Body Multiple (2002); Jeanette Pols is postdoctoral researcher at Amsterdam Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam. The meeting is organised by Mette Nordahl Svendsen og Finn Diderichsen, Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

Heather Munro Prescott, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and author of A Doctor of Their Own: The History of Adolescent Medicine (Harvard University Press, 1998), is conducting a survey about women’s experiences in using emergency contraception (e.g., ‘the morning-after pill’) — information she will use to strengthen the patient perspective in a forthcoming book on emergency contraception. She writes:

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