Biomedicine on Display

Jacob Kirkegaard has just finished the final preparations for his sound performance LABYRINTHITIS at Medical Museion in Copenhagen on Sunday at 6, 8 and 10 pm.

See this videoclip from the build-up phase last Monday.

Read more about the performance here. Free tickets on soundevent@mm.ku.dk

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us (Ecclesiastes 1: 9-10; from the King James Bible)

David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 is in many ways a splendid book. It has a clear and well-argued thesis, it reflects the author’s long research experience and command of the history of technology literature, and it is well-written and eminently readable for a non-specialist audience. In addition, much of its argument is as relevant for (medical) museum curators as it is for bookish historians of (medical) technology.

Consequently reviewers have been quite enthusiastic, for example Steve Shapin in The New Yorker (14 May) and Steven Yearley in the TLS (25 May; no link because the TLS is the stingiest culture magazine on earth, they never put a single fragment of content online for public use).

The idea is quite simple, and not entirely new (indeed Edgerton acknowledges that Svante Lindqvist, for one, has expressed similar ideas before, but only does so in a footnote). Criticising a traditional innovaton/invention-oriented history of technology, he shifts the perspective from novelties to the long durée of technological applications and use; this is part of a more general historiographical shift:

from the new to the old, the big to the small, the spectacular to the mundane, the masculine to the feminine, the rich to the poor” (p. xiv).

What’s historically significant then, in Edgerton’s view, is not how one damned new gimmick substitutes another over and over again, but how old technologies linger on and continue to play a significant social and cultural role long after they were innovations, not least in the less developed parts of the world. That’s ‘the shock of the old’.

It’s a sympathetic (but also very politically correct) approach, which can be read as a much needed antidote to a traditional innovation-oriented historiography. It is full of good and surprising examples, although it sometimes reads like a dead horse flogging exercise; after all, many social historians of technology over the years have said much that Edgerton would have difficulties to quarrel with. (Museum curators, on the other hand probably can learn more from reading it).

My major objection, however, is that Edgerton seems to undervalue the importance of a invention/innovation-driven historiography as a source of inspiration. In this he is not alone, of course. The anti-whig tradition in history of science, technology and medicine has generally been blind to the possibility that the critique of a history of innovation (and discovery and progress) may be a very innovative step for historians — but not necessarily useful for scientists, engineers and medical doctors.

If this is so, it opens up for an interesting metahistoriographical problem: If one applies Edgerton’s innovation- vs. use-oriented historiographical approach to historical scholarship itself, one will soon realise that almost all historians view their own practice in terms of historiographical innovation/innovation, but usually dismiss a user-perspective on historiography.

However, from a user-perspective (from the point of view of those who read history, for example scientists and engineeers) it would perhaps be as, and even more, relevant/useful to write a traditional innovation-oriented history? And maybe it is more useful because it stimulates the scientific/engineering imagination? While a user-oriented historiography easily becomes unimaginative, boring — and mundane.

But this book is neither unimaginative, boring or mundane. It’s a very masculine, rich and spectacular book. As the publisher’s jacket blurb points out: ”The Shock of the Old radically revises our understanding … [it] is a radical new way of thinking about history and technology”. So much for the possibility of a shock of the old historiography! The anonymous authors of the Ecclesiastes must be disappointed with David Edgerton!

(If you read Swedish, see also the short discusison about Edgerton’s book between Gustav Holmberg and myself on http://www.gustavholmberg.com/tomrum/2007/08/01/gammal-teknik-2)

The on-line Journal of Visualized Experiments (mentioned in an earlier post on this blog), was the first web-based service dedicated to visual demonstrations of experimental methods and protocols. It has been followed by others, for example, LabAction. Both were started by young lab people with little financial backing and both (especially LabAction) have a nice YouTube feel about them.

As a commentator in yesterday web-issue of The Scientist points out these sites so far have fairly few visitors (100-500 a day to their combined collection of 115 videos), compared to the many thousands of daily unique visitors to the Nature Protocols website. Nature Protocols don’t have so many videos on-line yet, but what they display is usually of high quality and resolution, as you can see from this mpg-file which shows how one removes nuclear material from a mouse oocyte. (There are many more here.)

Sites like these have been set up by scientists for scientists, like ordinary scientific journals. But they may soon begin to play a role in the formation of ‘biocitizenship’ (for a critical evaluation of the concept, see here). Right now most of these videos are technically too specialised, and they leave a lot of tacit knowledge and contextual information out. But I guess it’s only a question of time before other versions that are more relevant for a somewhat broader audience begin to circulate on the net and mix with millions of other videos – and thereby inject some ‘biotechmindedness’ into the web-savvy population. (Thanks to Mats for drawing my attention to the idea of ‘X-mindedness’.)

The Arts & Genomics Centre at Leiden University is announcing three-month bioartist-in-residence positions as part of a larger research programme called ‘Imagining Genomics: Introducing Visuality in the Genomics Debate’ which focusus on “the role of visual art in moral debates on genomics”. The results of the bioart-in-residence projects are planned to be displayed in the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, Naturalis. The application deadline is 1 September, i.e., already next week. For further details, see here.

I think this announcement is interesting for the way it connects visual art and moral debate. This is not an unproblematic connection. The use of art for moral arbitration has a troubled history indeed, and it would be interesting to hear further arguments for and against the use of art-works in contemporary moral discourse about biosociety. We will get ample opportunities for this at next week’s workshop on “Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context” here at Medical Museion, where several participants are working on related research projects.

(thanks to Ingeborg for drawing attention to the announcement)

I have to confess (blushingly) that I find this short, and very PIC, Onion News Network news item about the 100 year old neurosurgeon Carl Wainwright quite funny.

Probably because it (somehow obliquely) reminds me of this summer’s much belated but nevertheless extraordinary reading experience – Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, in which the major protagonist is a perfect neurosurgeon in his prime.

It also (and more embarassingly, I think) reminds me of our own temporary exhibition ‘Oldetopia’ that is scheduled to open on October 11, and which includes a series of 15 absolutely fantastic pictures of 100 year old Danish men and women made by artist Liv Carlé Mortensen. More about the exhibition in a later post — and hopefully, by then, I will be able to erase my inner images of Dr. Wainwright.

As usual when it comes to news from The Onion, one should listen to the story with a huge pinch of salt (as they say  ‘The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age’) but it may still have a lasting effect, I am afraid.

Friday 17 August, Danish Television Channel 2 (DR2) program Deadline aired an eight minutes interview with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard on occasion of the forthcoming premiere of his new sound work LABYRINTHITIS, commissioned by Medical Museion. See the interview here.

Read more about the performance on Sunday 2 September in an earlier blog post here.

In connection with the conference ‘Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body’ held Monday 3 September, Medical Museion has commissioned sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard to create a new work.

Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his listening ear inwards – to his own ear. By using specially developed listening equipment, he has captured the microactivity which the hair cells of the ear send out.

LABYRINTHITIS consists entirely of sounds generated in Jacob Kirkegaard’s own ears. Deep inside the cochlea there are thousands of microscopic hair cells functioning as sensory receptors. When sound enters the ear, they begin to vibrate in the watery liquid surrounding them, like underwater piano strings.

Thus, the hearing organ does not only receive sound. It also generates sound, just like an acoustic instrument. Some of the hair cells in the cochlea can change their shape to such an extent that they are enabled to move the basilar membrane and produce sound themselves.

These faint tones resemble the sound of a tinnitus – and they can be recorded with a microphone in the ear canal.

Jacob Kirkegaard employs the 1787 auditorium of Medical Museion as well as the audience for his composition: His listeners become part of an interactive concert as their own auditory organs respond to the tones played out into the auditorium. The room, at the same time, turns into one big resonant labyrinth of sound.

Jacob Kirkegaard LABYRINTHITIS

• Disorientation (Preludium)
• Vertigo (Canon)
• Nausea (Finale)

played on The Spiral Organ will be performed in Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, Copenhagen on Sunday 2 September 2007, at 6pm, 8pm and 10pm. Entrance is free, but seat reservations are necessary. Please write to soundevent@mm.ku.dk, indicating which of the three performances you prefer to attend.

For background information, please see http://www.ku.dk/satsning/biocampus/artandbiomedicine/sound_event_english.htm

(The news about Jacob’s performance have been registered by, among others, Networked Music Review, http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/07/30/live-stage-jacob-kirkegaard-copenhagen)

Just want to remind you all that we are arranging the public conference “Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body” here in Copenhagen on Monday 3 September, 10 am - 5 pm.

Confirmed speakers include

• Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London
• James Elkins, The Art Institute of Chicago
• Ben Fry, MIT Media Lab
• Wolfgang Knapp, Universität der Künste, Berlin
• Steve Kurtz, SUNY-Buffalo and Critical Art Ensemble
• Ingeborg Reichle, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
• Richard Wingate, UK Medical Research Council Centre, King’s College, London

For detailed program, including venue, titles and abstracts, see www.ku.dk/satsning/biocampus/artandbiomedicine

No registration necessary. For inquiries, contact Monica Lambert, mbl@mm.ku.dk

Lynn Morgan er professor ved Five College Program in Culture, Health and Science, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, USA. Hendes forskning inkluderer social studies of science, antropologiske studier i livets begyndelser og afslutninger, og udviklingens politiske økonomi (se også http://www.phdpubhealth.dk/Seminarserier/stf06/).

Lynn besøgte Museion i efteråret 2006 med oplægget ”Embryo in/formation: the construction of embryo subjectivity in mid-20th century America.” Abstract her. Nu er hun tilbage og holder oplæg ved et sundhedstjenesteforskningsseminar, d. 30. august kl. 15.15-17.00, Center for Sygdom og Samfund, KU, Øster Farimagsgade 5A, lokale 5.0.28.

Lynn er også gæstetaler ved festseminar i anledning af prof. Lene Kochs 60 års dag, med titlen Reassessing Sexy Issues: The Making of Embryos and Other Hybrids. Øvrige gæstetaler er Professor Nikolas Rose, UK; og Lecturer Nik Brown, UK. Festseminaret finder sted d. 31. august 2007 kl. 15 i lokale 1.1.18, ligeledes på Center for Sundhed og Samfund.

I love to discover new professional fields and knowledge-practices that I’ve never heard of before. Today Street Anatomy opened up the virtual door to one of them, viz., that of biocommunication and biovisualisation (formerly medical illustration).

I believe what these professionals do is of great significance for what we are trying to achieve in medical museums, including this humble institution, especially exhibitionwise.

Take for example The BioCommunications Association (BCA), which was founded as the Biological Photographic Association in 1931 and now has a much wider mission, i.e., to be an international association of media professionals who “create and use quality images in visual communications for teaching, documentation and presentations in the life sciences and medicine”. Thus the BCA includes people working with computer graphics, digital imaging, biophotography, videography, teleconferencing, scientific poster production, etc. — for the purpose of biological and medical communication (but it looks like the photographers are still setting the tone of their annual meetings).

They also have an annual competition (the BioImages Salon) with some great images among the finalists (unfortunately the images cannot be copied from the site; these guys are professionals: they know how to protect their IPRs).

Their link page is awesome — enough for a week’s browsing in this (to me) new and exciting professional field. When will there be time over?

Added: Is this a professional field in trouble, institutionwise? Penn’s Medical School decided in 2002 to close their department of Biomedical Communications (to the dismay of its former director). Maybe these are knowledge-practices and skills that are so widely used now that they cannot be confined to a special uni dept? Does anyone know?

One of our new blog siblings is Street Anatomy: Medicine + Art + Design, created in December 2006 by Vanessa Ruiz,

a graduate student in the Biomedical Visualization programme at the University of Illinois (Chicago) — this is the largest medical illustration program in the US, with their own Virtual Reality in Medicine lab. A kind of ‘medicine on display’ programme.

As Vanessa points out, most of us tend to have a rather dated understanding of what ‘medical illustration’ is. I, for one, always thought of medical illustrators as people who could handle a pencil and a water colour brush. Not anymore: “they use their artistic skills combined with technology to produce dynamic visualizations” in the form of illustrations, graphics, animations, 3D models etc. Partly to educate medical doctors and students, but also to encourage the public’s engagement with medicine: ”we persuade people to learn by engaging them with visual media that will educate them to take care of and maintain their bodies”.

Accordingly Vanessa’s blog is heavily illustrated – with a lot of stuff that medical museum curators could learn quite a few tricks from.

It will be exciting to learn more of what goes on in the field of medical illustration and biomedical visualisation. Does anyone know about other great sites in this field?

Just found a short, but updated and quite useful bibliography of cellular and molecular imaging books and articles from a history of science and STS perspective, compiled by Maura C. Flannery, a St. John’s University professor, who’s major research interest is the visual aspects of biology and the aesthetics of science. Even better, Maura also has a page with a number of useful links to cellular and molecular imaging websites. Browse and enjoy!

Medical blogs vary enormously with respect to quality, updating frequency, and aimed audience. Some are useful and interesting for medical museum curators. I believe Medgadget is one of them.

Founded in December 2004 (same month as this humble blog was born) by San Francisco anesthesiologist Michael Ostrovsky, it was announced as ”an independent on-line journal covering the latest medical gadgets and technologies, medical science, and the progress of the digital revolution in the healthcare industry”.

From the very beginning Ostrovsky and his team of editors and other contributors (who write 3-10 posts a day together) have invested a lot of enthusiasm in the project. In their own words, they have a passion for medical gadgets, constantly jotting down “snarky commentary on cool new gizmos”.

In other words, they are the true geek-peekers of the new medical technology world. But with a serious aim — they want to help medical professionals “make informed decisions based on objective analysis and honest editorial writing”.

Now they can add medical museum curators to the aimed audience list. Because many postings provide quite useful information for curators interested in collecting contemporary biomedicine, medical engineering and biotechnology. They identify all sorts of new medical objects, they provide background stories and they often contextualise them. And they almost always bring pictures of the items.

Medgadget doesn’t have any contemporary historical or museological ambitions (yet). But they are museologically quite useful — by default.

Genetics has become progressively important for medicine during the last 50 years – primarily for biomedical research, but also clinically. Consequently the history of genetics is bound to play an important role in the history of contemporary medicine, and historical studies of genetics in different varieties do in fact take up much of the shelf space in libraries of the history of medicine.

There are also a number of associations and networks of interest. One of these is the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN), founded in 2002 by medical geneticist Peter Harper at Prifysgol Caerdydd (Cardiff University), with the original aim to help preserve sources for the documentation of human/medical genetics, particularly in the UK.

In 2005 the GMHN received a three-year Wellcome Trust grant, primarily for “identifying and conserving key written records, including personal scientific records of workers, records of societies and institutions, and images”. In other words, basically to build up a history of human genetics archive. They are also actively promoting interviews with older medical geneticists in collaboration with the Oral History of Human Genetics Project. So far, however, they have not followed the advice from some of their foreign colleagues to add the acquisition of the material culture of genetics to the project aims. But this may come at a later stage, particularly if the Wellcome Trust prolongs the grant.

The third network meeting, organised by Toine Pieters (Amsterdam) will be held in Barcelona, 1-3 June 2008. Read more about it in the last GMHN Newsletter (#11) here.

Plato and Aristotle did it, Cicero did it, and many other classical authors too. Montaigne wrote a long essay on it, and Henry David Thoreau a whole book. Friendship is one of the perennial topics in the history of philosophical thought.

Some sociologists say that friendship relations have perhaps never been as strong as they are today, when individualism flourishes and traditional social institutions and solidarities have broken down, at least in Western societies.

Now, Western societies are also science-based societies — and science is an extremely individualist enterprise — ergo, one could expect friendship to be quite a pervasive kind of social relationship in science, technology and medicine, including biomedicine. In his autobiography (What Mad Pursuit, 1988) Francis Crick said that friendship was crucial for scientific collaboration: “certainly you have to be personal friends” (on p. 93).

Crick’s point is underlined by the ubiquitous references to friendship in book prefaces. In almost every book, in the humanities as well in the sciences, authors thank their colleagues and/or friends. And even if they may exaggerate, or include people they would never dream of having a really friendly relationship with, the ubiquity of the term ‘friend’ seem to reflect at least an widespread expectation that friendship in crucial for scholarship.

What has been written in history of science and science studies? The other day I searched through some of the standard book and article data bases (Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Google Scholar; and RLG’s Eureka for history of science) — and found almost nothing.

True, historians of science, technology and medicine have written quite a lot about concrete friendships, but I didn’t really find anything about friendship as a social or cultural category in the HoSTM- and STS-literature.

The only interesting item I did in fact find was one made in passing by veteran STS-scholar Evelyn Fox Keller who wrote in a memorial article to one of her old friends, mathematician Lee Segel, that in their case friendship came first: “work grew out of friendship, and gradually became the very medium of friendship” (E. F. Keller, “Science as a medium for friendship: How the Keller–Segel models came about”, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, vol. 68, 1033–1037, 2006; on p. 1034).

Maybe there is a rich literature on friendship in science that I have missed in this preliminary literature search? But it may also be the case that friendship has been overlooked among historians of STM and STS scholars.

Maybe the general opinion corresponds to the naïve idea expressed by F.J. Ayala that “scientists are inclined to transcend ideology, nationality, friendship, monetary interest and other prejudices when the mettle of scientific knowledge is at stake” (”On the scientific method, its practice and pitfalls”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, vol. 16, 205-240 1994).

That kind of naïvité has been surpassed when it comes to ideology, nationality and monetary interest, but may still be valid with respect to friendship. I don’t know. Does anyone have any good ideas?