Biomedicine on Display

As far as I can remember, my academic life has been a constant oscillation between grant applications and research evaluations. Now again. Tuesday we had a four hour long meeting with the Novo Nordisk Foundation reference group who commented on a 22 page report of the “Biomedicine on Display” project (which took at least a week to complete).

And now I’m working 18 hours a day to finish the pre-application for a new project, tentatively called “Material and Visual Culture of Contemporary Biomedicine” – deadline is tomorrow at 4pm!  So, not much sleep tonight — and no blog posts, except for this one. Added 30 nov: Finished the pre-application 18 minutes before dead-line. I guess there are probably 500 or more applicants to this 6th round of applications to the Danish National Research Foundation. Cross your fingers!

A recent post on this blog about the PRECARD risk assessment software sparked a number of comments on how to handle the problem of software in museum collections. Almost by default, software becomes outdated, and it will quickly become very expensive and time-consuming (or outright impossible) to maintain it in working order. Attitudes towards this problem ranged from refraining from the collection of software and opting in stead for manuals or other documents, that will give an impression of what the software could do and looked like, to either forcing doners into providing software in a format that will allow it to be stored in working order for extended periods of time or relying upon enthusiats providing their time and skill to keep the stuff running in a bottom-up effort.

I find it very difficult to make a decision on this point. Nevertheless, decisions need to be made, simply because the dilemma of the centrality of computers to virtually every aspect of (say) recent biomedicine and the short-lived and fragile nature of computer software confronts us and will do so increasingly in the future. We thus face a major museological problem. Let me provide a concrete example of what I think may be seen as a paradigmatic case.

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Most science, technology and medicine today originates in ’Empire’, not in ‘Multitude‘. But there are interesting exceptions, for example The 2nd annual Maker Faire in the Bay Area in May, which seems to have been a feast for bottom-up inventive science and technology geeks — if you can trust this video (from Quest).

Make-zine described the Maker Faire as a “science fair, with beer”. Quest wrote:

It’s been called “Burning Man for science geeks.” The annual Maker Faire attracts thousands of amateur inventors and scientists, displaying their home-made prototypes and gadget hacks. In a world where the technological race is speeding up, the Maker movement has revealed that the do-it-yourself culture is in no danger of dying out.

Apparently not the boring standard ‘public understanding of science’ kind of event, but a truly sci&tech popular movement occasion. A sort of sci&tech of the ‘Multitude‘ pace Michael Hardt and Toni Negri.

But — most of the DIY things in the first two Maker Fairs seem to have been based on classical physical science and engineering. No biomedicine or biotech.

It makes me wonder (again) if there is any DIY-biotech movement out there? Where are the Steve Jobs of postgenomics fiddling around with recombinant technology and protein sequencers?

I shortly discussed the future possibilities of “garage biotech and medicine” with Steve Kurtz when he was in Copenhagen in early September. He suggested that the limiting factor for a DIY biotech and biomedicine movement is the costs of the reagents. In other words, it is not the complexity of the protocols, or the hardware, or the lack of ambitions that set the limits, but the fact that the reagents used, for example in basic recombinant technology, are so expensive that happy amateurs cannot afford them.

Is Steve really right? Does anyone have a price list at hand? Or are there other, and less pedestrian, reasons for the lack of biotech and biomedicine stands on the Maker Fair?

More on transplantation: The release of Google Body — “a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet” — has just been announced. The new service is said to include “a fuzzy-logic ‘match my organ’ feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor for multiple organ systems”.

From FutureFeedForward (via Erik/Mymarkup), reflecting the ever-growing nervousness around the expanding Google empire – now also stretching into the medical field (cf. their interest in 23andMe).

Besides this future-dated report from 2022, there are rumours around that Google will in fact launch (a less ambitious, I suppose :-) Google Body in 2008-09. Can someone substantiate this?

Apropos our own Søren Bak-Jensen’s article “To share or not to share: institutional exchange of cadaver kidneys in Denmark” (forthcoming in Medical History in January) — there is also a more satirical side to the history of contemporary transplantation, as you can see on this recent Today Now! morning show in The Onion’s online edition.

Sometimes I’m in doubt whether The Onion’s mockumentaries, -news and -shows are actually real programmes copied directly from Fox News or some other channel of the same ilk.

I’m waiting for someone to write a Begriffsgeschichte of the contemporary biomedical discourse.

The most recent Begriff-candidate on my list is ’nanomedicine‘. The field’s pioneer, Robert A. Freitas, used the term ‘medical nanotechnology’ in a paper in 1998; a year later, the shorthand ’nanomedicine’ appeared for the first time in a scientific article; and the same year (1999) Landes Bioscience started publishing a nanomedical book series with Freitas as its main editor.

Now ‘nanomedicine‘ is all over the place: the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine was started by Elsevier in 2005; the year after came Nanomedicine, and in March 2007 the European Science Foundation (ESF) published their authoritative report on the future prospects of the field.

It’s high time for historians of ideas to get involved in an analysis of the variegated and rapidly changing contemporary biomedical and biotechnological disciplinary discourses. Why are so many historians focussing on, say, 18th and 19th century political discourses when there are so many important biopolitical discourses emerging around us right now?

At the Medical Museion, we have continuing discussion about how to handle the intangible (unhandable?) yet still material elements of recent biomedicine (genes, molecules, proteins, reagents etc.) in a museum setting. How to display what cannot be perceived? Sadly, my recent field trip to the Medica 2007 medical fair did not provide much in the way of an answer to this challenge.

Not that the intangibles of recent biomedicin were not represented at the fair. Dozens of companies advertise their product range of reagents for chemical analysis. And with the booming industry of ready-to-use lateral flow immunoassays, there is no shortage of antibody-producing companies either.

Yet how do these companies display their products? Well, as can be seen from the images below, most of the time they don’t.

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During the last two months, readers of The Scientist have nominated 60 life science laboratory web sites for the monthly magazine’s ‘Laboratory and Video Web Site Awards’. A group of judges have evaluated the nominated sites according to four criteria (design, usability, content and community) and shortlisted 10 of them. And now it’s the readers’ turn, again — to vote for the best site. Read more here.

It’s like parliamentary elections. I will vote, of course. Some sites are quite good, others turn me off. But even more interesting — from a humanities scholar’s point of view — is the voting and award event itself, because it reflects something pretty fundamental about what is going on in the world of biomed/biotech/life sciences these days, viz., the race for web visibility and the competition for recognition among scientists and labs.

Visibility on PubMed is apparently not enough any more to guarantee labs a net flow of grant money. Of course, a steady output of peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals is still a basic prerequisite for funding — but on top of that you seem to need to a strong web presence as well.

So The Scientist’s lab site award is not just a parlour game or beauty contest. It indicates that web presence is about to become a sine qua non in the world of biomedicine and biotech too. Do astrophysicists need web presence?

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin announces two 2-year postdoctoral fellowships associated to the Research Network “History of Scientific Objects”, beginning May 2008. For more details, see http://scientificobjects.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de or contact Hannah Lund (hlund@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). Dead-line is 1 January 2008. 

I spent a few days last week trying to keep my head above water at the 39th Medica Fair held at the Düsseldorf Messe Centre. With more than 4300 companies exhibiting their products to around 137000 visitors, Medica is the world’s largest medical fair and allows close inspection of (literally) everything from hospital ventilation systems over chemical analyzers to band aids.

The purpose of my visit was two-fold. First, how do medicotechnical companies display their products, set up exhibits, and breathe attractiveness into instruments, software, and utensils that they wish to sell; second, how, in terms of design and marketing, do exhibitors differentiate their particular products from those of compeeting companies. To my defense, it should be noted that I actually tried to pursue these two goals with some degree of perseverance. But to be honest, a lot of the time I was simply drawn in by the magnitude of the event, the endless number of objects on display, and the range of different products that somehow come together under the heading of modern medicine.

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Speaking of our recently opened exhibition Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing — Antje Kampf at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz is one of the organisers of an interdisciplinary conference titled ‘(Re)constructing the Aging Body: Western Medical Cultures and Gender 1600–2000′, 26-28 September, 2008.

With an ever growing proportion of elderly people in many Western societies and modern medicine promising to prolong life and well-being, the aging body has become an increasingly common image in current society. ‘Anti-aging’ has become a popular movement for promoting activity, mobility and life-style choice instead of conventionally held stereotypes of decline and decrepitude. Current theoretical contributions argue that the aging body cannot completely be reduced to culture and stand up for a materialistic deconstructionist perspective considering the elderly’s experiences and the interaction of mind, body and society. It is the meaning attached to gendered aging bodies by medical cultures that needs further investigation. Uncovering the meanings attached to, the knowledge produced of, and the processes inherent to gendered aging bodies in the past and in contemporary Western societies requires an interdisciplinary approach.

Much more info on www.aging-body.com. Deadline for 300 word abstracts is 7 January, 2008 (or mail to antje.kampf@uni-mainz.de).

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are looking for a full-time archivist in the Office of NIH History who shall maintain the documentary and artifact collections at the Office and the Stetten Museum, including more than 30,000 prints and photographs, 2,000 instruments and artifacts, 400 books, and 1,500 feet of documents and audiovisuals. Some of the collections are used in exhibits around the huge NIH campus. Salary: $66,767.00+. Applications before 23 November. See more here.

Yet another nearly missed conference: the Design Research Group (Anna Moran, Sorcha O’Brien and Ciáran Swan) are organising a one-day conference titled “Love Objects: Engaging Material Culture” on the relationships between people and their objects, to be hosted by the Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 14 February 2008. Dead-line for papers was last Friday – but maybe one can attend without a contributed paper?

Here is the aim of the conference:

The relationship between people and their objects is a complex and multifaceted one, which is continually negotiated between the material and the immaterial. Objects are used as tokens of affection, symbolic gestures and statements of devotion and can be represented, employed and appropriated in a multitude of ways. They carry out important roles in our relationships with each other, either as bearers of significance, or through embodiment, engagement or control. The seductive quality of objects can also mediate our relationships with them, as they engage our emotions in both subliminal and visceral ways. In doing so they facilitate the projection and subversion of identities, and the creation of the contexts in which they operate.

This is obviously very significant for any sci/tech/med museum, including our own medical collecting and display work — every single topic and theme vibrates of relevance:

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In an earlier post I discussed the Silicon Valley web-based genetic information up-start company 23andMe as an example of converging technologies.

23andMe and its public-engagement-with-genetics based business idea is the subject of a long and interesting feature article by Thomas Goetz in today’s Wired Magazine. 23andMe is now offering customers to scan their DNA for just $999 (by SNP genotyping from individual saliva samples with the help of the Illumina HumanHap550+ BeadChip).

The Wired-article raises a plethora of issues concerning the formation of ‘biocitizenship‘, or, to use a neologism, rather bio-consumership — that is, the convergence between bioinformatics, business, and the public engagement with science.

Goetz relates a meeting in September when Avey and Wojcicki invited their board of scientific advisers to review the website before it was launched. Much of the discussion circled around the question of how much they would have to teach their customers about genetics to enable them to understand the business offering. They ended with a compromise: “letting the genetics hobbyist geek out on the details while giving the novice a minimum of information”.

As Goetz writes, a web-based, customer-oriented bioinformatics company is not like Flickr or Facebook:

There’s nothing intuitive about navigating your genome; it requires not just a new vocabulary but also a new conception of personhood […] There’s a massive amount of information to comprehend and fears to allay before customers will feel comfortable with the day-to-day utility of the site.

23andMe’s solution to the public-engagement-with-genetics problem is to offer a rather rich menu of FAQs together with some basic animated tutorials (e.g., here and here) that explain the basic principles of genetics.

It will be fascinating to follow 23andMe.  I guess several other companies will soon follow along the same bio-consumership road.

(The Wired-article also includes a videochat with 23andMe co-founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki who explain “how they’re helping people make sense of their genetic information”, but Goetz’s text is much more informative.)

Twice a year the Danish museum community comes together for a two-day meeting at the Fuglsø Conference Center, strategically placed between Copenhagen and Aarhus. The 2007 autumn meeting last Wednesday through Friday gathered 500+ participants, and quite a few of them attended the Thursday morning session on “Science, medicine and technology as culture”, organised by Karin Tybjerg (formerly HPS, Cambridge, now Head of the Dept of Astronomy at Kroppedal Museum outside Copenhagen).

I had expected an audience of twenty or so, but to my surprise there were at least 75 people in the room

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