Biomedicine on Display

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades?

I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s a topic for a serious research project and even a book. Instead I will take on a more preliminary task: I will try to reconstruct a handfull of ideal-typical rationalities for why STM-museum curators around the world are engaged in bringing art and the biomedical sciences together.

I hasten to add that I haven’t done any fieldwork, or asked curators to fill in any questionaires. The reconstructions that follow in the next couple of posts are based primarily on websites and occasional discussions, and especially on my own experiences as the director of Medical Museion in Copenhagen.

Sizewise, Medical Museion is somewhere between the Jurassic midgets and the contemporary Power giants. We are placed in an old 18th century palace-looking building (the former Royal Academy of Surgeons) in the Copenhagen inner city area, with approx 4000 square meters of storage, exhibition and office space. Our biggest asset, besides the building, is a huge collection of medicotechnical artefacts, wet specimens and hard human remains — actually one of the biggest collections in northern Europe — ranging from 18th century medical curiosities to 20th century everyday medical care objects. We believe we have a total of around 200.000 objects plus another 60.000 images.

Like many other similar medium-size traditional medical history museums around the world, our museum was – until recently, when it was still called the Medical History Museum at the University of Copenhagen – content with taking care of and displaying the old treasures. Some medical history museums are in fact still quite satisfied with such a role; they are not interested in becoming engaged with the rapidly changing biomedical landscape, i.e, all these revolutionary things that are happening on the interface between postgenomic cell biology, pharma production, medical technology, biotech industry and computer science. It’s a messy world, so I think it’s perfectly legitimate (and probably even quite wise) to stay away from it.

But we decided to jump on the life science bandwagon, to engage with the hurly-burly of the contemporary life science world. So in the last four-five years we have turned both our research efforts, our acquisitions of new artefacts, and our temporary exhibitions towards investigating and displaying contemporary developments in the biomedical field. And a few years ago, a private Danish research foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, decided that this approach was worthwhile supporting.

So now we are in the midst of a combined research and curatorial project called ‘Biomedicine on Display’. I say ‘combined’, because we seek to integrate research, the acquisitions of the material and visual culture of biomedicine, and the creation of exhibitions. And we do indeed have a great interest in bringing art, aesthetics and medicine together.

So in a sense, we are not just a medical history museum anymore, but a medical museum. That’s one of the reasons we changed our name to Medical Museion. So, which were our reasons for going into art and aesthetics?
[I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow].

Museums are a significant part of the global science learning and experience economy. There are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of science, technology and medical museums and science centers around the world. The Association of Science-Technology Centers presently lists 447 institutions, but they don’t list small, regional and local museums.

This STM-sector of the museum industry (let’s forget about science centers) spans everything from small, regional, amateur-driven collections and displays run by retired scientists, engineers and medical doctors to large professional-driven institutions supported by state grants and having hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of visitors each year—like the Science Museum in London, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, just to mention three big STM-museums on three different continents, who are among the significant actors in the global cultural and experience economy.

Whether they work on a small scale or as large operations, many STM-museums nowadays are involved in bringing art and science (art and technology, art and medicine) together. This is true both for the very small, queer and curiousities-filled ones, like my personal favourite, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. It’s true for the middle-sized ones, like the Wellcome Collection in London which is deliberately exploring the art-life science connection. And it’s true for the Big Ones, like Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris which has even published a guide to their own artworks.

Why then has art and aesthetics entered the STM-museum sector? In a number of posts over the next couple of days I will discuss five possible reasons why museums are increasingly bringing art and science together.

These posts are parts of a paper I gave at the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences” organised by Ingeborg Reichle for the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) meeting in Berlin a couple of weeks ago under the title “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together”.

The other speakers in the session were Suzanne Anker (New York) and Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden). Above are Rob, Susanne and Ingeborg before we started the session.
[to be followed]

Inspired by Material World we thought we would like to know who our readers are. We know you are dispersed all over the world — from Korea to Chile, from Alaska to South Africa. Most of you come from Denmark, United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States, fewer reside in Colombia, Norway and Australia. Why do you read this blog on and off? What do you think of it? And how can we make it better? Please write to us in the comment field below.

Best wishes,

The Biomedicine on Display group

Veterinary history used to be one of these backward corners of the historical specialities occupied by happy amateurs (read: retired veterinarians). Not so much anymore. Younger professional generations are mobilising current historiographical tools to understand the history of domesticated animals and their health problems, including their relations with humans. And there’s of course also bioethical problems involved.  

As a token of this new interest the Centre for the History of Science Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) in Manchester is organising a one-day workshop on ’The Health and Welfare of the Manufactured Animal’ together with the Veterinary History Society on Friday 19 September. ”By focussing on the differing ways in which animal ‘needs’ have been constructed and understood over time, with particular emphasis upon discourses of ‘health’ and ‘welfare’”, says the organiser, Rob Kirk:

the workshop seeks to explore how animals have been determined by, whilst simultaneously determining, the environments, contexts, knowledge claims, and wider understandings within which they have existed in specific places and times. Papers draw upon a variety of historical and sociological approaches and are organised by three topographic themes: the laboratory, the farm, and the home. Our aim is to determine the extent to which historians can contribute to wider debates that see animals as co-constituents of the relationships within which they live. In so doing we seek to explore how far it is possible to move beyond the representation of animals as passive products of human material and intellectual processes.

Tentative speakers include:

• Stephanie Eichberg (Durham University), “Pets and Scientific Subjects”: Considering the animal body in different environments
• Rob Kirk (CHSTM, University of Manchester), “Living Spaces: Environment and welfare in the lives of laboratory animals”
• Gail Davies (UCL), “Making Mice, Making Space: Tracing the geographies of transgenic mice welfare”
• Richie Nimmo (University of Aberdeen), “Animal Mediations: Cows as contingent actors, co-producers and machines in the early 20th century British dairy industry”
• Abigail Woods (Imperial College London). “‘No room for passengers!’: The construction of the fertile cow, 1930-50
• Karen Sayer (Leeds Trinity & All Saints) “TBC”
• Andrew Gardiner (University of Edinburgh). “How small animals made their medicine”
• Mick Worboys and Neil Pemberton (CHSTM, University of Manchester), “Breeding, Feeding, Leading: Making the modern dog in Britain, 1870-1910″

And because this is a conference organised for intellectual purposes, there is no registration fee! 

For further info, contact Rob Kirk at robert.g.kirk@manchester.ac.uk or visit the website: www.chstm.manchester.ac.uk/newsandevents/conferences/manufacturedanimal

I haven’t read Daniel Miller’s recently published The Comfort of Things (Polity Press, 2008) yet, but his own presentation of the book in today’s Material World promises an extra-ordinary interesting reading experience for anyone interested in the use of ‘particulars’ (unique, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, singular, curious, etc. things) in museum practice.

The Comfort of Things is composed of thirty ‘portraits’ of individuals and households from a single street in London. Miller — who is professor of material culture at UCL — suggests that there is a “so far unexplored potential legacy of anthropological perspectives on the world” which emerges “if we dissolve away our usual dualism between the individual and some larger category of society or culture”.

The ‘portrayed’ households failed “to fit the kinds of categories that are used to subsume individuals in social science”. In some respects they could be classified as ‘working class’ or ,’Brazilian’ or ‘gay’ etc., but “none of these categories really capture what is richest about our encounters with them”. By using a random London street as his unit of inquiry, Miller had to describe whoever opened the door to their homes — thus they were not chosen “as tokens of social science notions of identity”.

Cannot wait to get my hands on it before summer laziness takes over.

We have repeatedly come back to the art of medical animation on this blog. Although in principle we are more interested in animation of invisible biomedical microstructures, animations of classical macroanatomical structures are still a source of awe and fascination, especially when they are well-done. See, for example, this beautiful animation of a human heart:

One thing is that it has an almost haptic quality — another bonus feature is that you can move an interface slider to seamlessly disclose the working of the valves beneath the increasingly transparent muscular ‘glass’ surface. Nifty! Imagine an exhibition room in which a real, preserved heart was shown with this animation in the background. (I don’t think they used any of these in the Wellcome Collection’s Heart-exhbition?).

The interactive heart is produced by Hybrid Medical Animation, a small Minneapolis-based company which specialises in creative medical and scientific imaging. And they don’t restrict their productions to macroanatomy; for example, they have also done instruction movies about molecular targeting, like the one to the right.

See more examples here.

(thanks to today’s Medgadget for the tip)

Cannot resist spreading this image from the Brazilian advertising agency NeogamaBBH, which is circulating in the blogosphere right now (e.g., Street Anatomy, Frame 2wenty 4our, etc.). For more, see here.

The James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at the Saïd Business School , Universitry of Oxford, is announcing two research fellows in science and technology studies. The range of research topics includes (but is not limited to): biomedical innovation and society; cognitive enhancement; converging technologies; evidence and evidence-policy relations; governance of genetic technologies; science, technology and inequality; imaging and visualisation; law, property and inequality; mundane objects and ordinary technologies; neuromarketing; security and surveillance; sociology and ethnography of the social sciences; technology, mobility and urban geographies; technoscience and its publics; and visualisation in archaeology.

The fellows are expected to: identify potential new research topics and questions; critically evaluate existing literatures and perspectives bearing on these topics; devise research projects and identify likely funding sources; submit research proposals; undertake research and writing with a view to publication in leading academic journals; contribute directly and in support of all research, take an active part in research meetings and related activities; act as a source of information and advice to other members of the group on methodologies or procedures; present papers at conferences or public meetings; etc.

It’s probably difficult to do all these things equally well, but otherwise it sounds like the Perfect Postdoc Job for an STS-oriented PhD. Deadline for applications is 14 July and informal inquiries can be addressed to Steve Woolgar, steve.woolgar@sbs.ox.ac.uk. Read more here.

Together with some one hundred other hopeful Danish university academics, Søren and I spent three hours today listening to representatives of the Danish Council for Strategic Research instructing us how to write better applications for so called ’strategic’ research projects in co-operation with Danish small and middle-sized corporations. It’s all about getting funding for projects that will promote long-term Danish economic interests; all us gathered in the room will compete for about 100 mill. euros in the September phase-2 application round. The success rate after having passed the first application round is about 33-50%, so we were all eagerly listening!

And then (inspired by Derek) I went home to read last week’s issue of Nature, in which cell biologist Theo Wallimann from ETH in Zürich writes (”European research needs a dash of anarchy”, Nature, vol. 453, p. 850) that “almost every significant breakthrough in the history of science has come about by serendipity — not as a result of strategic planning or problem-oriented and directed research”. And he continues:

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions. Good scientists are by definition anarchists, who don’t want to be managed by what Gottfried Schatz of Biocenter Basel calls ‘chronoclasts’ — people whose bureaucracy steals their research time and blunts their creative potential. Good science has an inherent potential for self-organization.

What a schizophrenic day! In the morning we had our minds focused on how to get a grip on some of this strategic research money. And then, a few hours later, Wallimann’s call for a dash of anarchy.

The first thing that comes to mind is Nietzsche’s distinction between slave and master mentality.

(occasioned by Derek Lowe’s post “Anarchy in the EU” in today’s In the Pipeline)

Participatory web media are increasingly being used for raising the medical scientific awareness of patients, caregivers and doctors (I guess this is the basic idea of ’formation of biocitizenship’). Latest example is a video channel launched Monday by the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF in co-operation with YouTube:

with “the goal of promoting earlier diagnoses and getting more patients into research studies and clinical trials” (quote from the press release).

The UCSF people are also experimenting with two other forms of online communication. To the right you can see their widget with links to the YouTube channel and their own site.

They have also created a ”Defeat Dementia”-group on Facebook.

Says the director of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, Bruce Miller:

The YouTube channel and these other forms of online communications will enable us to engage a broad audience in the fight against these illnesses … One goal is to increase awareness about the earliest signs of some of the less well known diseases … If we can promote accurate diagnoses of patients, we can get them into clinical trials sooner

Looks like a very conscious strategic use of web media for the formation of medical scientific awareness. Expect to see much more of this kind from universities and research centers in the near future.

Learning new software tools takes a lot of time, so I always take the opportunity to learn some basic tricks by looking over the shoulders of my colleagues while they handle the interface. But often my colleagues are as unknowledgeable as I am. The obvious solution then is video tutorials. There are thousands hundreds of them if you want to learn Photoshop or how to create your Wordpress blog and so forth. But I haven’t seen any specialized service for biomedical researchers before. Now Bioscreencast has created a video tutorial library where you can watch (presently 128) videos that tell lots of useful stuff — for example, I just learned how to create a RSS feed for continuously showing PubMed search results on my customized ig-Google page. Nifty! 

Last week Nature carried a fascinating advance online article^* written by a research group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) lead by Jack Szostak. They have created a simple artifical protocell in the form of a single-stranded DNA-template within a shell of such fatty acids that were likely to have been present in early life environments four billion years ago.

It turned out that this particular protocell could take up nucleotides from the outside without the help of ‘modern’ protein pores and channels and that these molecules then took part in the template-copying reaction. In other words, a precursor to a simple artificial life system. Read more here.

This is great stuff for everyone who is fascinated by the problem of the emergence of early life (and the construction of artificial life). But equally fascinating is the fact that this research is conducted by a group of scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Mass General Hospital. This tells something about the open-minded research strategies of these two medical research institutions — a far cry from the narrow understanding of medical research (and research in general) which the Danish government and its research authorities have adopted over the last decade under the slogan ‘Fra forskning til faktura’ (from research to invoice).

I doubt that scientists in a Danish medical research institution (not even to think of a hospital) would survive for long if they focused their research efforts on the origin of life. Because even though such research may be very important for the understanding of cell functions in the long perspective, there is no immediate medical payoff; no cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s in sight whatsoever.

^*S. Mansy et al., “Template-directed synthesis of a genetic polymer in a model protocell”, Nature online 4 June 2008.

On Friday, June 13 2008 (2:00 - 5:00 pm) Dr Andrea Tone will talk about “The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers” at Medical Museion in Copenhagen. Here is the abstract of Andrea’s talk:

“In the last 50 years, we have increasingly turned to a pharmaceutical solution for the problem of everyday nerves. Today, drugs for anxiety are a billion-dollar business in the United States. Yet as recently as 1955, when the first prescription tranquilizer –Miltown - became available, pharmaceutical executives worried that there would not be a market for anxiety-relief. Instead, Miltown became a commercial sensation, the first prescription psychotropic blockbuster in United States history. The drug’s financial success and cultural impact revolutionized perceptions of anxiety and its treatment.”

Andrea Tone will provide the first comprehensive account of the rise of America’s tranquilizer culture based on her new book ”The Age of Anxiety” (forthcoming with Basic Books, December 2008). Drawing on a range of original sources – manufacturers’ files, FDA reports, letters, government investigations, popular culture, and interviews with inventors, physicians, patients and activists – Andrea Tone has explored the history of the drug’s development, popularity, and later discrediting within the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which America’s contested but enduring relationship with tranquilizers took shape.”

Andrea Tone is Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of numerous articles and books including ”Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America”, named one of the best books by Washington Post.
 
Moderators: Rikke Krølner (DSPM) and Jesper Vaczy Kragh (Medical Museion)

Registration: Due to limited seating, registration recommended before Friday, June 6th, 2008. Send replies to: sej@si-folkesundhed.dk, indicate ‘Andrea Tone’ in the subject line.

See http://www.dspm.dk/ for more information.

The annual clean-out day at the Panum Institute, which houses the Medical Faculty of the University of Copenhagen, took place last week. With the sun shining from at clear blue sky and temperatures rising to the high twenties, employees at the Panum Institute went on a building-wide cleaning spree. And just like last year, Medical Museion was in position, lurking around garbage containers, ready to rescue the cultural heritage of recent biomedicine from certain destruction.

The clean-out day in 2007 produced in excess of 48 tons of waste. The numbers from this year are not in yet, but it is clear that we were nowhere near that amount. For Medical Museion, the day also resulted in the acquisition of fewer objects. One reason was that we were much more critical this year about what to take in. So when the hard work of clean-out was over and a treat of cold beer and hot saussages were handed out to the participants, we were able to enjoy our harvest of a few but very interesting (and slightly bizarre) objects.

One group of objects were three maniquins from the Department of Odontology. The training heads immediately caught the attention of Camilla Mordhorst and Monica Lambert, who saw numerous possibilities for use in the exhibition.

Another quite unexpected find was a collection of bladder stones, complete with a specially worked-out typology.

In addition to these acquisitions, the Panum Garbage Day once again proved to be a very effective means of alerting scientists to Medical Museion’s interest in quite recent biomedical equipment. It seems that the awareness that things do not have to be terribly old, rare, or valuable in order to be relevant as museum objects is spreading among the people who work with biomedical technologies every day and who are in the position to donate objects to the museum. For that reason, Medical Museion will definitely be in place for next year’s clean-out day.

After the minisymposium with Jens Hauser and Sepp Gumbrecht on the concept of ‘presence’ here at Medical Museion last spring, our research group has repeatedly come back to the relation between mediated visualizations of biomedical objects, on the one hand, and the immediacy of touching them, on the other (see, for example, Jan Eric’s earlier post on Condillac’s statue).

As an anecdotal illustration of the immediacy of touch, I’d like to present the following personal experience.

In mid-March, I accompanied my partner to the National Hospital here in Copenhagen for an ultrasound scan of our then 13 week old foetus. As thousands of other prospective parents we were of course thrilled by what we saw on the screen:

Watching our future baby ’live’ on a computer screen like this was quite amazing, even though we had seen such pictures on the internet before. It’s an experience we share with millions of others:  digitalized ultrasound scanning foetus images have become an integral part of the contemporary understanding of what it means to deliver new citizens to the world. A striking image of early life that is easily communicated in our visual culture and as such an illustration of the formation of biocitizenship, both discursively and substantially.

Back to the anecdote: Six weeks later, we went for the second screening and watched the same kind of picture, just more detailed, with ears, fingers, toes and everything. It was, of course, very satisfying to see that the pregnancy proceeded well, and that there was no need to worry.

Yet, none of us were really moved by the experience. And I realised that even though I had been quite amazed during the first scanning session in March, both sessions left me somehow unsatisfied. There was something lacking which I couldn’t really articulate. My partner felt the same way, especially after the second scanning.

It was no big thing, and none of us found it wortwhile discussing it at length. For my own part, I shrugged it off as one of these many moments of distraction that acompany academic life.

However, two weeks after the second scanning, my partner suddenly said one evening: ‘put your hand on my belly’. I did — and there it was: the ‘rumbling’ that I had read about! Something moving inside. Not really kicking, but ‘rumbling’.

Wow! Double wow! This was our baby, no doubt. I couldn’t see it, of course, and I couldn’t distinguish arms, legs or head from each other. It was just a ‘rumbling object’ deep inside my partner’s belly.

From a medical point of view my subjective haptic experience was of course nothing compared with the detailed, objective and communicable ultrasound visualizations. And yet — as an experience of emerging life it was much more evocative. Touching our ’rumbling’ foetus made a much stronger impression on me than seeing him/her (we don’t want to know ’its’ sex yet) in high screen resolution. Now he/she was real — for real!

And then I understood why the two previous scanning sessions had left us somewhat unsatisfied, as if something was lacking. Despite all the exquisite visual detail, the perception of a scanning image is mediated. That is, there is literally a medium between the perceiving spectator and the foetus. In this case, a technically sophisticated clinical platform — an obstetric clinic with trained technicians operating state-of-the-art ultrasound echoprobe equipment according to standardized procedures and with the newest imaging software, etc. — stand between us and the foetus. While my hand on her belly is unmediated (unless you want to call the belly muscles and the placenta a ‘medium’).

As an anecdote this has rather limited evidential value, agreed. But it nevertheless makes me think about the immediacy of touch, and to what extent the sense of touch is an undervalued sense in a world which is dominated by the sense of vision (and partly the auditory sense). (For further views on this, see Jan Eric’s and my paper to the ‘Artefact’ meeting in Oslo last September.)

It also raises questions about touch as a basic cognitive sense (cf Jan Eric’s post on Condillac), about touch as an emotionally loaded sense, about the communicability and possibility for shared cultural experiences of touch, and so forth. Lots of questions for later posts.

(finally, to medical doctors reading this post: I’m not at all against imaging technologies, of course; I’m just fascinated by the relation between visual mediation and the immediacy of touch :-)