Biomedicine on Display

The thick guest-book for the Oldetopia-exhibition is filled up with visitors’ comments and we had to buy a new one.

As Bente (our outreach officer) says, an exhibit guest-book is a wonderful medium for public response — because it conveys people’s immediate reactions: their thoughtful critical remarks, their enthusiasm, and even occasional outbursts of disgust.

Here are a few selected pages from the last 12 months.

In this one, Kris tells one of our handsome, cool and knowledgeable medical student guides:

1000 thanks, TOTAL cosiness.
You have cured my fear of dentists
MARRY ME!
Hugz   Kris (born 1986)

What more can I say? Museums are not just temples of heritage, they are also arenas for the immediate expression of romantic love.

And here John proclaims that we are a really “sick museum”:

Well — we knew that, didn’t we?

More and more museums are becoming aware of the importance of offering their collections to scholars for research. If you would like to immerse yourself in Science Museum’s (London) rich collections — with over 300.000 objects relating to science, technology and medicine — you can apply for one of their new Visiting Research Fellowships (£16,000 for eight months) or Short-Term Research Fellowship (£2,000 per month for a maximum of three months), which will be awarded in 2009-2011. More info from Peter Morris, peter.morris@nmsi.ac.uk (no website info yet as far as I can see). Formalities below: Continue Reading »

The 3rd Annual Science and the Public Conference (in Manchester last June) was a very enjoyable affair (see programme here). Now, the 4th annual conference has been announced — this time in Brighton, 13-14 June 2009. The theme for next year’s meeting is ‘Science and the public: uncertain pasts, presents and futures’ and here’s the (maybe at trifle too vaguely phrased for my taste) call for papers:

The relationship between science and the public has provided fruitful material for analysis from a range of academic disciplines, and an important area of policy and practice, in recent years. Studies and experience have revealed a startling complexity, past and present, in science communication, a range of channels (formal, informal, fictional) through which dialogue and debate takes place, and a wide variety of participants in these interactions. Science itself has been reconceptualised, and the complexity of science as a discourse, as practice and as a form of life raises many questions. Science has long been seen as a quest for certainty, even if that goal is unachievable, but our interactions with and examinations of science often reveal, and are characterised by, many uncertainties: what are we encountering, describing and making when we examine science in its many forms? At the same time as this critical examination of the interface between science and the public has been taking place, a dramatic proliferation in modes and amounts of public engagement with science occurred. Science museums, outreach work and edutainment for younger people have achieved new prominence while history of science and popular science texts flourish in the market. This conference will bring together academics and practitioners who have an interest in the intersection of science and non-science, be that in contemporary, past or future societies, to confront and discuss the uncertainties, and certainties, of science and the public.

Possible topics looks like a delicious smorgasboard:
•       Scientific controversies in the media
•       Experts and expertise in public
•       The representation of science in fiction
•       Public expectations of science and technology
•       Historical analysis of the relationship between science and the public
•       The role of museums, outreach and edutainment
•       Science communication in theory and practice
•       The role of news and entertainment media (including the internet)
•       The construction of interdisciplinary projects and frameworks

Not much falls outside this list, I guess — probably a good thing, because the field is so new that it is great to hear a large variety of topics.

Two seasoned practitioners in the field — Patricia Fara (Clare College, Cambridge) and Steve Fuller (Warwick) — have been engaged as invited speakers. Everybody else is supposed to send 300 word abstracts for individual papers, panel proposals or roundtable proposals to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com before 14 February 2009. Someone on that email address can probably also answer inquiries.

Telemedicine has already been around for a while — especially in image-based diagnostics where specialists can, in principle, be located anywhere in the world when they interpret, say, photos of dermatological conditions or CT/MRI scanning images (and have flexible working hours and earn a lot of money).

Telemedical practices thus sustain the general trend of out-sourcing and marketization of medicine in the last decades, because the increasing number of specialists available diminish the constraints of local bottle-necks. Telemedicine is a truly globalizing technology.

In Europe, the private Telemedicine Clinic (TMC) in Barcelona, founded in 2002, has become a leading provider of large-scale image readings, serving public hospitals and local health authorites, including over 60 National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in the UK and several Swedish hospitals, among them Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and Lund University Hospital. Political demands for the reduction of waiting lists is one of the reasons why hospitals take this step; another reason is that small, regional hospitals, like Esbjerg Hospital in Denmark have difficulties recruiting specialists.

The American company Telerays has now gone a step forward in this out-sourcing and marketizing trend by establishing an auction-based market place for telemedical diagnostics in radiology. Hospitals and imaging centers send in orders for the interpretation of batches of images to a virtual auction room (Telerays’ website) where only accredited radiologists have access.

The job goes to the lowest bid (”Cut costs one bid at a time”, as Telerays’ webiste proclaims). The price is established solely by the hospital/imaging center and the bidding radiologist; but Telerays takes a flat 15% of the final price.

As Health Business Blog points out “Telerays could set the basis for lower priced, foreign competition to emerge”, but that there ”will have to be a relaxation of regulation, payment policies and attitudes before that happens”.

(thanks to Radiologic Technology for the tip)

We all know how babies can be conceived in test-tubes, that we can clone eggs in petri dishes, and that embryos can be stored in the freezer. Old-fashioned sex is increasingly substituted with artificial conception. But what does a leading bio-artist and art historian think of all this? Suzanne Anker from the School of Visual Arts, NYC, gives a seminar in Cambridge on Tuesday (HPS Dept, Free School Lane at 5pm), asking questions like:

When posed with the classic quandary, where do babies come from, will the mythology of life’s creation soon also include glassware and the bio-lab? Has the bundle-carrying stork been exiled from fairy-tales? And with the bio-printing of replacement organs and tissues on the research horizon, at what cost is this further quest for immortality?

Suzanne wrote The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (with Dorothy Nelkin in 2004), so she’s well placed to opine on this interesting technoscientific field.

Jacob Kirkegaard’s spectacular sound work ‘Labyrinthitis’ — originally commissioned by Medical Museion, first performed in the anatomical theatre at Medical Museion on Sunday, 2 September 2007, and again at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, September 2008 — is now for sale on CD. You can order it from TouchShop. Read more below:

Continue Reading »

The ‘Material Worlds’ conference at the University of Leicester, 15-17 December 2008 — marking Susan Pearce’s long and distinguished contribution to the field of material culture studies, museum studies and archaeology — will take a broad look at material culture and theoretical approaches to it. Themes include how to deal with museums and heritage, the roles and values of objects, designing and making, objects in museums, representing and interpreting culture, collectors and collecting, etc. The draft program is very rich and varied, with plenty of sessions and discussion panels of interest for medical museum people.

In her short obituary of George E. Palade — who was the first to identify what was later called ribosomes (thus a shared Nobel prize in 1974) — Andrea Gawrylewski, staff writer at The Scientist, refers in passing to something that Palade wrote in his autobiographical essay:

My father had hoped I was going to study philosophy at the University, like himself, but I preferred to deal with tangibles and specifics, and - influenced by relatives much closer to my age than he was - I entered the School of Medicine of the University of Bucharest (Romania) in 1930.

Interesting opposition between philosophy and medical science as dealing with ‘tangibles’ and ’specifics’. Wonder if this is valid for historians too? Is there an opposition between being interested in the philosophy of history and preferring to work with historical tangibles and specifics, as we do in museums?

I for my part believe it is possible to embrace both (but maybe I’m just naïve). In fact, most people I know are either philosophically minded or tangible-oriented. Does this have anything to do with personality structure? Or is it an institutional thing?

The emergence of evidence-based medicine is one of the most interesting issues in the history of contemporary medical history. Wish I were in Stockholm on Monday 3 November when Ingemar Bohlin from the STS Section at the University of Gothenburg will speak about evidence-based decision making in a science-based society and the origin, distribution and limits of the ‘evidence movement’ in an afternoon seminar at the Nobel Museum. Ingemar will reconstruct four strands of historical development that together led to current evidence-based medicine, and describe the relations between them in order to throw light on procedures for contemporary knowledge production. Write to bokning@nobel.se if you want to participate; a background text is available. More info from Paul Sjöblom, paul.sjoblom@nobel.se.

Report from Artefact meeting no. 13, October 5-7, 2008.

Artefacts was initiated in 1996 by the three institutions: the Science Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Deutsches Museum. The aim was and still is to promote a meaningful dialogue about the value of objects to serious studies of the history of science and technology. A wide variety of institutions (both museums and universities) have contributed over the succeeding years.
The Artefacts meeting this year was held in Washington, October 5-7. The topic was the relationship between Art and Science/Technology, as expressed through consideration of an artifact or a collection of artifacts. This topic encouraged a wide range of presentations; from the reception and use of the first Hammond Organs in Norway to mathematical paintings of the well-known author and cartoonist, David Crockett Johnson.
The encounter between art and science seems to be a never ending producer of the most interesting situations and artefacts. Take for example the new Artificial Tree Cellular Towers (se e.g. CBS’s report on the phenomenon), which was the topic of the presentation of professor Barney Mergen from Georg Washington University.  

These ‘trees’ are so curious, they need to be seen (a wonderful exhibition object, but probably rather difficult to display unless you have a museum as big as e.g. National Air and Space Museum in Washington). A lot can be said on these ‘trees’. To me they incarnate the human’s ambivalence to technology – it seems that we can’t get enough of the new technologies as long as they don’t interrupt our carefully staged picture of a long gone ‘natural’ world with bird song, endless forests and cozy huts.     

The next issue of the Vienna science magazine heureka! will feature an overview of the most evil, base, fraudulent and slimy scientists in history — a Hall of Shame — “um das breite Spektrum an ethisch verwerflichen und fragwürdigen Motivationen abzubilden”.

Not only Nazi scientists, but all kinds of ”Menschenhasser und skrupellose Experimentatoren, die übelsten Plagiatoren und Betrüger, die größten Neider und die hoffnungslos Verblendeten” (sounds much better in German than in English, especially when you read it out loud!).

The inclusion of “hoffnungslos Verblendeten” is probably a mistake, because if this criterion is taken literally, heureka! will be thicker than Who’s Who in Science. But otherwise, send your suggestions (with short motivations) to the editor, Oliver Hochadel (hochadel@falter.at) before Friday 24 October.

The initiative has already given rise to protests: Stuttgart professor in history of science and technology, Klaus Hentschel, finds it “HÖCHST fragwürdig” because he believes it feeds into a public tendency ”zur Schwarz-Weiß-Malerei”, like in “US-Cowboy-Filmen” (from today’s Oldenburg-list).

Some time ago, the National Library of Medicine opened a new exhibition called ’Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health’ in the library foyer on NIH campus, Bethesda. Featured stories include the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the US, the Chinese barefoot doctor movement, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and the WHO smallpox eradication program.

I haven’t seen the physical exhibition, only the web version. Admittedly, public health is probably one of the most difficult topics for exhibitions (physical or web-based). But given NLM’s huge economic ressources, one could expect something much better. For example, take a look at the online games on the Online Activities & Resources page. If you haven’t seen a late-1990s interactive website before, here’s your chance; it’s against the odds.

A laudable aim — to illustrate ”the importance of clean water, safe housing, nutritious food, affordable healthcare, and protection from violence in fostering health and wellbeing” — is lost in a pretty boring web product.

I wonder if this video will attract that many postgrads to “research training, career development and mobility schemes allowing researchers to be truly mobile both internationally and between commercial and non-commercial sectors”? (the European Union Marie Curie Actions programme).

That said, the retro style is obviously inspired by the classic ‘Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level’ (1971) (cf. the upper video with the one below).  

(thanks to Jessica for the EU video tip) 

Just a few years ago, this museum with its old buildings, rich collections, and esoteric research projects was one of the best preserved secrets in the Danish museum world. Few members of the public knew about our existence.

But now we are gradually opening up the place, with new temporary exhibitions, expanded regular opening hours, etc. Part of the visibility strategy has been to put up a banner on the front facade. Which hasn’t been easy, because you are not allowed to put anything on our classified buildings (or on the interior walls, for that sake) without the permission of The Heritage Agency of Denmark. So we’ve spent years (literally) on correspondence forth and back to satisfy the agency’s strict aesthetic requirements.

Please don’t ask how many hours we’ve spent negotiating the colour, size and font of this piece of plastic (some things in museum life do not always come easily, and heritage agencies aren’t among the most creative government bodies when it comes to design restrictions).

But, at last, here it is — Medical Museion’s first banner (the ‘drops’ at the bottom is the logo of the Faculty of Health Sciences).

(see also Bente’s post on Museionblog here)

Today’s poetic quote on science blogging from Deepak Singh:

I think all of us have bemoaned the lack of depth in mainstream scientific coverage, in the shallowness of press releases. One of the roles we [i.e., science bloggers] can play/should play is bringing reality to the science many of us love and breathe. To highlight the beauty and power of what we do and its fragility. To explain the potential of scientific discoveries, yet keep them real and not make them sound like a silver bullet to solve all ills

That’s why I think (again and again) that In the Pipeline is such an excellent science blog, because it brings the reality — both the beauty and the fragility — of the lab into life. The power of plain talk.