Biomedicine on Display

From all of us to all of you — we’re taking a few days off to enjoy a research-, exhibition-, acquisition- and blog-free zone.

As an icon of the Xmas season, we couldn’t resist bringing this pic:

Taken from Moist Production’s poster “Immaculate Confection”:

(thanks to Vanessa, Street Anatomy, for the tip)

I’m fascinated by how often scholars of science studies reinvent the wheel — because they are ignorant of other approaches to science than their own myopic perspective.

For example, I just stumbled over an otherwise excellent article — “Counting Corncrakes: The Affective Science of the UK Corncrake Census”, Social Studies of Science, vol 38, 377-405, 2008 — in which Jamie Lorimer, a postdoc at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, discusses how emotions play a role in scientific work.

Lorimer observed, during his field work, how surveyors, researchers and their study objects were linked in a way that triggered “a variety of emotional responses among surveyors and researchers”. These “complex and multi-faceted” emotions, Lorimer suggests, provide “the vital motivations” that compel investigators to their work. And continues:

Although social studies of the field and laboratory sciences are beginning to concern themselves with the body, they have not yet fully engaged with the role of emotion in scientific practice. In Latour’s famous account of his trip to Boa Vista, for example, we hear little about what he and his research subjects were feeling at the time, what they enjoyed about their work and what they found frustrating. Perhaps this general reluctance to discuss emotion is a hangover from the radical symmetry and anti-ontological stance advocated by early actor-network theory, which effaced the specific skills and feelings of humans (Lorimer 2008, p. 398).

What Lorimer says, is that the community of actor network theorists (ANTs), headed by Bruno Latour (a follower of Michel Serres), have effaced the emotional dimension of scientific work. And that he is now filling out this lacuna by introducing affect into science studies:

This paper has shown that affect plays a vital role in motivating field scientists, many of whom work long hours in challenging conditions for little material reward. They do it because they enjoy it; in Massumi’s (1996) terms affect provides the ‘vital glue’ that impels these human–corncrake interactions … it is likely that there is a clear topography of fun, awe or intellectual challenge that can be had in the field (Lorimer 2008, p. 398).

Well, the importance of affect may be new to some students of science studies. But the rest of us, especially we who read and write biographies and autobiographies of scientists, have known this for — yes, centuries! In fact, a focus on the affective dimension of science is one of the defining traits of the genre of scientific biography.

Lorimer’s article illustrate one of the dangers of intellectual movements like ANT — they form cognitively closed communities that become so absorbed in their own terminology that they don’t realize that there exist other analytical approaches to the world. And when they find lacunas in the construct they believe they have found out someting new. We may expect to see many post-ANT scholars reinventing lots of wheels in the years to come.

I’ve just learnt about a new interesting project called Material Beliefs, which takes emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of the laboratories and into public spaces. 

Material Beliefs focuses on technologies that blur the boundaries between the body and materials. They are also interested in how design can be used to stimulate discussion about the value of body-material hybridity. Rather than focusing on the outcomes of science and technology, they wisely see them as unfinished and ongoing practices.

Sounds like a project that we might be able to learn from.

Material Beliefs is based in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths (University of London) and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK. See much more on their integrated website/blog here.

This week our museum staff is closing down the temporary exhibition ’Oldetopia‘, which opened back in October 2007 (14 month is a long time for a temporary show).

All the artifacts will be handed back — either to our own storage facilities or to our generous lenders. For example, a set of delicate surgical knives and other equipment that we used to show aesthetic surgery are carefully packed to be sent back to the plastic surgery clinic at the National Hospital here in Copenhagen.

Below, our conservator Nicole Rehné walks away with some stuffed poultry, the (animal) remains (no living animals were harmed in the exhibition!) of the pioneering endocrinological experiments performed by Danish medical doctor Knud Sand in the 1930s.

We intend to keep the stuffed ones in storage and are not at all thinking of repatriating them to the indigenous fowl population in the South East Asian jungles :-)

The wall texts are scraped off. They looked good — but it’s hard work to remove them without destroying the underlying wall-paper (many grateful thanks to the designer who kept the wall texts short). Here Sven Erik Hansen, our in-house physician and guest researcher, removes letters — first the consonants, then the vowels. While our administrator, Carsten, concentrates on the headlines:

Soon the next temporary exhibition will fill the ground level show rooms. From Wednesday 21 January and three months on you can see Design4Science. More about that later. 

(thanks, Bente, for letting me use the Danish original on Museionblog)

Just a comment triggered by the announcement for the 3rd annual graduate student conference at the Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 10-11 April 2009 on the theme avatars, personae, heteronyms and pseudonyms.

The organisers take the Sanskrit word avatāra as their point of departure (in Hindu theology, an avatar is a deity that descends into a lower realm, i.e., what Xians call an incarnation): ”How do we make ourselves visible, or readable, to the world at large? How do we portray or define ourselves­ to ourselves?”:

The virtualization of certain areas of our societies has provided new fora for experimenting with and reflecting on the images we construct and project, the personae we mimic and adopt, and the ways in which we interact with each other. That said, virtual culture may merely highlight issues that have emerged in different forms through visual art and literature both transnationally and transtemporally: for example, the use of gender-altering pseudonyms as a method of alternative self- representation; the adoption of myriad personae as a tool in artistic creation and performance; and the veneration of icons both religious and social.

Accordingly, the conference is proposed to deal with “the various descents, ascents, descendants and ascendancies of the avatar, as well as the various representational iterations of alternate or constructed personae, such as pseudonyms”, i.e. papers might include topics like:

• oracles and prophets
• icons as objects, icons as people
• masks
• poetic personae
• literary hoaxes; invented authors and their reception
• ghostwriters
• female writers with male pseudonyms and vice versa
• gender, performance, corporeality, drag, self-portraiture
• digital personae; dystopic/utopic movement toward the virtual
• archetypes (Jungian, etc.)
• “personality” or celebrity self-construction, “avatars” of human ideals, cultural “icon” worship, public personae and the culture of self-representation
• orality vs. textuality; textual history & hermeneutics
• hiding/obscuring vs. highlighting/exaggerating

For some reason it all reminds my of Richard Satava’s late 1990s notion of ‘medical avatar’. Satava — who had been in charge of the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) combat care program and later their telemedicine project — had a vision of a multi-dimensional 3D-scanner representation of the whole body, which recorded all possible kinds of patient data — brain waves, blood flow, heartbeat, inner organ structure etc. — in real time:

The patient will walk through a doorway, like the security scanner at an airport, and we will get all the information we need from a true suspended hologram. You can actually feel the beat of the floating heart even though nothing is there

Forget about bloodless avatars in Second Life; Satava’s ‘medical avatar’ was a bloody realistic avatar. The head above (made by Alexander Tsiaras, founder and CEO of AnatomicalTravelogue) is taken from a critical paper by Claudia Reiche where it is accompanied by a quote from Satava:

What you are looking at here is bits and bytes. Zeros and ones. But it’s also a living, breathing, caring human being. This may well be a way to introduce the future to you.

Would be interesting to see if somebody will use the occasion of the Stanford meeting to follow the notion of ‘medical avatar’ through the last ten years of multidimensional medical imaging literature. If so, send an 500 words abstract to avatarsconference@gmail.com by 10 January.

The recently founded Nordic Network of Medical History (chaired by Astri Andresen in Bergen) is organising a three-day postgrad course on “Power, policies and health” (3 ects points), 11-14 May 2009, at the University of Copenhagen. The aim is to present

some theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of power and policies in the field of health, namely power studies (how to study the exercise of power and the processes of problematisation), relations between research and policymaking (when and how does research and policymaking interact), the anthropology of policy (analyses of how policy discourses ‘work’). Two methodological and design approaches are presented oral history as a means to study policy processes and comparative studies of health policies. Focus is on recent history.

PhD-students with different disciplinary backgrounds are invited to register. The number of participants is limited to 20. An important part of the course is discussion of participants’ projects (participants are supposed to submit short texts before the course begins). There is no course fee, and each participant will get a 800 DKK bursary per day to cover food and accommodation (but you’ll have to pay for travel). Faculty includes Virginia Berridge, Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Susan Wright, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus; and Signild Vallgårda, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. Registration with Susanne Fray, s.fray@pubhealth.ku.dk. Further info here, or from Signild Vallgårda, s.vallgarda@pubhealth.ku.dk.

Two quotes from yesterday’s online media caught my interest as a historian of contemporary biomedicine:

First from an interview in yesterday’s Nature online with former Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Elias Zerhouni:

The economic stimulus package is $500 billion, with $1 billion for science. It’s outrageous. This is the future of our country. So now we’re subsidizing the industries of the past at the expense of investments in the industries of the future. It’s almost an insult, frankly.

Second from a post on yesterday’s Medgadget about a European Union (EU) funded project that aims to develop a microchip that can do DNA analysis for clinical applications:

This is one of the examples of pan-European cooperation that we constantly see over the wires, that never seem to make it past EU’s bureaucratic directives … It seems to us that an average 10 person startup from Silicon Valley tends to deliver results better than multinational projects run by Brussels.

Both quotes remind me how direly we need historical studies of the long-term interaction between medical science/tech development and economic policy.

A History of Genetics Day will take place at the John Innes Centre, Norwich (UK) on 9 September 2009. An international line-up of historians of science will speak, including

• Robert Olby: William Bateson and the establishment of the John Innes Horticultural Institution
• Marsha Richmond: Institutionalizing Mendelism: Women in the John Innes Workforce
• Donald Forsdyke: William Bateson’s contributions to evolutionary theory
• Ted Porter: Biometry and the question of blending inheritance
• Oren Harman: Evolutionary chromosomes: C. D. Darlington and Cytogenetics
• Jenny Marie: Genetics in 1930s Britain: a context for genetics at the John Innes Horticultural Institution and the Plant Breeding Institute
• Soraya de Chadarevian: Genetics in the atomic age
• Mike Gale: From Plant Breeding Institute to Crop Genetics
• Keith Chater: Focus and diversity in the history of bacterial genetics
• Sabina Leonelli: Arabidopsis, the botanical Drosophila: from thale cress to model organism

The conference will be accompanied by a historical exhibition drawing on the John Innes Foundation Historical Collections. More info here.

In his most recent exhibition, French artist Christian Boltanski has set up a small recording studio where visitors can donate their heartbeats to the vast archive of the heart that the artist is currently building. Ultimately, the collection of heartbeats is to be stored on the uninhabited island of Ejima in Japan, which belongs to the art centre Benesse Art Site Naoshima.
There, it will be possible to access for anyone who feels the urge to listen to the heart of a beloved deceased, that is to say if the person in question was a donor, or simply contemplate over fugitive life. In more than one sense, Les archives du coeur is a continuation of Boltanski’s by now lifelong exploration of the ephemerality of human existence, or what the artist calls “small memories” as opposed to the kind of memories that make up our common historical references. The theme of irreversible loss, fading remembrance and eternal oblivion, which pervades works such as the The Children of Dijon (1986) and The Dead Swiss (1990) – see image below – is once again addressed here.

Those familiar with Boltanski’s work will also recognise his use of photographic portraits and naked light bulbs, albeit this time they’re not combined. Instead the portraits are sampled into one big projection, which shows fragments of faces shifting in furious speed. The light bulb in its turn, throws its swaying dim light over a dark room with nothing else in it except for the vigorous throbbing of a pulsating heart. What attracts most attention however is undeniably the possibility of donating one’s heartbeat to the archival record. This is carried out in a special room that is made to resemble a consulting office.

A white-coated “clinician” instructs you about the procedure, and after giving your informed consent the recording can take place, earphones on your head and stethoscope to your heart. Because it deals with a culturally emblematic organ as the heart, Les archives du coeur poses questions about contemporary biomedical archives, biobanks and databases in an oblique way. Can I be sure that my heartbeat will stay on Ejima and not be used in new inconceivable artforms? The exhibition is on until the 14th of December at Magasin 3 in Stockholm.

Here’s an interesting opportunity for bloggers specializing in medical and health communication. The NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research is organizing a three-day course on ”Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research“ in Bethesda next June — free registration, meals and lodging are provided (but you have to pay for your travel). There are only 50 spots and competition for these courses use to be formidable. Course agenda here, application form here. Deadline is 30 January!

(thanks to Jessica for the tip)

Yesterday, December 9, I joined the 40^th Anniversary Celebration of ‘Engelbart and The Dawn of Interactive Computing’ at Stanford University to celebrate what has been called the ‘mother of all demos’. On that day in 1968, 40 years ago, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, Engelbart and his team in Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC) debuted numerous—and now ubiquitous—technology innovations, including hypertext linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, real-time on-screen text editing, shared-screen teleconferencing, and the computer mouse.

Engelbart and his colleague William English, the engineer who designed the first mouse, conducted a real-time demonstration in San Francisco with co-workers connected from his ARC laboratory at SRI’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Yesterday, Engelbart was there at Stanford to be celebrated and to listen to the impressive list of speakers, who had conducted the demonstration or experienced it.

Like any other celebration, many anecdotes from the dawn of computer history were told. From 1961 to 1965, Robert W. Taylor was program manager for the NSA Headquarters Office of Advanced Research and Technology, and provided some of the very early and significant funding to SRI’s Augmentation Research Center. He talked about how hard it was for people to understand the new technologies in the beginning and getting a sense of what they actually were financially supporting. People instantly understood the hardware. It could be seen, felt, and measured. The hardware had size and shape. The software was more difficult. It could not be pointed out physically; it could not be seen and had no weight. If forced to point it out, you had to point to the holes in the punched cards.
Today, software has become an everyday thing. Even though, the most of us honestly do not have a clue about how software works (and we still cannot feel it or see it), there is nothing mysterious about software. I wonder if the same will happen to some of the invisible and in-sensible biotechnologies. That the more we get use to them, the more their invisibility and complexity will present a communicative problem. Two years ago, Thomas wrote a paper with the title ’Who is afraid of the recent biomedical heritage?’ (se former post on this blog, ) I wonder if that title is going to work in 10 years?  

The European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) invites submissions for its bi-annual meeting in Heidelberg, 3-6 September 2009. The general theme of the meeting — “Global Developments and Local Specificities in the History of Medicine and Health” — includes issues like:

• the impact of globalisation processes (political, economic, means of communication etc.) on local ideas and practices in medicine
• the spread of local medical ideas, practices, as well as materials (remedies, instruments, etc.) to broader national and international contexts (”travelling knowledge”)
• processes such as the hybridisation of “local” and “global” (or more hegemonic) concepts or practices
• the invention of (supposed) local traditions and their relations to previously transferred / migrated knowledge or practices (e.g. newly emerging “traditional medicine” in South America modelled on “alternative medicine” in Europe, or on Asian “medical systems”)
• the interrelations between colonial powers and colonies, or former colonial powers and former colonies in the realms of medicine and public health
• linguistic and cultural translations/adaptations of “foreign” medical concepts and practices
• the shifting perceptions about what constitutes the centre and what the periphery of certain developments, like “innovations”
• physicians as (global) travellers.

You can send in single paper proposals as well as proposals for sessions including at least three papers (particularly international panels; and you don’t need to be a ‘European’ to attend :-). Submit a one-page abstract for each presentation to marie.c.nelson@liu.se with a copy to volker.roelcke@histor.med.uni-giessen.de no later than 31 January, 2009. More info on www.eahmh.net soonish.

Like so many others, I’m intrigued by a YouTube movie that shows Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom’s body bakery shop (see the movie below).

Mr. Unarrom uses ordinary baking dough (plus cashew nuts, chocolate and raisins) to make bread in the shape of body parts. It’s all perfectly edible (well, I guess cannibals would find real body-parts perfectly edible too :-)

Mr. Unarrom is said to have been inspired by reading anatomy books and visiting pathology museums. What nobody seems to have suggested, however, is that he may have also been inspired by watching or reading about wax moulages. Because what Mr. Unarrom is doing with dough is what dermatologists and artists a century ago were doing with wax.

Medical wax moulages were used as documentation and teaching aids, for example to communicate the symptoms of skin diseases (an historical low-tech antecedent of telemedicine). Several museums around the world have collections of such moulages. Here at Medical Museion we have a collection of around 75 wax pieces, some of which are displayed (we’ve written about them before). Here is conservator Nicole Rehné busy restoring one of them:

And here is Mr. Unarrom working on one of his ‘loafs’ of bread:

For further reading about wax moulages in the history of medicine, see Thomas Schnalke’s excellent book Diseases in Wax: The History of the Medical Moulage (Berlin 1995).

And here’s the movie:

(thanks to Toronto advertising copywriter Jeremy Elder (shape+colour) for the tip about Unarrom’s ‘Body Bakery’)

In continuation of our former post on the auditory space of contemporary medicine —  listen here to sound artist John Wynne’s recordings of the medical soundscape at Harefield heart hospital, aired in BBC3’s Between the Ears slot in June.

I guess the idea of the programme was to use the medical sounds as background illustrations to the interviews with the patients in the clinic. As such they do their work well. But I would also like to see a reversal of front and backstage — that is, bringing medical sounds to the forefront, analogous to the way, for example Jacob Kirkegaard creates musical compositions out of ‘natural’ biomedical sounds.

(thanks to Gustav and Speechification for the tip)

As I wrote last week, Deutsches Museum in Munich is an impressive colossus which also has its innovative moments.

I’m thinking particularly of the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’, a small open nanotechnology research lab in the public area where ‘real’ nanotechnology researchers are doing their daily job.

The laboratory was initiated last year by the museum’s director general, Wolfgang M. Heckl, who also happens to be a professor in experimental physics and nanotechnology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) — and in addition has a reputation for being a prize-winning and dynamic science communicator.

The staff working in the museum laboratory are actually research students in his LMU lab. Here is one of them sitting in front of a scanning tunneling microscope doing something for his dissertation work while I took a photo of him:

Heckl has described (in German, on the Deutsches Museum blog) the idea of the public  museum laboratory as a mutual learning process. Not only will the general audience get an immediate feeling of ‘the making of science’. By working in a public laboratory space his students will also begin to realize that the visitors may in fact be interested in the research process and that they will therefore have to learn to communicate their knowledge with non-peers.

What I think is essentially innovative about this project is Heckl’s idea that the open research lab is an environment that could contribute to creating mutual trust between science and the public. Visitors have the opportunity to ask the student researchers about their working conditions, personal motivations, life perspectives etc. In this way, Heckl suggests, young researchers may become realistic role models and ambassadors for science. And as a consequence, he believes, science communication changes into a dialogic process:

Dabei kann Kommunikation nur dann wirklich funktionieren, wenn sich beide Seiten als gleichberechtigte Partner anerkennen, also weg vom Defizitmodell der Wissenschaftskommunikation früherer Jahre, hin zum Dialogmodell.

Accordingly, Heckl hopes that this new platform for science communication will result in a museum that involves the “co-production and understanding of objects” (”Mitmachens und Begreifens von Objekten”).

I guess that Heckl’s program for science museum communication will cause heavy heartburn to some museum directors trained as historians of science and technology. In fact, he doesn’t say a single word about placing nanotechnology in its cultural, historical and social context, and I can well imagine that his ideas aren’t particularly popular among the historians-curators at Deutsches Museum.

Nevertheless it sounds like an interesting and innovative way of creating a participatory element in our kind of museums. I, for one, would certainly not substitute the historical and cultural galleries with open research laboratories. But I would like to see some serious attempts to integrate our historical displays with some more direct and dialogic-oriented science-public interaction.

Open research laboratories in museums might be one way forward. Doesn’t have to be a nanolab, of course. It could be a working electron microscope lab, an imaging lab, a tissue engineering lab, a clinical chemical lab, or whatever — which is then somehow set in historical and cultural perspective.

Another way could be laboratories for historical reconstructions of scientific (technological, medical) work. Otto Sibum (now in Uppsala) and his co-workers have done some very interesting work along the lines of “an experimental history of science”. (The only problem with that approach is that it doesn’t contribute to establishing relations of trust between scientists and visitors, but between historian-curators and visitors — but that’s a problem to be left for a later post.)

(Open conservation laboratories is something else — they have been tried out, often with considerable success.)

Someone may have come up with much better ways of integrating history-based science communication with science-based science communication. If so, please let us know!

PS: They also have a more conventional showcase with everyday products containing nanotechnological ’stuff’ placed in the room where the ‘Gläsernes Forscherlabor’ is situated: