Biomedicine on Display

Our colleagues at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (in DC) are right now experiencing a dramatically increasing traffic from all over the world to their unofficial Repository of Bottled Monsters blog. From about 100 views a day to 300 views an hour last week.

The reason for this stunning outreach success is that Wired.com and many other websites have spread the news about the NMHM staff’s work to put the museum’s picture archive on Flickr. In a few week’s time, more than half a million Flickr users have seen the exquisite collection of images, especially of American war medicine.

The US Army (which owns NMHM) are imposing a general ban on letting its employees and institutions have access to Flickr (and other social network sites), so the NMHM staff decided to put the pictures on Flickr from their home computers in their spare time.

Many other institutions already do this (in their working hours :-). For example the Smithsonian has a great photostream on Flickr Commons. So do Powerhouse, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Swedish National Heritage Board (two weeks ago), and many others. But what the NMHM example shows better than these is that a presence on the Commons can make a small institution and its blog blossom.

Here at Medical Museion we have so far been somewhat reluctant to think in these terms, not only because it’s a big and expensive operation to put our rich image archive online, but also because we are already getting some direly needed income from selling images.

But maybe we should put the image collection online for free? We will miss a few thousand DKK a year in monetary revenues, that’s right. But the good-will revenue from posting them in the public space, for example, under a Creative Commons license, will probably be much higher — and in the long run it might, as a side-effect, increase our overall revenues.

Nick Carr (Rough Type) has an interesting comment about Wikipedia. Referring to an essay in yesterday’s Sunday Times by Noam Cohen, who likens Wikipedia to a city with features like ‘basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities’, Carr points out that policing is an increasingly important feature of the popular online encyclopedia:

It’s the fact that Wikipedia has imposed editorial controls [on certain articles] … restricting who can edit them.

In other words, if you visit a noncontroversial Wikipedia article, like ’Toothpick’, you are still allowed to edit it. But if you visit articles like ‘Barack Obama’, ‘Islam’, or ‘Sex’ you will find a ‘view source’ tab instead of the usual ‘edit this page’ tab. Trustful self-organisation has been replaced by editorial policing.

Interesting! I’ve never thought about this. So I made a rapid search for ‘Genetics’, ‘Medicine’, ‘Evolution’, ’RNA’ and ‘DNA’. And guess what — ‘Genetics’, ‘Evolution’ and ‘DNA’ are apparently too contested to be open for bottom-up editing, while ‘Medicine’ and ‘RNA’ are seemingly uncontroversial (so far). See here:

To some extent this is self-evident. I’m not surprised there are thousands of wackos out there who love to infest the Wikipedia article on ’Evolution’. But why ’DNA’ and ‘Genetics’ — and not ‘RNA’?

In an interview for the Danish daily Information about his new book The Politics of Climate Change — which is scheduled for publication in May, with laudatory pre-blurbs by Martin Rees, Ulrich Bech and Bill Clinton on Amazon.com — British sociologist Anthony Giddens reminds us that Martin Luther King famously said ‘I have a dream’, not ‘I have a nightmare’. In other words: dystopian thinking is not a good basis for political action.

I guess he’s basically right. There is much that supports the idea that climate policy changes will be served better by what Giddens (1990) called ‘realistic utopianism’ than by fear scenarios (even though critical and negative scenarios sometimes are necessary stepping stones towards more positive agendas).

However, it makes me wonder: could the same reasoning be applied to the way we talk about biomedicine and medical technology?

I’m asking because almost everything I have read about biomedical and medical technology policy in books and articles by social scientists and humanities scholars over the last decades has been guided by what one could call a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion‘.

The scholarly literature is carried by a strong, mostly unexplicit, undercurrent of skepticism and negative criticism. Biomedicine and medical technology invariably poses ethical, political and social ‘problems’ and ’challenges’ — rarely opportunities, possibilities or means for liberation. Social science and humanities scholars writing about the future of biomedicine and medical technology have nightmares, rarely dreams.

I guess the ubiquity of this critical and negative scholarship could be understood as a kind of collective gut reaction against the commonplace (and often pretty naïve) scenarios of a bright biomedical and medicotechnological future envisioned by scientists and engineers. The biotech revolution has to a large degree been carried by enthusiastic utopianism. Pharma websites are cluttered with pictures of happy children playing on lush green meadows with beautiful mothers and benevolent-looking grandpas in the background.

So I understand the need for a balance. But why do we have to choose between naïve scientific and corporate enthusiasm on the one hand and academic skepticism on the other? Why is it so difficult for social science and humanities scholars to develop a more ‘realistic utopianism’ with respect to the future development of biomedicine and medical technology?

At the moment, academic designers (like Suzanne Lee) seem to be more upbeat than social scientists and humanities scholars. Could we learn from the attitude of bio-designers and bioartists to avoid the quagmire of negative scenarios?

The paper that Susanne and Jan Eric (who are both working in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ project) presented at the third Surveillance & Society conference in Sheffield in April 2008 (see earlier blog post here) has just been published in the journal Surveillance & Society (vol. 6, 2009). Here’s the abstract:

This article explores two instances of medical surveillance that illustrate post-panoptic views of the body in biomedicine, from the patient to the population. Techniques of surveillance and monitoring are part of medical diagnostics, epidemiological studies, aetiologic research, health care management; they also co-shape individual engagements with illness. In medicine, surveillance data come as digital anatomies for educational purposes and clinical diagnostics that subject the body to imaging techniques, but also as databases of patient collectives that are established in large-scale, at times nationwide, epidemiological studies. We will show that techniques of medical surveillance now include more bottom-up and less-centralized modes as well: with web 2.0 applications, one encounters endoscopic clips uploaded and made public on the internet and tools to navigate through patterns of sickness in urban space. Surveillance techniques directed at individual patients and at population health reconfigure the constellation of the body, space and the gaze into a post-panoptic distributed mode.

Read the full paper online here.

Research animals in the history of 20th century biomedicine has received quite a lot of attention in recent years. And what animal is more interesting than the pig! Our colleagues in Health Services Research Unit here in Copenhagen are announcing a three-year position as PhD-student in a new research project, headed by Lene Koch, called “Modelling pigs and humans: Understanding human/animal connections in translational research”. The general aim of the project is to “investigate the moral, socio-material, technical and organisational work that is needed in order to establish the pig as locus of producing knowledge about human life and disease”. The PhD student they are looking for right now is expected to work on a subproject titled “Extending life: The use of transgenic (humanised) pigs as disease models in biomedical research and treatment” which addresses

the social dimensions and epistemic aspirations of the emerging field of translational medicine within selected biomedical research areas. Specifically, the moral, socio-material organisational and scientific work performed to establish the pig as a potential for modelling human organs and/or functions in research settings and in patient treatment.

Sounds like a great project and a great opportunity for an exciting PhD project. Contact Lene Koch (koch@pubhealth.ku.dk) for further details.

(the pig above — from Struve Labs that produce pigs for pig-huma-tranplants — has no relation to Lene’s project)

The theme of the 2010 meeting of the Society for the Social History of Medicine in Durham and Newcastle, 8-11 July 2010, will be ‘Knowledge, Ethics and Representations of Medicine and Health: Historical Perspectives’. The organisers particularly encourage proposals for 20 min papers addressing questions such as:

• What processes have generated knowledge about the body, illness and health that has become authoritative in different societies?
• How have claims of medical expertise been justified vis à vis claims from other domains of social and cultural authority such as religion and law?
• What did it mean for medical practitioners in different cultural and social contexts to claim to be ethical as well as knowledgeable?
• How did they present themselves to the public?
• What kind of material, visual and textual representations of body, mind, health and disease have gained ‘defining power’ exerting influence on medical practice and research until today?

Otherwise no restriction re. period or geographical region. They also want panel session proposals (with 3 papers). Send 250 word abstracts to conference@nchm.ac.uk before 1 November. For more info, see www.sshm.org.

Next time you happen to be in New York, make sure you pay a visit to Observatory, a new collaborative presentation / screening / classroom / exhibition located at 543 Union Street in Brooklyn. The collaborators include Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy), Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras (Curious Expeditions), Pam Grossman (Phantasmaphile), Herbert Pfostl, illustrator/animator G. F. Newland, and video and book artist James Walsh. Plans for Observatory include lectures screenings, exhibitions, book-release parties, classes, and symposia. For recent events, see here and here.

Studies of biomedicine (a subarea of science studies) has long been defined in terms of social studies of biomedicine (social studies of science). Over the years, some, but alas not many, scholars (including myself) have tried to infuse some awareness of the individual and personal dimensions of biomedicine.

Now, an interdisciplinary conference titled ‘Turning Personal’ at the University of Manchester, 16-17 September, promises to take the discussion a step forward by providing a forum for the discussion of how social research can incorporate more complex and multi-layered accounts of personal lives into academic writings and analyses:

It has been argued that we now have a sociology without real people and the same may be said of some sister disciplines and although there have always been threads of work which re-imagine the personal (eg biographical work) there is more to be done and said about capturing some of the more detailed aspects of personal lives, as well as theorising personal life more cogently.

Topics include (e.g.) emotions and emotional spaces, escape(s) from intimacy, relationships/ relationality/ connectedness, virtual lives and second lives, impersonal lives, writing / researching / theorising the personal. Keynote speakers include Carol Smart (Uni Manchester), who works on how people conduct their personal lives, Tia DeNora (Uni Exeter), who is interested in musical selves in musical spaces, and Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, London). Send abstract submission (here) to victoria.higham@manchester.ac.uk before 1 April.

Continuing our series of visualizations of viruses (see earlier posts here and here) — these beautiful glass sculptures by Luke Jerram

just arrived in the mailbox. “Smallpox, HIV & Flu, which together form an installation called ‘Past, Present and Future’”.

The big news in US health politics this week was that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Salmonella as a food stuff. Hundreds of food manufacturers have been busy reorienting the production lines for this fabulous new market possibility, for example these brand new Salmonella-enriched cereals:

Read more in The Onion here.

The provisional programme for the Society of Social History of Medicine Postgraduate Conference in Dublin (Ireland), 16-18 April 2009 — on the theme ‘Medicine and Healthcare: History and Context’ (could it be more general?) — is now available. See programme in pdf-file here and other conference details here.

Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of virology and visualizations of viruses will enjoy Frederick Murphy’s powerpoint slide set ‘The Foundations of Medical and Veterinary Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technology’ (downloadabe here).

The set contains a large number of images of viruses and virologists taken from his own and his colleagues’ image collections, other internet sites, and library collections (I hope he hasn’t breached too many copyrights :-).

The slideshow is a chronologically organized catalogue of names, portraits, major inventions and scientific objects and not a history of virology as such — but the image material is very interesting and sometimes stunning (the image above is a colorized micrograph of a Ross River virus, an RNA alphavirus responsible for a disease called epidemic polyarthritis). A very useful introduction to the myriad of actors and objects in this exciting biomedical field.

If you are on the outlook for a job where you can combine research in medical history with public outreach — here’s your chance: The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester are looking for someone who would like to do 50% of each. The post would, they say in the announcement, “suit a historian of modern medicine, science or allied field, with a recent (or imminent) PhD, who wishes to develop their profile into the expanding area of outreach, while at the same time developing their research experience and profile”. Salary level is £28,839 – £33,432. Read more here. Prof. Michael Worboys (michael.worboys@manchester.ac.uk) can answer informal inquiries. Closing date is 30 March.

The status of research physicians, i.e., biomedical researchers who are trained as medical doctors (MD), is an interesting issue in the history of contemporary biomedicine.

What makes research physicians so interesting is how their contributions to research compares with scientists who have received 8-10 years of research-oriented training in the BSc – MSc – PhD track, for example in molecular biology, physiology or some other medically relevant subject area. “The MD-PhD wars”, as one blogger (Kristi) puts it:

As an undergraduate and graduate student this was a popular water cooler topic of conversation. Who receives better training, who make better scientists?

The argument against research physicians is that even though they have received a long training to learn how to diagnose and treat patients, they’ve never really learned how to think in terms of research. In Kristi’s (not entirely unbiased) words:

The PhD trains you to think independently, to connect seemingly unrelated ideas, to design experiments that are meaningful no matter what the outcome. MDs are taught to memorize, and only do rotations in labs to catch a glimpse of how real science is done and fulfill a requirement for graduation.

In some countries, like Denmark, the problem was ”solved” in the 1990s by introducing a three-year PhD-program between the MD and a later research career. I put ”solved” between inverted commas because in my experience (I’ve been sitting on our faculty’s research committee for a couple of years), applicants for medical PhD stipends with a BSc+MSc background usually wrote much better applications than applicants with an MD background and therefore got most of the stipends.

An upcoming conference — ‘The Role of the Research Physician: From Golden Past to Threatened Future? in Bethesda 26-27 March — promises to go deeper into the issue. Organized by the Office of NIH History, the aim is to bring together leading physician researchers, organizational leaders, historians and social scientists for an exploration of the physician-scientist research tradition, its future challenges and opportunities:

Physicians who devote themselves to biomedical research have played crucial roles in the development of scientific medicine for more than 100 years. A variety of institutions—hospitals, medical foundations, the Public Health Service, most notably the NIH, universities, and pharmaceutical companies—have supported their research. Since the ‘Golden Era’ of physician-scientists — roughly 1950 to the mid-1970s — leaders in each research context have expressed increasing concern about the ability of physician-scientists to sustain themselves and their research tradition.

More, including speakers, etc, here.

Collecting in museums runs the risk of becoming a rather pedestrian and academically uninteresting activity unless informed by and contributing to some wider theoretical perspectives. The one-day interdisciplinary conference on ‘Collecting and Gathering: Making Worlds and Staking Claims’ at Columbia University, 23 May, might be helpful to develop the discourse around museum collecting and acquisitioning. As the organizers (graduate students at the Dept of Archeology) say:

Practices, institutions and ideas centered around collections and collecting offer a fruitful area for interdisciplinary enquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Whether in the processes through which collections come to be formed, or the ways in which existing collections are experienced by a variety of publics, the impulse to collect is often key to knowing a wider world, and also knowing oneself.

Accordingly contributions dealing with museum collections as well as less tangible collections (collections of facts or ideas) are equally welcome, relating to themes such as:

• The temporality of gathering – how the past and future are grasped and mediated through material substances and practices
• Collecting and power – how collecting sets up or maintains power differentials between collector and collected, exhibitor and exhibited
• Fixing and making worlds – the bonding of materials, substances, place and people
• Histories of collecting – changing modalities and definitions of the collection and of what it is to gather materials, ideas or people in place and time
• Collecting as a transformative process – how collecting alters, re-presents or invents the object that is collected and the implications of such transformations
• Spaces of collection and collections of spaces – the politics, poetics and meaning of the exhibition space and its architectural framing

Another interesting feature of this conference is that it will be accompanied by an exhibit on collecting designed by students in the Museum Masters program at Columbia University.

Send 200 word abstract + contact information to Matt Sanger (mcs2178@columbia.edu) before 22 March.

(thanks to Haidy for the tip)