Biomedicine on Display

Sometimes it’s amazing what turns up, when you use the web. I’m currently doing some research for a Ph.D-application concerning neuroscience (among other things) and stumbled upon this online article: A Harvard Psychiatrist Explains Zombie Neurobiology

The article does what it promises – it discusses zombie neurobiology and refers to a Havard psychiatrist who appearently is also a zombie movie fan and therefore has made zombies his specialty: “the world’s leading authority on the neurobiology of the living dead”.

Aside from being one of the many examples of the pervasive prescence of neuroscience in all aspect of western culture, this hybrid case of science and fiction also could (with only a little intellectualizing) point to the discussion about the boarders of science communication and leisure economy. Experience zombiemovies and learn about neurobiology at the same time! How’s that for new ideas on public outreach. Neurobiology sure has its moments.

Two months ago I praised John Harley Warner’s and Jim Edmonson’s book Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in America, 1880-1930.

As Kirsten Jungersen points out in a comment, one of our former staff members here at Medical Museion, Mikkel Jessen, wrote about dissection as a rite-of-passage in an article in the journal Bibliotek for Læger already in September 2002 (pp. 260-69).

Mikkel’s is a short but excellent article on four different ways in which dissection has been displayed: Rembrandt’s ‘De anatomishe les’, Hogarth’s ‘The four stages of cruelty’, Simonet’s ‘La autopsia’, and a photo of a staged dissection at the Royal Academy of Surgeons in Copenhagen, where the medical students are trained in ‘the necessary kind of inhumanity’.

What triggered this post, however, is that Mikkel’s article is yet another example of how the work of young scholars in small countries remain largely unread outside the small national circle (Bibliotek for Læger publishes in Danish only). Had Mikkel written his piece in English it would have been recognized several years before John and Jim published their excellent book. I mean, he could have been recruited as a PhD-student at Yale, where John works, or whatever.

So Mikkel’s article reminds me how many good opportunities are lost because too many young Danish (Swedish, Norwegian, Estonian etc.) scholars restrict themselves to writing in their mothertongues. Use the current lingua franca, please!

Our outreach officer, Bente Vinge Pedersen, has transformed Medical Museion’s newly opened temporary exhibition Split + Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine into a web exhibition.

See it here (for English, press ‘in English’ in the upper right corner).

But remember — the web version is a poor substitute for the real stuff.

Anastasia Filippoupoliti at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece
(afilipp@gmail.com) and Graeme Farnell at MuseumsEtc, UK (graeme@museumsetc.com) are soliciting papers for a forthcoming book that will explore:

• the processes involved in developing new science exhibitions in and for museums
• the issues involved in transforming scientific ideas or events into exhibitions
• the challenges faced by museums in communicating science to a wide audience.

Much has been written about the difficulties of disseminating science to the public through a variety of new and traditional media. It is, indeed, a complex subject to tackle in the exhibition space, yet a challenging and multidimensional one.

How best to understand the process of working from scientific data to the ideas-based exhibition? What exactly is lost during the transformation of factual information into an exhibition environment? And more importantly, how can the exhibition work most effectively as a tool for narrating science, its past and present?

They welcome a range of submissions including, but not limited to, the following issues/themes:

• both theoretical perspectives and case studies relating to science exhibitions
• exhibition design for science: problems and opportunities
• successful design techniques and approaches in relation to science displays
• science communication in the museum: interpretation issues
• learning activities and science collections
• developing learning resources for science exhibitions
• object stories and science learning
• exhibitions interpreting the history of science

Please submit an abstract (up to 400 words) and a biographical note (up to 250 words) by email to both editors above. Deadline for abstracts and bio 30 September 2009. Selection for inclusion 30 October 2009.

While we’re at it, here is another interesting conference coming up. (See here or here for recent posts about interesting conferences.)

The Danish research center DREAM (Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials) have organized a one-day conference at Roskilde University, September 22nd 2009. At the conference there will be presentations about a.o. the (maybe not so) new possibilities of using digital communication in a museum context; critical discussions about museums as learning institutions; and discussions about the relationship between the public and museum institutions in a new museological context.
These are themes which are discussed regularly at Medical Museion – and Museion will be represented among the conference participants. Some presentations will be held in English and some in danish according to the conference programme. Here is a rough translation of the danish conference teaser:

The digital culture brings forth new opportunities to strengthen communication to more, potentially interested users. But external communication is not only good communication of an academic subject. Communication influences, changes and distorts the subject. More, and more diverse, communication changes the relationship between communicator, message and recepient at the same time as boundaries between leisure centers, knowledge centers and museums are erased.
DREAM invites you to discuss these changes. What happens with the changed forms of communication? Who is communicating with whom? What is changed? And who is changed? What does the new forms of communication mean for the self understanding and development of museums and science centers?

What happens if one lets an entire congress of specialists in the field of neuroaesthetics loose in our temporary exhibition Split and Splice. Fragments from the age of biomedicine? I have no idea – but I intend to find out.

In September the University of Copenhagen is host to The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference and the program is intriguing. Admittedly I’m a regular tabula rasa when it comes to the subject of neuroaesthetics but the questions asked by this branch of science are extremely interesting. If I have understood just the basics of neuroaesthetics correct they seem to believe that how we perceive art and beauty is something that is in the basics of human understanding. Interesting. I would very much like to hear how they would judge our exhibition and how they would view it from a neuroaesthetic point of view. Therefore I have written to the organisers and asked them if they might be interested in viewing our show and if the conference participants might like to visit the Medical Museion while they are in Copenhagen. I’m eagerly awaiting their reply.   

While we’re wating I thought that I might show a picture from Split and Splice: a PET scanner ring. Also used (I believe) in the field of neuroaesthetics.

Another object-oriented conference is coming up, this one organised by CRESC (Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) at the University of Manchester. The list of speakers looks very promising (I’d particularly like to hear Graham Harman, as his work on object-philosophy is extremely intriguing). Here is an excerpt from the conference description:

As contemporary social theorists continue to signal the need to reconfigure our deliberations on the social through attention to practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the affective dimensions of human sociality, this conference takes as its focus the objects and values which find themselves at centre stage. And we ask, in the context of nearly two decades of diverse disciplinary approaches to these issues, what matters about objects? How are they inflecting our understandings of technology, of expertise, and of social change? How has a focus on objects reconfigured our understandings of how values inflect the ways in which people make relations, create social worlds, and construct conceptual categories? How have objects become integral to human enthusiasms and energies, to transformational ambition, or to the transmission of values across time and space? How do objects move between ordinary and extraordinary states, shade in and out of significance, manifest instability and uncertainty? How do moral and material values attach to objects as they move in space and time? What dimensions do they inhabit and/or reveal?

More details can be found here.

Excellent comment on the alleged Chinese ‘tradition’ for organ trafficking:

Organ Donor Dolls by David Foox, who created these designer vinyl toys in order to bring awareness to the issue of organ transplant and donation. Currently China undertakes around 10,000 organ transplants per year (about the same as the US).

(Thanks to Vanessa for the tip)

Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, invites applications for a 3-year PhD/2-year postdoc position in the projekt ‘Communicative barriers between biomedical research and everyday health care in a museum context’:

The increasingly important role of biomedical knowledge and advanced medical technologies in Western health systems is a challenge to the public communication of and engagement with medicine, especially in science, technology and medical museums. This project aims to develop the understanding of the means through which esoteric biomedical and medico-technological knowledge and practices can be communicated to lay people in a museum exhibition context, with special emphasis on the use of material and visual cultural practices. The project is expected to help construct new physical and web-based exhibition and display practices for science, technology and medical museums.

Medical Museion is an integrated research and museum institution that focuses on the public engagement with the contemporary biomedical sciences. We are especially interested in the interface between biomedicine, material and visual studies, museum studies and studies of the participatory web. See www.corporeality.net/museion.

The salary level for a PhD-candidate in Denmark is 295,000 DKK (approx. € 39,600/ £ 34,000) p.a.

The salary levels for a postdoc is 370,000 DKK (approx. € 50,000 / £ 42,000) p.a. upwards (depending on earlier experience).

The position is part of a larger cross-faculty research program ‘Dissemination and Innovation: Health in Everyday Life’, which in turn is part of a newly established Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen (see http://healthyaging.ku.dk).

Applications for the postdoc level shall include CV and publication list; short description of background and motivation for choosing this research project; project description (max. 5 pages); and copies of degrees.

Application for the PhD level shall include a CV; short project proposal (max. 2 pages); academic transcripts; and copies of degrees.

Deadline is 1 September, 2009 at 14.00. Applications must be submitted electronically and in print (4 copies) to:

Assoc. prof. Lene Otto
Section of Ethnology, the SAXO Institute
Faculty of Humanities, Njalsgade 80
DK-2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
lotto@hum.ku.dk

Further information can be obtained from Professor Thomas Söderqvist, ths@sund.ku.dk, or +45 2875 3801.

For the full text of the announcement in context, see http://healthyaging.ku.dk/vacancies.

Ever wondered why hospitals are associated with the colour green? Green surgery scrubs, green operating theatres, green-painted instruments, and so on and so forth.

A temporary exhibition called ‘Artifact Spotlight: The Colour of Medicine’ at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa shows how the colour green conquered the hospital world during the 20th century:

Green was a popular choice. Surgeons first added “spinach-leaf green” to their clothing in 1914 to reduce glare from traditional hospital whites. In the 1930s, hospital decorators used green to influence patient moods. It carried associations with nature, growth and recovery. Tiled surgical suites, patient rooms, clothing and instruments all went green in the post World War Two era.

The exhibition curator, David Pantalony, is currently exploring the history of the colour green in medical instruments in the period 1950 to 1975 and in medicine in general. Look out for his forthcoming article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal this summer.

Here’s an another image of the exhibition:

I distributed my memory of being a biochemistry student swinging rats by their tails through the air so the neck landed on a bench edge (no blood, just a momentarily broken neck) to the rete list, adding:

It took some training to land it exactly on the edge, though; some less manually skilled students smashed the rat’s back on the table, which only paralysed it. I must confess that I sort of liked this swinging procedure, to the great admiration and horror of some of the other (female) students. Sublime! Gothic biochemistry, to paraphrase Bruce Sterling.

This provoked another round of comments, which I take the liberty to quote from (they are publicly accessible in rete’s online archive), because they throw some additional light on the rat guillotine phenomenon.

Frank Manasek (cf. earlier post) remembers that “there actually was very little blood – the little critters don’t have a lot”:

Lab rats are pretty big and I never saw the guillotine used on rats – Thomas is right – the swinging technique was preferred. I seem to recall that mice and hamsters weigh about 100 grams and rats maybe 5 times that. Rats also bite so you have to be careful.

and adds that:

A drawback of the guillotine is that the decapitated animal has spasms and if you want to get an organ out very quickly it can be a problem. I used to take out hamster spleens and there was always a slight delay. A table-edged rat only quivered.

Steven Turner at the Smithsonian (see also earlier post), remember chatting with the scientist who brought the rat guillotine in to their collection:

It was part of a large group of instruments that he had pulled out of the trash as the FDA labs were being reorganized. He hadn’t worked with the guillotine personally, but we all assumed that the red base was to disguise the blood released during decapitation. However, since Frank and others report very little blood being “spilled” this may not be correct. It’s possible that the red paint was meant as a caution aqainst cutting off one’s own finger – which seems like a real possibility with this instrument. On the other hand, a busy government testing lab might have sacrificed a lot of animals.

To which Frank responds:

Steve, on a busy morning I might have sacrificed 200 hamsters – very little blood as I recall. Mostly fur clogging the knife. Yes there was danger of finger loss- animals often were sacrificed in a cold room (4 C) – my hamsters were (the reason here was that they were cold-adapted) and fingers could get numb quickly.

These interesting comments remind me about that we are dealing here with a kind of invisible practice in the history of recent biomedicine. A practice that permeats much of the daily routines in the laboratory but is almost unaccessible through the published literature or laboratory notebooks. A practice that, to my best knowledge, no oral historian of biomedicine or biomedical memoir has so far touched upon.

Inspired by Morten’s post on the ‘rat guillotine’ that we collected during our first ’Archaeology of Contemporary Biomedicine Garbage Day’ exercise in 2007, I asked the rete list “if there are other ’rat guillotines’ around or if this is a unique Copenhagen death machine?” — and immediately received some interesting answers:

Dartmouth anatomist Frank Manasek responds that these weren’t necessarily rat guillotines, but rather general small-animal guillotines:

In the US they were available commercially at least in the 1960s when I used one for several years decapitating hamsters. My commercial model looked just like the one illustrated except it didn’t have constraint tubes.

Rich Paselk, who heads the Scientific Instrument Museum at Humboldt State University also recalls using such a machine as a student in biochemistry in California back in 1967:

Aside from the animal issues there was also the fun of convincing the rat to put its head in the hole (there was no constraint tube on ours), and the fear of putting a finger in by accident.

So Rich was quite happy when the course was over; he preferred other killing techniques in his later lab career.

Finally, Bart Fried puts icing on the cake by adding that commercial guillotines are still sold (see for example this one from Daigger’s website) and that they can be found ”in virtually every pharmaceutical company’s laboratory and in many hospital laboratories”.

Most interestingly, Bart also points to the existence of formal sets of rules and regulations for the use of such items, like the Policy and Procedures for Maintenance of Guillotines document from the University of Arizona. Well, when you think of it, of course! Foucault would smile in his grave — the governance of rat and hamster euthanasia!

A while ago one of my friends went to Sydney to visit a friend who works in behavioral neuroscience. My friend was shown around in her friend’s laboratory and when she returned to Denmark one of the things she mentioned (with more fascination and dread than any other item from the lab) was the so called rat guillotine, she’d seen. According to her friend the guillotine was one of the most humane instruments for destroying the rats after the experiments.

The concept of a rat guillotine is likely to produce images of a tall narrow machine with a sharp triangular blade rushing towards an outstretched (rat) neck. A search in Medical Museion’s collections reveals another image, though:

The guillotine in the picture was originally from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen. It was constructed ca. 1970 by the mechanic Henning Emmè (†1990).

The guillotine is a fascinating (if somewhat morbid) piece of laboratory equipment that can at the same time hint at the more gory parts of science and the relation between scientist and animals and also be used as an example of ‘home made’ laboratory equipment. As assistant engineer Kristian Karlsen told us, when Museion was at the annual ’clean-up-day’ at Panum, biomedical researchers in past and present have often had to construct their own equipment in collaboration with mechanics and engineers. He mentioned that at some point in the recent history of biomedicine at Panum there was one equipment-building workshop for every 4-5 laboratories. In other words, ‘home made’ laboratory equipment is and has been a more important and frequently used part of biomedical research than most people would think.

The ’clean-up-day’ at Panum resulted in a few of such items collected by Museion. For example this little machine:

It is still an ongoing process to collect all the information we need about the item and its use. It came from one of the Department of Biomedical Sciences’ storage rooms and has most likely been used to slice tissue up for experiments (notice the slightly rusty razor blade over the white block). Like the guillotine this item has the ability to evoke curiosity in the beholder. It is clearly a unique ‘home made’ item. But how did it work? Who designed it?  And how exactly has it been part of biomedical research practice at Panum?

When more information becomes available, another blog post will follow up on this one. We’re right now in the process of communicating Musion’s collections online at the museum’s Danish blog, but will also post some of them here when it seems appropriate – new strange and interesting items may see a virtual light of day, so to speak, during the next couple of months.

Split + Splice, Del + Hel, is about the inter-relations between the culture of biomedicine and the enormous complexities of 21st century living.  The exhibition explores these complexities through the material culture, objects and instruments used by biomedical practitioners in research and in clinical activities.

Much as biomedicine itself, Split + Splice is an innovative hybridisation of complex practices.  It is not exactly science communication; it will not teach you comprehensively about the field of biomedicine.  It is not exactly old-fashioned history of science; it will not show you a triumphalist progression of miraculous discovery.  It is not exactly an art exhibition; it will not leave you with a sense that you have seen inside a solo mind.

Investigation, intervention, inquiry, analysis, critique, visualisation, modeling.  All these processes are present in scientific methodology, in the disciplines of art, design and aesthetics, and in the methods of the history and philosophy of science and medicine.  If the sheer knife of a microtome can give us the startling and strange histological slice of tissue that revealed the neuron to Ramon y Cajal for the first time, then we must also be able to wield with equal precision what we know about aesthetics to reveal vital information about the cultures that made the objects under scrutiny; here we have investigated the prosaic but fundamental way that both plastics and computing have revolutionised medicine.  Under a humanities microscope, epistemological investigations of the ritual and often hypnotically repetitive practices of biomedicine can reveal, among other things, the social assumptions that often underpin disease prediction.

In Split + Splice we have used different techniques from the arts, the sciences and the humanities as prisms to analyse the same material in several ways.  The exhibition’s ‘catalogue’ User Manual is also the object index for the entire show: a gift to the visitor to take away and keep, but also something that sets the objects free from text, allows them to be discovered in their form and materiality by the visitor.  

Split + Splice is not about the ‘user end’ or the magic bullet, but rather the minutiae of biomedicine’s daily practice.

  
We take the visitor into the engine room of biomedicine, into its Cold Room, its Wet Lab, its number crunching, its visualisation practices.  Its incubators and ion exchange columns.  Its legal frameworks and its media leaks.  We will take you into some of the historical origins of biomedicine’s process of fragmenting the body into smaller and smaller pieces.  We came to the conclusion that all of biomedical practice is a never-ending attempt to contain the torrent of life and manage the flows of this cascade of complexity from biosample to dataset, from clinic to lab, from individual to populace.  These practices of containment and flow tell us much about the cultures of biomedicine and the kinds of societies that its practices produce.  
 

Split + Splice is an experience, not an explanation.  We want people to leave the exhibition with a sense of how to ask pertinent questions about biomedicine and the ways in which it affects their own individual and social/collective lives.  Switch on, measure up, and to go with the flow, into the show.

Martha Fleming, for the exhibition team: Søren Bak-Jensen, Susanne Bauer, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Jan Eric Olsén and Jonas Paludan.

For more pictures from the exhibition, see Museionblog or, for a slideshow of the pictures, go here.