Biomedicine on Display

In the last ten years or so, in the wake of the renewed interest in protein research and proteomics after genomics, we have seen more and more artists making protein sculptures. See, for example, Graphic Thought Facility’s neon protein artwork, or Colin Rennies glass sculpture of ATP synthase, or Julian Voss-Andreae’s wood and steel sculpures of proteins, just to mention a few.

Here’s another recent example. Herwig Turk sent me these images from his current exhibition gaps (with Paulo Pereira and Johannes Hoffmann) at the Museu da Ciência, Coimbra, Portugal (the museum of the Universidade de Coimbra):

Made by ropes and epoxy and coloured with red ship paint, gaps is based on a 3D-model of connexin43 drawn by PhD-student Steve Catarino at Universidade de Coimbra in connection with a research project supervised by Paulo Pereira.

Cx43 is one of the several specific proteins that form so called ‘gap-junctions’, i.e., channels that allow signal molecules to pass the membranes between cells. Intercellular communication by means of ‘gap-junctions’ is vitally important for many bodily functions; best known is the gap junction signalling responsible for the coordination of heart beat.

Herwig explains the background for the artwork:  [Steve] did a sketch to explain it to the students and we build a sculpture after that sketch”:

My stomach rumbled with excitement when I read the call for papers for a workshop titled ‘History, Digestion and Society: New Perspectives’ at University College Dublin, 30 April – 1 May 2010, organised at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland.

As the organisers (Ian Miller and Mike Liffey) point out, diet and digestion are neglected in histories of the body, health and medicine. And diseases of the digestive system, like dyspepsia, peptic ulcer disease, vomiting etc., are not properly historically contextualised:

(image of knitted stomach from Strange but Trewe)

Meanwhile, historical analysis of issues related to food and eating often reveals a tendency to stress the political elements of historical events at the expense of the biological and medical. Topics such as hunger strikes, and the rise of organised movements such as the Temperance movement and organised vegetarianism have complex medical and biological aspects which are worthy of serious analytical attention.

Possible topics include:

• Refusal to eat food (e.g. hunger strikes)
• Dietary movements (e.g. temperance societies, vegetarianism)
• The development of related technologies such as frozen food and processed food.
• Historical concepts related to understandings of nutrition
• The history of individual digestive organs such as the stomach
• Medical issues related to digestion (e.g. gastric ulcer disease, indigestion)
• Socio-cultural issues related to obesity and anorexia.
• Surgical and medical intervention in the digestive system.
• Human and animal digestive habits
• Digestion and criminal activity (e.g. poisoning)

Send a 250 word abstract to Ian Miller (ian.miller2@ucd.ie) no later than 30 November 2009. For further info: Mike Liffey (michael.liffey@ucd.ie)

If the colour of medicine is green — what is (are) the colour(s) of the biomedical laboratory? And how have these colours shifted over time?

I’m asking, because David just sent this image of a “gorgeous MacBeth densitometer” (cat.nr. 1998.0174) telling me he’s now looking around for “space age blue” in his museum’s collection.

I guess the biomedical laboratory is a more rainbowish affair. Consider this awesome Sartoblot:

(see earlier post here)

Rose Sherman (Director of Enterprise Technology at the Minnesota Historical Society) is circulating a survey about how museums are engaging their communities through social media technologies — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.

Rose asks a lot of relevant questions, like:

• How frequently, on average, are your social media web sites updated?
• What function(s) in your organization has staff assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• What function in your organization is primarily responsible for actively using social media tools to engage communities?
• On average, how many hours per week do staff spend on actively using social media tools to engage communities, e.g. they Tweet, update Facebook pages, post photos to Flickr, post videos to YouTube, etc. ?
• Do you have a full time position(s) assigned to engaging with your social media networks?
• Do you have a social media policy? (e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbook?

Thought-provoking questions which remind me that the function of such surveys is sometimes to make you aware of what you haven’t done yet. A small museum like ours is particularly provoked by questions like “How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?”.  I would rather have preferred: “How many infinitesimal part time equivalents …”.

So we’ve got lots to do on the social web media side.

You can fill in the survey here.

Later today, the art exhibition SK-INTERFACES — originally displayed in Liverpool in 2008 (see earlier post here) — opens in “extended continuation” form (what others would call perpetual beta :-) at Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg.

The opening event features Kira O’Reilly (inthewrongplaceness), Yann Marussich (Bleu Remix), Paul Vanouse (Relative Velocity Inscription Device) and Jun Takita (Light, only light!). The show, which is curated by Jens Hauser, is running until January 10, 2010.

Contributing artists include: Art Orienté objet, Maurice Benayoun, Zane Berzina, Critical Art Ensemble, Wim Delvoye, Olivier Goulet, Eduardo Kac, Antal Lakner, Yann Marussich, Kira O’Reilly, Zbigniew Oksiuta, ORLAN, Philippe Rahm, Julia Reodica, Stelarc, Jun Takita, The Office of Experiments, The Tissue Culture and Art Project, Sissel Tolaas, and Paul Vanouse.

Here’s the perpetual beta flyer:
Skin is our natural “interface” with the world – more and more, however, technological extensions are taking over its role; “interfaces” create both new freedoms and new constraints. In the cross-disciplinary exhibition sk-interfaces, twenty international artists reflect on how modern technosciences have altered our relationship with the world: telepresence, digital technology, speculative architectures, bio-prostheses, tissue culture or transgenics – for the artists, they are not mere topics but tools, methods and media to appropriate. They test the permeability of the borders between disciplines, art and science. Their interfaces connect us with other species, put satellite bodies up for debate, destabilize our conception of what it means to be human today, and create evolutionary scenarios confronting the technological pressure to adapt and its socio-political implications. As a natural inventor of the artificial, Homo Sapiens compensates for its imperfections through the use of technology. Arguing for the naturalness of the media created to this end, theorist Marshall McLuhan once suggested that they be understood as bodily extensions per se – something not unlike an electronic skin spanning the world in which inner and outer were no longer clearly distinguishable. Yet, these prosthetic extensions come at the high price of “auto-amputation”, for each prosthesis permits other senses and states of consciousness to be numbed and to atrophy. Today, in the context of the so-called Life Sciences, media and technological interfaces can no longer be considered merely as telecommunicative, digital, or human-machine interfaces; in the age of bio-facticity, even that which apparently grows naturally is now technologically induced, producing biological artefacts. In view of the utopias and dystopias this inspires, it is no surprise that artists take up the material, function and metaphor of skin as the original, semipermeable and active membrane. They contest the predominating utilitarianism with subversive alienation, aesthetically, poetically and provocatively. Sometimes they wrest from the technological a holistic impulse, sometimes an ecological illusion in which humans admit their responsibility rather than isolate themselves in their alleged superior status. Hence, sk-interfaces examines above all the “ – ”: the in-between-space of our contemporary ontological grey zones.

Yuwei Lin and Christian Greiffenhagen are planning to organise a panel on ‘video methodologies and STS’ at next year’s EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) meeting in Trento (September 2-4, 2010), and want to know if others are interested.

As they rightly point out, despite the rapid technical developments and a general turn to the visual in the social sciences, “video methodologies are still not widely used within STS, and most researchers continue to rely on ‘traditional’ ethnographic or other qualitative research methods using other means, such as talk or writing.

However, video technologies clearly offer exciting possibilities of capturing the dynamics and complexities in the field. Video constitutes a new form of evidence that can be exploited by researchers. Not only can it be used for the purposes of observation and documenting, video can also be used for ‘action research’ as a research tool through which field participants could represent their experiences through new media production and exchange (e.g., de Block and Sefton-Green 2004). When applied in STS, video helps to understand the complexities and multi-modalities in scientific and/or technical development and implementation processes more fully.

Would everyone agree with these arguments? What are the challenges of applying video-based methods in STS-like research (e.g., nuisances of using video technologies, field workers’ informed consent, interaction with the field workers, ethics of publishing video data)? How have video-based methods been applied in different types of research? What are the implications of video-based methods to STS research? Is it possible to capture ‘where the action is’ on video, or is scientific and technological work too distributed, both spatially and temporally, to allow such capture?

Interesting initiative! Anyone who would like to get involved in the panel should contact Yuwei (yuwei@ylin.org) before 5 October.

The other day photographer Mads Ljungdahl visited us — and took this romantic picture in one of our reconstructed early 20th century dentist’s clinics (it’s the building of the High Court of Eastern Denmark in the background):

(credit: Mads Ljungdahl, http://www.madsljungdahl.dk and  http://www.artreview.com/profile/Mads_Lj)

A couple of months ago I advertised David Pantalony’s forthcoming article on the colour green in medicine. Just want to add that it was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last week (Sept 15, pp. 402-03). Read the full online text here.

A couple of weeks ago, I noted with some innocent pleasure that this humble blog was listed among the 100 Best Blogs and Websites for Innovative Academics. Pretty nice, I thought!

Then it turned out we’re also selected for the 100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs. Pretty nice too, I thought!

A couple of days ago, a service called The Daily Reviewer told us we’ve been selected for their Top Museum Blogs list. But now I’m not so innocent any more. Here’s their message:

Congratulations! Your readers have submitted and voted for your blog at The Daily Reviewer. We compiled an exclusive list of the Top 100 museums Blogs, and we are glad to let you know that your blog was included!

It’s the same kind of rhetoric you recognise from spam mails. The introductory “Congratulations!” tells it all. You can also acquire an ugly little yellowish badge to put on your site. Classical vanity fair methodology.

I mean, they probably don’t list blogs with Technorati authority below a certain point; they probably take advantage of blogs with a certain readership and utilise our vanity to sell advertisements. Parasites on our egos.

The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh is announcing a job as heritage manager. The succesful incumbent shall lead a team of professional staff and will be responsible for the operation and development of the College’s museums and library including collections, exhibitions, archives, members’ services and the College’s historic buildings. Closing date is 2 October. More info here.

Three months ago, Nature Biotechnology (27: 514-18, 2009) published a commentary titled ‘Science Communication reconsidered’, a topic we are of course very interested in here at MedMus.

I believe the commentary is still worth a comment, because it was written by 24 (sic!) more or less well known ‘experts’ in science communication, including Matt (”framing science”) Nisbett.

The co-authored commentary — which is based on a workshop on the changing nature of science communication “focusing specifically on biotech, biomedicine and genetics” held in Washington D.C. earlier this year — describes the state of science communication in general and in the printed news media in particular, and then ends with some recommendations for how to make the situation better.

The recommendations are peculiar for at least two reasons:

First, I’m surprised that none of the 24 authors seem to have noticed the importance of science, technology and medical museums for today’s science communication arena. True, many STM museums still have their focus on science, technology and medicine of the past, but more and more museums both in Europa and North America are increasingly identifying themselves as venues for science communication.

This total lack of mention of museums is all the more surprising because the 24 authors have a pronounced trust in government-sponsored science communication. In fact, they are wedded to a mixture of old mass media, newspaper journalism and a mid-20th century understanding of government-induced democracy.

The authors believe that the alleged threat to science journalism posed by corporate science media is thus best met by increasing funding of university- and government-supported science journalism.

Accordingly they don’t have much trust in science blogging. It’s mentioned in passing, but otherwise they believe blogging is “unlikely to become an effective solution” to what they perceive as a crisis in science communication.

Well, apparently the 24 authors are not entirely up-to-date with today’s media situation. Not only has grassroot blogging (both blogs by scientists and blogs by non-scientists about science) proved to be enormously vigorous. It is also much more likely to provide a democratic balance to corporate science newsrooms.

Why this nostalgic cry for an old-style public media and gvmt-sponsored science communication policy? Part of the explanation may lie in the  professional backgrounds of the 24 authors. Despite their focus on ‘biotech, biomedicine and genetics’, surprisingly many of them are affiliated with schools, departments and centres of public and community health.

My general impression is that scholars of public health tend to be more bound to have faith in goverment-sponsored health campaigns and less bound to trust bottom-up citizen health initiatives. Also that the basic rationale for much public and community health is a tendency to support government solutions for health policy issues.

If so, this co-authored plaidoyer for enhancing science communication is just classical public health communication policy writ large. I doubt a group of writers from departments of medical engineering would come up with similar recommendations for science communication. And Medgadget would probably find the commentary outrageous.

Human anatomy is a fascinating thing and apparently there is something fascinating about wearing it also. I thinking especially of clothes with pictures or images that resemblance the human anatomy. As an example I often wear a T-shirt with a cranium on in. I don’t really know why or give it much thought. Really, it’s just a T-shirt.

Just now when I was searching for info on The Visible Human Project I accidently stumbled onto this website on The Visible Embryo. What really struck me wasn’t really The Visible Embryo itself it was the merchandise one could by from their online store entitled: Shop The Visible Embryo. Here one can buy T-shirts, aprons, a pregnancy timeline full colour tote bag or (my personal favourite) a birth spiral ceramic travel mug.

I’m not quite sure who the intended buyers are. Medical students? Pregnant parents-to-be? I guess that there really isn’t any difference between wearing a T-shirt with a cranium and a cap with a pregnancy timeline but somehow the latter sort of freaks me out and I don’t really buy the following statement: “Look cool on bad hair days or when shading your eyes from the sun”. Well, I most seriously doubt that.

Look cool in your Birth Spiral Black Cap

A few weeks ago I attended the Science Online London 2009 conference – a conference on science communication in the new era of “the Web”. As they wrote on the conference homepage:

The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science online. How is the Web affecting the work of researchers, science communicators, journalists, librarians, educators, students? What can you do to make the best use of the growing number of online tools?

The conference itself made good use of the online tools. As an apropriate feature it was possible to attend the conference online via Second Life (SL) instead of on site (in ‘First’ or ‘Real’ life). So I attended the conference while sitting in my living room in an appartment in Denmark, joined in virtual reality by people from various parts of the globe and quite different time zones. Blogger Dave Munger even gave his presentation through Second Life, as the screen picture below is an image of (notice also my freshly created SL avatar sitting in the lefthand corner):

The Second Life feature in itself made the conference interesting, so let me start there and come back to the actual contents of the conference later. By doing this, I am also letting you experience one of the unfortunate aspects of doing conferences in Second Life: the technology is not only a media but also distracts you from concentrating on what is going on. Or in one case when there was only a bad audio available from a breakout session, it made attending the conference difficult. Then again, there were other benefits.

One major benefit (and major distraction too) was the ongoing commentary and debate going on in Second Life while speakers were presenting. The presentations were communicated by video and audio streaming (see programme and streams here), while powerpoint slides were visible on the virtual screen you see to the left in the picture above. Ad to this a chat browser with ongoing commentaries and an ability to rotate your view around the virtual amphitheatre that set the stage for the SL conference – to view the often very elaborate, fancily dressed avatars, whom you were chatting with – and you get an idea of the set up. Commentaries varied from quick resumes of what was just said to parallel discussions or sharing of links and jokes (like this one) – kind of like handing notes to each other during a lecture. This was really helpful for a newbie like me, and it also gave a feeling of inclusion and made a great opening for networking, since everyone spoke to everyone in the chat.

From a museum-outreach perspective the chatting also gave me a couple of unexpected examples of what SL can do. Chek for instance the HMS Beagle (Darwin) exhibit in SL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Elucian%20Omega/175/103/23. Second Life may be a relatively small online community and you may need a lot of computer skills to pull something like the HMS Beagle off, but – for me at least – it opens up for a whole new perspective on the use of online tools in a museum context.

As for the actual content of the conference there were several interesting presentations: aforementioned blogger Dave Munger, science editor of The Times Mark Henderson and ‘Genetic Future’ blogger Daniel MacArthur talked about ‘Blogging for impact’, how to use the blog as a tool to achieve fame, present journalists with a good science communication opportunity, and further/damage your academic career. Basically saying that blogging is the future of science communication and of becoming a popular academic, and that comments are usually of a much higher quality in blogs than on the mainline web (please feel free to prove them right ;-)). But also that not all universities recognize this (yet), and that being publicly critical of collegues on your blog may damage your career. There was a breakout session on institutional barriers afterwards, but I’ll skip that here. See here for videos of most of the conference or here for a blog that has links to all the blogposts on the conference and its different sessions.

Another interesting presentation was on managing online scientific communities – both on the technical issues involved (tech support, spam, legal aspects etc.) and on building communities on the Web. Taking the online scientific community ResearchGate as a good example, the presentation stressed the need for learning from the community what their needs are, continously developing the online resources (search engines, interface, applications), and engaging visitors. 30-35% of ResearchGate’s registered users are active ca. once a month (doing literature search, asking a question etc.), so it seems they have found a productice way of making an online community. Knowing what your audience is interested in and would want to know about or be able to do seems to be the way of creating an actual community. Interaction and involvement are important.

The conference ended with a presentation by science fiction writer and former research scientist John Gilbey under the headline: Far Out: Speculations on Science Communication 50 years From Now. Gilbey not so much outlined a future of science communication as he asked a lot of questions relating to the current way things are heading. The questions also (kind of) summarized the underlying questions in, and pointed to the context of, the conference’s different presentations. While thinking on a concept like New Museology, these questions made a lot of sense to me, so let me just end this post with some of Gilbey’s questions:

In a changed future who will our [insert scientist/blogger/profession etc.] sponsors be? How free will we be? Will we be encouraged to deal with public by employers? Would you blog against ‘evil’ organisations anonymously?

Will virtual reality be an obiqutiuos part of science communication in the near future? Scientists’ location becoming irrelevant?

Would a future environmental event spur more interst in science? Or would society crash totally following an unrecoverable internet failure? How many would loose information they couldn’t recover?

Most of the persons in SL answered in the positive to these questions. Would you?

A couple of weeks ago I proposed a significant-medical-objects game — a sort of crowdsourcing/museum 2.0 procedure for the acquisition of objects for medical museums.

Turns out there is a website called, yes, Significant Objects, which has a host of exciting writers attached. The site’s objective is different from my little game. It’s based on the books Buying In (2008) and Taking Things Seriously (2007), in which Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn examined the ways in which we invest inanimate objects with significance.

With the Significant Objects site they have set up an curating experiment in which the ’significance’ of objects bought in thrift stores and similar places are ’artificially cooked up under controlled conditions’.

Sort of great idea — but in my mind real stories about real objects is more more interesting than ‘artificially cooked-up’ stories. Fiction is terribly overrated.

From left to right: Kirsten Rosenmay Jacobsen, Camilla Schumacher-Petersen, Splice and yours truly

Maintaining an exhibition like ‘Split and Splice: Fragments from the age of biomedicine’ is quite a job. Not many of us who frequently visit museums consider the time and effort put into maintaining the shows that we visit. We kind of take it for granted that the display cases are polished and we properly rarely think about it – unless the general maintenance is lacking.

Admittedly maintaining a show can sometimes be a tedious job but never the less it is extremely important. Changing light bulbs and keeping the dust levels down are some of the more mundane tasks but as Split and Splice is a special exhibition – it also requires special maintenance. Especially the two stars of the show, the rabbits Split and Splice named, of course, after the show itself. Deciding to have live rabbits in the show was a long process and something that we discussed over and over again. Knowing fully well that having rabbits in the exhibition required special care we decided to go through with it. Feeding the rabbits, cleaning their cage, ensuring a steady supply of hay, ensuring that the room temperature is at an acceptable level are just some of the challenges we face every day – and the rabbits are alive and kicking. Especially the younger audience seem to be responding well to the presence of live animals within the show. Just the other day a couple of sixth graders had had enough of the (admittedly) sometimes frightening stories of medieval surgery and had retreated to the front lobby of the Museion were I found them while going through the exhibition showrooms. Introducing the kids to Split and Splice immediately cheered them up and turned what could have been a bad museum experience into a positive one.

Anyways … maintaining the rabbits requires special care which is why we have just had a visit by veterinarian Camilla Schumacher-Petersen and her assistant Kirsten Rosenmay Jacobsen (both from The Department of Experimental Medicine, University of Copenhagen). There had been no indication of any health problems what so ever but I very much wanted a professional opinion just to be sure. Camilla inspected both Split and Splice and found them to be in good shape. She cut their nails and was all in all satisfied with their living conditions.