Biomedicine on Display

A “team of pretty cool people” in Chicago are twittering and blogging under the name ‘Museumist’. “Putting the Museum World on Display” is their motto. We’ll twue them for infringing our precious trade marks (Museionist on Twitter and Biomedicine on Display) :-)

… who have run a succesful and well-visited blog for a year now and

waxed lyrical about the Library’s collections in the areas of cataloguing and digitisation projects, new accessions, and new discoveries about existing items in the collections; bragged about the use of Library material in the media, news topics about the Library’s activities, and events and workshops going on at the Library or involving Library staff, or pontificated to the wider world about so many other areas of relevance to the Library and the History of Medicine that [they] can’t possibly list them all here.

That’s the spirit!

Nina Simon, best known for her awesome museum 2.0 blog, is visiting Medical Museion tomorrow to give a lunch seminar on her ideas on the participatory museum. Her visit fits very well into our current plans for engaging both the health sector and the public in re-organising the collections and permanent exhibitions — more about these plans in the next couple of weeks. If someone wants to attend, send Carsten a mail (holt@sund.ku.dk).

Here are some images from last month’s show with Phillip Warnell swallowing a pill camera in Medical Museion’s anatomical theatre:

See more images here (the event was originally announced here).

(thanks to Bente who published the images on our Danish blog the other day)

Laboratory equipment for rats or mice have begun to fascinate me more and more. Not in the way the rat guillotine was fascinating, but more in the way of how lab equipment can show so many things about biomedical practices, contexts and knowledge production.

The picture above is from an article in the October issue of The Scientist, which Thomas has referred me to, called ‘Lab Toys – How does cage enrichment affect rodents?’. It is a really interesting article (as he knew I would think) about, well, lab toys – and their consequences for lab practices.

For instance the article illustrates one of the aspects about the use of laboratory animals that you seldom think about: the everyday life in the lab where humans and animals interact. Rats, for example, are not only instrumentalized in an experimental setting but must also, like any other domesticated animals, be cared for and nurtured. And offered toys. As the article describes there is a growing interest and market for this special kind of lab equipment, combined with a growing concern about animal welfare both in public as well as in a biomedical research context.

Another often overlooked aspect (seen from the humanities, at least) about biomedical laboratories that the article shows, is the amount of creativity involved, not only in coming up with new experimental setups, but also in designing facilities for animals. Innovative lab workers apparently do a lot for the well being and the shaping of lab animals’ environment using simple things like cardboard or shreded paper.

The article also had some more critical points about lab toys.

In the 1940s, the famed neuropsychologist Donald Hebb decided to bring home one of his experimental rats, letting it run free in his house and play with his children. The increased variety in the animal’s environment compared to a small bare cage, he found, improved its ability to learn. Psychologists since then have examined the effect of environment on cognitive processes such as learning, fear and addiction.

This and other examples are given to illustrate the fact that the living conditions of lab animals — from materials used for nesting, gnawing or hiding, to temperature and access to other animals — affect their behaviour, stress level, immune system and physical condition. Wheels, gnawsticks and hiding places can therefore in a more or less subtle way influence the results of the experiments the animals are used in.

So if you want to know if your lab’s results are comparable to the results from other labs you have to take these aspects into account and maybe even standardize your lab animals’ living conditions (just like the standardized units, setups or even what you could call standardized mouse like the oncomouse that are used today). As the Dutch researcher Vera Baumans says in the ‘Lab Toys’ article: “The effects of different types of enrichment are often strain-specific and gender-specific, and are even sensitive to the statistical method used in any given study”.

Allthough this is only a relatively small part of the field of modern biomedicine, the living conditions of laboratory animals can, in this way, reflect many of the central aspects constituting the field. One important aspect shown in the lab toys discussion is the way medical sciences attempt to manage complexity by creating controlled lab settings.

But it also becomes clear that the laboratory is a setting for animal and human interaction beyond a simple ‘exploiting the animals’. It is a setting where you cannot separate lab practices from their political and social context — in this case in the form of regulations and concerns for animal welfare. And as the article ends by pointing out, the investment in animal welfare made by Pharma companies like Novo Nordisk can also have a positive effect on the image of these companies as moral entities.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any laboratory toys in the collections of Medical Museion, but they would definitely be items worthy of a museum exhibit. Imagine a rat toy and a rat guillotine next to each other to illustrate some of the paradoxes and themes in recent biomedicine. More lab toys on display, please!

Looks immediately like an innovative angle to the study of lives in science — that is, Wellcome Library’s and the British Records Association’s upcoming conference Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection in London.

The one-day meeting will deal with the resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives — i.e., manuscripts and personal papers, films and photographs, forensic evidence and physical remains, etc. Speakers include Georgina Ferry (science writer), Julianne Simpson and Helen Wakely (Wellcome Library), Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons), Tim Boon (Science Museum), Paul Carter and Natalie Whistance (the National Archives) and Allan Jamieson (Forensic Institute).

The programme seems a bit unfocused, however — and the ‘researching lives’ theme a fairly loose umbrella for six talks that point in quite different directions. I mean, these are all smart and knowledgeable people and it would have been great if the organisers had created a meeting format that turned this mix of professional backgrounds into a sparkling discussion about the ‘researching lives’ issue, instead of letting them loose 40 minutes each on six different topics.

Anyway, I may be wrong — go and listen for yourself. Further details and a booking form are available from the website of the British Records Association.

Here’s an innovative way of putting biomedicine on display:

As Vanessa (Street Anatomy) says,

the menstrual cycle has never looked so exciting! [...] Perfect for explaining the menstrual cycle for the first time to a young girl … or to a 26-year-old.  I had no idea I went through a luteal lunacy!

Created by I Heart Guts!, “the brainchild of an anatomically obsessed illustrator who loves internal organs and all they do”.

Maybe the next generation of the classic biochemical pathways wall charts could learn a lesson or two — or better, I Heart Guts could make a version of:

(click here for a larger version)

When I was working at the Medical Museion as a docent, I often introduced visitors to our fabulous pharmacy. Here the visitors are introduced to such interesting objects as a jar containing moss from a human skull and a container for leeches. Leeches were used to draw blood from patients to restore their blood balance. The theoretical basis for this procedure was of course humoral pathology.

The use of animals is not something that is restricted to pharmacies in medical museums like ours. Animals are also used in biomedicine today. I’ll get back to that.  

One of the advantages of being a museum docent is that one gets an opportunity to see the facial expression of visitors when they listen to stories like the one about the leeches. It’s interesting but hard to describe. It’s like if they had just chewed on a piece of lemon — actually a quite common emotional reaction.

The reason why I came to think about this is because a year or so ago one of our visitors claimed that maggots are being used today to clean infected wounds, a procedure I realised is known as biosurgery. Googling ‘biosurgery’ I found out that it stands for a variety of different procedures, but one is actually the medical procedure of cleaning wounds. As usual one can find a YouTube video of the procedure being executed. Take a look here:

I’m quite sure my own facial expression was the exactly same as our visitor expressed when I told them about the use of leeches  :)

While searching for more info on biosurgery I also stumbled upon this article where I found this great quote:

Despite its effectiveness, maggot therapy — or biosurgery to the squeamish — must overcome the “yuck factor” with physicians to gain widespread acceptance. “In my experience, patients are very trusting. The ‘yuck factor’ is with practitioners,” Ms. Jones said. Internal Medicine News, 1 Feb. 2005

The ‘yuck factor’ seems to be an accurate description, which I guess can also be applied to other biomedical procedures.

One thing that I was unable to discover was how often maggot therapy/biosurgery as a technique is used around the world. Does anybody know?

Part of the fun of being involved in a medical museum these days is that the notion of ‘biomedicine’ is so much broader than traditional medicine and health care taught in faculties of medicine and health science.

As a university institution for biomedical science communication we are, by default as it were, confronted with some of the most fundamental issues in the world today. Financial crisis, atomic weapon threats and global warming  aside — the rapid technical development in biology and biomedicine raises some pretty hefty social, political and ethical questions which we, as a museum, can hardly avoid dealing with if we want to stay just minimally atuned to the world around us.

Take the issue of synthetic biology. Forget about the potentials benefits and risks of stem cell biology, nanotech, gene therapy, and so forth. Synthetic biology — the design and construction of new biological systems not found in nature, for example, constructing living cells from simple molecules (proto-cells); creating new biological systems based on biochemical pathways not found in nature; etc — is potentially more powerful, not least for medical therapy and human enhancement. 

Is it safe and secure? Well, of course it isn’t! In yesterday’s issue of Public Service Review: Science and Technology, Markus Schmidt, who leads the SYNBIOSAFE project at the Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management, raises some of the problems involved in the development of synthetic biology:

With the availability of genetic sequence information available on the internet and outsourcing of DNA synthesis to specialised synthesis companies, we are facing the risk that some person with malicious intents might place an order for pathogenic genes.

But there is always two sides to new technologies. In the future, more and more people will probably be able to construct new biological systems (read: democratic technology). Already, the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in Boston invites students from all over the world to construct new biologies. And there are several DIY biotech groups who want to get the techne out of the laboratory, to bring it to the people. Such democratisation of synthetic biology might, as Schmidt rightly observes, lead to a creative revolution similar to that we have seen in the computer industry and the internet. Imagine synthbio 2.0 — love it or hate it.

Schmidt’s institute is only the last in a row of initiatives to discuss the safety and the political, governance and ethical issues involved in synthetic biology. Two years ago a report from the J. Craig Venter Institute discussed the governance problems associated with synthetic biology, and last year a report from the International Association of Synthetic Biology proposed a number of technical solutions for improved biosecurity. And there are several other initiatives around — enough to fill the agenda of a future-looking medical museum.

Schmidt’s analysis is expanded in M. Schmidt, A. Kelle, A. Ganguli-Mitra and H. de Vriend, eds., Synthetic Biology: The technoscience and its societal consequences (2009); there is also a 55 min video here: SYNBIOSAFE: Synthetic biology and its social and ethical implications.

The material dimension of science is back in focus for historians.  As far back as I remember, it was historians of technology who were the ‘materialists’, whereas historians of science were ‘idealists’. Didn’t really matter what kind of studies they did — historians of science have always tended to be intererested in mind (theories, ideas, concepts, discourses, etc.), whereas historians of technology have given higher priority to matter — material matter, not just conceptualised matter.

But historians of science are about to discover the material aspects of science. Next summer’s workshop ‘Scientific Objects and their Materiality in the History of Chemistry’ is a case in point. Organised by Michael Gordin (Princeton), Ursula Klein( Berlin), and Carsten Reinhardt (Bielefeld) and held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 24-26 June 2010, it will explore the materiality of scientific objects with a focus on the history of chemistry:

For both experimental inquiry and technical application, the sciences depend on working with material things and processes. In this respect, chemistry is arguably the material science par excellence, primarily through the crucial role of the synthesis of chemical compounds, and the strong interactions with technological institutions and industry. In terms of the representation of its objects of inquiry, chemistry has a peculiarly materialized semiology in a long-standing tradition of graphic formulae and three-dimensional structural models, as well as a rich heritage of ordering systems such as the periodic table. In the middle-ground between representation and intervention there stand certain kinds of principles and entities, some of them invisible, that are both objects of experimental inquiry and theoretical speculation. Concepts such as the atom, element, or phlogiston have laid the groundwork for chemical research in defining the units of ordering systems, constituting the goals for material production, serving as limitations to the extent of chemical practice, or having crucial heuristic roles. And all of them have experienced variation, re-definition, development, suppression, and sometimes even extinction in the course of history.

And they tacitly refer to the notion of ‘mangling of practice’:

Commonly, the materiality of scientific objects has been described by two, arguably conflicting, dimensions: First, by studies of materially-intervening practice—the ways in which ‘real things’ are involved in and condition such practice. Second, by the significance and meaning ascribed to things in discursive practice. These two dimensions are not necessarily in contradiction, and their tension can be used in productive and innovative ways.

I hardly need to emphasise how important this kind of inqury is for museums of science, technology and medicine, because materiality is at the center of the museum enterprise.

 The following concepts/objects are indicative of the organisers’ intentions:
• earth, air, water, fire, ether
• sal, mercur, sulfur
• phlogiston, caloric, oxygen, lumière
• element, compound, composition, mixture, alloy
• electron, atom, bond, molecule, structure
• polymer, colloid, crystal, glass
• salt, base, acid
• metal, halogen, rare earth
• gas, liquid, solid, plasma
• natural product, synthetic product
• supramolecular, nano
• pure, impure
• chemical reaction

The workshop will consist of ca. 15 precirculated papers. The want max 350 words proposals by 1 December, 2009. Write to Carsten Reinhardt: carsten.reinhardt@uni-bielefeld.de.

It’s difficult now to imagine how once, in a culture long ago, there were no cells or tissues, no molecules or receptors, no hormones, proteins or DNA. Just a body, with organs, sinuses, cavities, limbs, and fluids of different kinds.

This pre-cellular, pre-molecular body will be the object of discussion at a symposium titled ‘The Body on Display, from Renaissance to Enlightenment’ at Durham University, 6-7 July 2010:

At once an organ system, disciplinary target, metaphor, creation of God, cultural construction, ’self’ and receptacle for the soul, it is not surprising that the body has fallen under the attention of historians of art, gender, thought, medicine, theatre and costume, and of literary scholars, archaeologists and historical sociologists and philosophers. This symposium will look at the human and human-like body on, and as, display, between c.1400 and c.1800. We will explore the notion, and reality, of the exposure of the inner and outer human form, and the representational, visual and material cultures of the body. This was a formative (and even transformative) period for the visual and representational culture of human corporeality, witnessing the watersheds of Renaissance and Enlightenment, challenges to long-held understandings of the body and, allegedly, both the creation of the modern ’self’ and the eventual secularization of Western society.

And topics might include, e.g.:
-Dissection, the medical ‘gaze’ and medical illustration
-Corporeality and the flesh in the visual, written and performing arts
-The body in religious iconography, hagiography and religious
performance
-Gesture, kinesics and the expression of emotions
-Corporal punishment and bodily shaming
-Clothing, garments and cosmetics and their significance

300 word abstract to body.ondisplay@durham.ac.uk before 30 January 2010. Read more here: www.bodyondisplay.org.uk

I performed my fist knee operation today. Not in real life though but on my pc. Videogames inspired by medical practises or diseases has been discussed on this blog before but I don’t think that this particular game has been mentioned. In the game one takes on the role of a surgeon (or a surgeon’s assistant, I’m a bit in the dark on that one) and I must admit that I found the game to be surprisingly unpleasant.

I guess that working at a place like Medical Museion one gets hardened by telling stories of how the medieval surgeons performed their work or how the cholera epidemic infected people in the middle of the 19th century. Nevertheless this game, where one gets to perform surgery on a knee, really struck me. One thing is the images of the opened knee but I believe that it’s really the sound on the game that gets to me. Especially the sound of the saw going through the knee is really disturbing. Urg!

I must admit that I found it rather educational and apparently my patient survived. To be quite honest I’m not sure that it’s possible to actually ever fail. The game also reminded me of an article I read recently (”Inscribing surgery in digital culture” by Jan Eric Olsén, Årsskrift for Medicinsk Museion, vol. 3, 2006: 49), in which he links computer gaming and virtual surgery:

Future surgery may not require knowledge in handling the scalpel but rather familiarity with computers. It has also been suggested that surgeons who often play computer games sharpen their ability to coordinate the senses of vision and touch, when performing keyhole surgery (Satava ed 1998: 143-144)

That might be right, but I’m quite sure that the above-mentioned game does not train the necessary skills :) (For an online article about the link between surgery and computer gaming click here)

The other day, I lamented the fact that any new idea I developed about museums apparently was preempted by Nina Simon (or so it felt when I read she had already suggested the notion of the ’slow museum’).  I felt like Professor Otto Lidenbrock who exclaimed “Arne Saknussem, always Arne Saknussem”, every time he succeeded to reach a new outpost on his way through the underworld and found that the Icelandic medieval alchemist had already been there (in my favourite Jules Verne novel A Journey to the Centre of the Earth; now in a new translation with a scholarly introduction by Jane Smiley).

Well, my Lidenbrockian feeling of beeing scooped has now shifted object of transference, from Nina Simon to Jim Bennett at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, who has just opened, of all things, an art exhibition on steampunk.

Well? Didn’t we have a discussion about steampunk in museums on this blog in early September? And now Jim opens an exhibition about it!?  “Parallel trajectories, as usual”, Jim replies when confronted with this remarkable coincidence.

But of course he’s right — and generous, since we all know that exhibitions take months, sometimes years to prepare. So Jim and his colleagues were there long before us. Jim Bennett, always Jim Bennett.

Anyway, the new exhibit at the Museum of History of Science in Oxford is titled “STEAMPUNK — the first museum exhibition of steampunk art”. It opened Tuesday and will run until 21 February, 2010. See further: www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/steampunk,  www.steampunkmuseumexhibition.blogspot.com, and www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/broadsheet9.pdf

Can’t wait to see it.

BioSystems — the blog of a new venture-capital supported biotech upstart Plectix that specializes in representing cellular signalling — reinforces my impression over the last couple of years that privately employed scientists too can use the blog medium to say increasingly interesting things about what used to be the turf of public university scholars in the social sciences and humanities (’science studies‘ and ‘philosophy of science‘). For example, last December, Isha Antani addressed the perennial problem of the trade-off between competition and co-operation among life scintists.

I’m currently on paternal leave with 1-year old Johanna — which means that my blogging activities are structured after her sleeping schedule. And to save time we share lunch table and working desk: