Biomedicine on Display

Taking our Twitter session at the EAMHMS conference two weeks ago (“a qualified kind of success”) as his point of departure, Danny Birchall (Museum Cultures) summarizes his view of the pros and cons of conference-tweeting:

On the negative side conference-tweeting tends to be personally distracting (and possibly insulting to a speaker forced to regard an audience gazing deep into their phones and laptops); susceptible to triteness and glib summation rather than reflective thought; and elitist: it excludes from a conversation those without the appropriate technology or ability to cope with distraction.

On the positive side, it provides a kind of collective note-taking, accessible even to those not involved; it provides for an additional, multiplicitous and open conversation, not directed through a chair; and sometimes allows for people not present at the conference but connected to its participants, to join in the conversation and bring new information and perspectives to it.

Despite the fact that only four of us tweeted throughout the conference, and that for half of it there was no wifi available, we did a not not bad job, and towards the end of the conference did indeed begin to get others chipping in, asking what ‘the problem of the medical museum’ was, and questioning our assertions about the situatedness of art.

With reference to one of the last tweets I wrote during the EAMHMS-conference (while we were discussing Thomas Schnalke’s presentation),

I would like to add to Danny’s pros and cons:

Tweeting during a conference allows you to make much more succinct statements than you will usually make in the oral discussion. I don’t think I would have said this so sharply in the oral discussion; but in the tweet format it looks more acceptable.

Conference-tweeting gives rise to two interconnected levels of discourse. On the one hand, the usual oral, polite, verbose, slow, performative (and often somewhat self-aggrandizing) conference discussion mode; and, on the other hand, a more direct, written, snappy, and less self-oriented networking kind of discourse (twittering) in the background.

What’s most interesting about this, I think, is how these two levels of discourse are connected in real time; and how they actually invert the traditional relation between a slow, polite and formal written discourse, and a faster and less formal oral discourse.

PS: Danny has generously compiled a transcript of all the tweets on #EAMHMS over the course of the three conference days, which he believes gives “an interesting, if inconsistent, overview” of the proceedings.

It’s nice, of course, to read ‘Three Unknown Places in Copenhagen Worth Exploring’ in today’s issue of denmark.net:

Tired of the Little Mermaid and Tivoli Gardens? Here are three of Copenhagen’s less known tourist attractions … [the Sondermarken park, Cisternerne: Museum of Modern Glass Art  and] … Medicinsk-Historisk Museum.

I assume denmark.net means Medical Museion, which has been our officially recognised name for over six years now. Implementing a new institutional identity is really an uphill struggle. Shall we throw in the towel? Noops! Museions of the world, unite!

From Medical Museion's collections

Tiffany Jenkins is soon coming out with a book titled Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority in Routledge’s ‘Research in Museum Studies’ series.

Drawing on interviews, ethnographic work, and media and policy documents, the book analyzes, says Routledge’s announcement, “the influences at play on the contestation over human remains, and examines the social construction of this problem”.

One potentially interesting result of Jenkin’s analysis (which supports my own experience here in Denmark) is that

the strongest campaigning activity has been waged, not by social movements external to the institution, as they are frequently characterized, but by actors inside it

As Jenkins points out, this has implications for how we theorise the museum.

The fact that Tiffany Jenkins is arts and society director of the sometimes contested (see here and here) London-based think-tank Institute of Ideas, makes it an even more intereresting publication. I’ve already ordered a copy, although 70 GBP is a pretty hefty price tag.

Martin Robbins of The Lay Scientist has posted this scathing and completely brilliant look at what most science journalism looks like. It is funny because it is true, as they say. Be sure to read the comments as well, some of them are comedy gold.

Cannot wait to see the new exhibition WeltWissen (World Knowledge) which opened yesterday at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

Organised by the Humboldt University, the Charité Hospital, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences and Humanities and the Max Planck Society, it is announced as the highlight of the Berlin Year of Science with more than 3,200 square meters exhibition space containing 1,500 original things, installations and media stations crossing time periods, institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

One of the highlights is yet another of Mark Dion’s typical installations that “highlights the system behind scientific activity as well as its fragmentary nature” — a 500 square metre shelf structure with objects Dion collected “while wandering through Berlin’s scientific storage rooms”.

See more here: www.weltwissen-berlin.de. Closes 9 January.

We’ve just finished the three day conference on ‘Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums’ here at Medical Museion. See the Twitter session here: http://twitter.com/search?q=%23EAMHMS#search?q=%23EAMHMS. Unfortunately, the wifi only worked Thursday afternoon and Saturday afternoon (Friday and Saturday morning it was down),  but the link gives feeling of the discussions. We’ll follow up with a series of videos of the speakers and selected parts of the discussions.

I’ve been a fan of the online-based Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) — a hybrid of YouTube and scientific journal that epitomizes the very essence of the notion of ‘biomedicine on display’ — from the very beginning.

JoVe has just published its 500th video-article with a splash of celebrity, because it (“Hi-C: A Method to Study the Three-dimensional Architecture of Genomes“) is co-authored by a team headed by Eric Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute at MIT.  The appearance of a methodological article by the Lander-team in JoVE will hopefully boost the popularity of this innovation to scientific commnication.

One of our basic aims here at Medical Museion is to put current trends in biomedicine in a longer historical perspective. Last Friday, we got yet another opportunity for doing this, when the new Core Facility for Integrated Microscopy at the Faculty of Health Sciences opened together with an international research symposium on the state-of-the-art of microscopy.

In the hallway outside the symposium room, we displayed a selection of six of our most beautiful old microscopes that represent the development from early simple single lenses to end of the 19^th century compound microscopes. The aim was to make the symposium participants better appreciate the beauty of early microscopes and the craftsmanship that has gone into constructing them.

During the lunch break, I had a chat with Peter Evennett, who has edited the English version of Harald Moe’s classical The Story of the Microscope together with Chris Hammond. Peter and Chris, who are members of the Royal Microscopical Society’s outreach and education committee, has helped us select the displayed items from our large collection of microscopes and write the showcase texts for the exhibition, which was designed and put together by Bente and Ion.

The oldest microscope (or rather replica of a microscope) selected is actually only a lens in a brass fitting, made in 1670 by Anthony van Leuwenhoek of Delft, who for the first time ever was able to clearly observe life on an incredibly small scale. Holding the lens at a slant towards the light, he was able to see living bacteria and wriggling, human sperm cells. It was the beginning of a whole new era for science.

Peter went on to tell me how early microscopes weren’t used for science, as I thought, but were a kind of intellectual hobby and prestige objects for wealthy gentlemen. Consequently many of the microscopes from this period are quite charming and exquisite. It wasn’t until the 1830s — when the wine merchant J. J. Lister was able to produce objectives that minimised the colour fringing — that the microscope was seriously introduced into science. And so in 1839 a group of scientists got together to propose a toast to the instrument and to found the Royal Microscopical Society.

On display was also a modern single lens microscope from 1848, just like the one Darwin brought with him on the Beagle. The newest microscopes in the exhibition were compound microscopes from the end of the 19^th century. They had a double lens system, with an objective lens that projected the image from the sample up through the tube to the eye lens, which worked as a magnifying glass. The light was redirected from a window or an oil lamp via a small built-in mirror, to hit the sample from below and carry the image up the tube, to the pupil of the scientist’s eye.

And then Peter’s efforts to educate me became technical …

Though it was by means of light that the microscope functioned, light was also the factor setting the limit for how detailed the samples could be shown. Opposed to what many people think, the basic principle in microscopy is not magnification, but  resolution. In the 1860s and 1870s, the German physician Ernst Abbe (co-owner of the Carl Zeiss AG, the famous microscope producer) discovered that the smallest distance you can have between two things before the images of them merge — and thereby determining how detailed a picture you can see in a microscope — is limited by three factors:  1) the angle of the light entering the microscope, 2) the substance through which the light has to pass, and 3) the wavelength of the light.

Of these three limiting factors the last is now being contested by using electrons with a wavelength 100.000 times smaller than visible light. But, as Peter puts it, that’s using tricks.

The covers of most major scientific journals are plastered with beautiful, realistic pictures taken with the latest advances in microscope technology. This month’s Nature Medicine is no exception.

Few of these images, however, have the qualities of David Goodsell’s works of art. Goodsell, who is based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, creates hyperrealist paintings that render the molecular world not as an abstract, diagrammatical space as we know it from biochemistry textbooks, but as a teeming, chaotic, dense and beautiful mess. They are simple, yet they portray the complexity and distinct organization of subcellular life in a way that no ‘real image’ can.

For example, Goodsell’s pseudocolor depiction of HIV — shown here in cross-section and incorporating all current information from structural biology and electron microscopy — gives a much-maligned pathogen a unique artistic quality.

Reminiscent of those of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, William Morris, and the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, the hybrid ornamental-organic style of this and Goodsell’s other paintings give the molecular world a retro feel, bringing the cell and its contents closer to us and our lives. The challenge of putting biomedicine on display in museums and engaging the public at large is to make connections between the abstract visualizations of the molecular world and the lived existence of the postgenomic individual. It’s one of Goodsell’s great contributions that he offers a way to bridge this gulf.

Read more here (Nature Medicine, vol. 16, September, p. 943, 2010)

Museums have become safe houses. Great public dormitories where art [or science?] sleeps after the officials testify that it has earned some rest. All risks are controlled and all rivalries canceled by the professionally cutting-edge and tolerant institution. They tell two stories. They are the official messengers of the mainstream and the dull record of whatever has happened to acquire power. But they tell another story: They are documents of the violence of canonization and they reveal themselves as belonging to power and discipline. There is no story of art without a story of cultural division and cultural denigration!

Quoted from The New Futurist Manifesto by Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan (The Freee Art Collective).

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on our relationship with plastics in a hospital context, and would like to have Medical Museion as one of their research partners.

Ion showed us plastic dentures from the 1860s, a very realistic plastic arm with painted finger nails, and colourful plastic leg pads for children. Even though museums in general look down on plastics as an inauthentic material, we actually found a lot of objects in the collections, which partly or totally consist of some sort of plastic. The two plastic-lovers enjoyed the tour, even though Susan was a bit frustrated because of not being able to touch the displayed objects. The wonderful thing about plastics is that it can look exactly like any other material. But as Susan put it;”Once you touch, you know”.

Plastics are discount: Plastic is also an interesting material because it is highly used, but not very highly thought of. Unconsciously a lot of people today think of plastics as a discount material, as the fast, cheap unnatural solution. The wide range of functions that makes plastics so usable is the same feature that alienates it from us. One can make anything out of plastic, which means that plastic in itself is invisible and without identity. Plastic is, what it is made into. Alone it is formless, it is nothing. It is hard to develop a relationship to an thing made out of plastics, when one knows that there are a million plastic objects out there exactly like it.

Plastics are clean:  already from the mid 19th century the first synthetic materials began to appear and in the beginning of the 20^th century, Bakelite (phenol formaldehyde), which was used for electric apparatus like telephones and plugs, was invented. It was not until the 1960s that plastics became the most common material to use in almost all areas of human life. Susan and Marcia are focusing on plastics in a hospital context, because in hospitals one will find both plastic object of everyday use and highly specialized hospital objects in the same material. At the same time the many single use objects exemplifies the good aspects of plastic products, like good hygiene, and environmentally bad aspects like waste problems.

Our postdoc Adam Bencard is working on the new exhibition about metabolism, which is soon to be set up in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences (the Panum building).

He’s in a good mood. The graphic designer’s sketch for the show, by coincidence, has much the same colour scheme as the mosaic-like art work, by David Goodsell, commissioned for the windows of the exhibition room. This chaotic piece of art that Adam`s looking at, depicts an enlarged human muscle, where all the different muscle cells become one big and beautiful entanglement.

In Adams view, such forms of art can help us understand our own body as more than just a controllable and effective biological machine. He points out, that there is much more coincidence and well functioning confusion at play in the internal human body, than the traditional scientific models would have us believe.

If you write or read blogs that include history of science and medicine, you may be interested in filling in this short online survey posted by Jaipreet Virdi, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto — it only takes a minute or two. Jaipreet explains the background for the survey here.

(Thanks, Rebekah, for the tip. Rebekah also recommends this link to a good list of blogs and twitter accounts with history of science content).