Here’s the manuscript for my article to the Medical Museion Yearbook 2007 which is coming out in July. It s an outline of ideas which will be explored in the workshop ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’ and the ‘Art and Biomedicne: Beyond the Body’ conference in late August and early September, organised by Jan Eric Olsén, Stine Hebert, Thomas Söderqvist and myself.

Opening the morning paper it is not unusual to see biomedicine displayed. An image of the SARS virus. A world map showing migratory patterns of wild birds purported to be propagating avian flu. An article about the licensing of pharmaceutical patents to drug manufacturers in India who will produce anti-retrovirals cheaply for an Africa overwhelmed by HIV. A graphic template showing the genome of the fruitfly.

But the virus image is not an enlargement of a microscopic entity: it is an elaborate visualisation constructed painstakingly from data some of which is obtained crystallographically and some of which is theoretical. Before even reaching the newspaper’s picture editor it will have gone through the mill of a specially written enhancement software package before being tipped into Photoshop for false colouring. The world map does not show the trade and trucking routes for the food industry which is just as lethal a vector of avian flu as any wild bird or… high-flying businessman. The article about pharmaceutical licences does not say how many have died unnecessarily during the fifteen year battle of activists to obtain inexpensive treatment for HIV. The fruitfly genome gives the impression of showing the ‘building blocks’ of life, but does not explain that gene expression is different from genetic structure, nor does it explain why the lowly fruitfly was worth the time and effort to be gene sequenced.

There are a lot of invisibles in current biomedicine. As we have seen, some are very big, others very small. How can these invisibles be conceptualised, visualised and explored by museums of medicine? Medical Museion has taken on this challenge, an engagement which will no doubt benefit many museums much larger than itself. It has taken it on by starting in the right place, which is to think before acting, to create a research culture around these issues, and to develop solid interdisciplinary communities among those who know this to be a burning issue. It is a burning social as well as intellectual issue – how can a larger public be empowered by knowledge of these complex fields to act responsibly and effectively, and how can health policy be informed by more than the science itself?

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