Biomedicine on Display

The Imagine Science Film Festival will be held 16-25 October in New York. The objective of the festival is to showcase films (especially fiction films) that “effectively incorporate science into a compelling narrative while maintaining credible scientific groundings”. The public will join scientists in learning and imagining science through visual storytelling. Films with bio/medical content include ‘A Biometric Tale‘ (2003), ‘In Vivid Detail‘ (2007; about prosopagnosia, i.e., inability to remember faces), and ‘A Fruit Fly in New York‘ (2007). See more here.

On 21 February 2009, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT, are organising a one-day graduate symposium that will explore ways in which art overlaps with science, and with a focus on material objects. Possible topics are:

• networks of artists and scientists
• artist/scientist collaborations
• art and the natural world
• the philosophical concept of the sublime
• theology, art, and science
• the influence of scientific discoveries on the arts
• artistic and scientific approaches to epistemology
• dialogues between art and science in the Enlightenment
• art, science, and education
• science museum displays
• scientific illustration
• travel accounts
• art and exploration
• amateur practice
• photography as science or art
• artistic and scientific concepts of truth

The organisers invite proposals for 25-minute papers across the arts and sciences. Abstracts of max. 300 words by October 14, 2008 to imogen.hart@yale.edu. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Read more here.

Yes, if we shall believe the Aarhus Network for Science, Technology and Medicine Studies which is hosting a one-day conference in Aarhus, Denmark, 23 October, under the heading ‘Challenging hyperprofessionalism: The intradisciplinarity of science, technology and medicine studies’.

To present “the richness of what is going on across the disciplines”, the organisers invite “research based papers or posters, including work-in-progress, broadly within science, technology and medicine studies”, especially contributions that address the intradisciplinarity issue.

Each paper will only be allotted 20 minutes for presentation and questions (not much time, really!). Titles and 100 word abstracts are due 8 October (send to idenklk@hum.au.dk). Slightly more info here.

Following two succesful earlier meetings (in Stockholm in 2006 and in Gothenburg 2007), the Swedish medical history network organizes its third conference, again in Stockholm, on Thursday 29 January 2009. The main item on the meeting agenda is the planned project for writing the history of the Karolinska Institute, founded in 1810, and today one of the world’s leading medical research universities. As the project involves up to ten Swedish medical historians in 2008 and 2009, it will probably dominate the meeting, but the organizers promise that there will be plenty of time for presentation of other current research projects as well. Conference language is Swedish, but you don’t need a Swedish passport to attend. For inquiries, contact Roger Qvarsell, roger.qvarsell@isak.liu.se, http://www.isak.liu.se/temaq/rq/presentation.

Like many of our readers, the Biomedicine of Display blog team is taking some break periods here in August.

Not because we are on relaxing vacations (most university people in Denmark take theirs in July), but because most of us are very busy writing draft chapters for our joint anthology ‘Curating Biomedicine’ — the book which will summarise our research efforts in the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project of the last two and a half years.

We won’t stop posting altogether, but you will probably hear less from us over the next two-three weeks.

Everyone in southern Scandinavia interested in genetics and democracy should take the opportunity to attend a seminar series organised at the University of Lund in October through December. Dates and preliminary speakers include:

October 27

• A. Hedgecoe, Sussex: “The Politics of Personalised Medicine”

November 17

• A. Clarke, Cardiff: “Genes, Knowledge and Autonomy: Whose Knowledge? What Knowledge? When?”
• H. Gottweis, Vienna: “Operating Biobanks: Towards the Governance of Disappearing Bodies”

December 8

• L. Koch, Copenhagen: “The Politics of Life – past and present use of genetic knowledge”
• B. Wynne, Lancaster: “Genetic Risk – expert and lay perceptions”

More details later (or contact Niclas Hagen, Niclas.Hagen@svet.lu.se, for more info).

Inspired by Material World we thought we would like to know who our readers are. We know you are dispersed all over the world — from Korea to Chile, from Alaska to South Africa. Most of you come from Denmark, United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States, fewer reside in Colombia, Norway and Australia. Why do you read this blog on and off? What do you think of it? And how can we make it better? Please write to us in the comment field below.

Best wishes,

The Biomedicine on Display group

The medical faculty at the University of Oslo has announced a full/associate professorship in medical history, with a focus on Norwegian history. The candidate shall have a research background in Scandinavian/Norwegian medical history, which sort of narrows the field of possible applicants. Read more here. Deadline for applications is already 1 August 2008.

At last, we have put together a list of books, articles and unpublished PhD-theses with relation to the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project published between 2005 and 2008. Unfortunately, very few of these publications are yet available online. If you want a copy of any of these, contact the author.

Only publications with relation to the BoD-project are listed. For full publication lists for each author, see here.

Here’s an interesting job opportunity for anyone devoted to the history of contemporary biomedicine. The Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. is looking for a historian to study the history of post-WWII biomedicine at NIH or supported by the NIH (this is not a severe restriction, since the NIH has financed a large portion of the significant post-WWII biomedical research efforts). The job also involves developing the Office’s virtual presence, including its website. It’s a <5 years position, and non-U.S. citizens are also welcome to apply. Potential applicants with a background in history, science studies, sociology/anthropology of medicine etc. are encouraged to contact the head of the Office of NIH History, Dr. Robert Martensen (martensenr@mail.nih.gov), to discuss the position prior to submitting their proposal. Review of applications will begin 30th June 2008.

As we’ve announced before, the 14th meeting of the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences will be held in Edinburgh, 17-21 September. Now the website is up for paper proposals and registration. This year’s meeting will be devoted particularly to aspects of “the use, culture, history, art and manufacture of models, prosthetics and surgical interventions” and to work towards a European-wide electronic database of body part models and prosthetics held in medical collections. So activate your prosthetic brain and produce an abstract before 15 April!

We have received a mail from Ginger Scott, a Masters student in the Museum Studies program at the University of Toronto, who is currently researching the display of human anatomy in museums. Ginger has asked us to distribute this inquiry to our readers:

Through my research, I am particularly interested in the relationship between human anatomical displays (the objectification of death) and the museum visitor and the issues involved when an individual is confronted with representations of themselves as specimens or objects. I am also fascinated by the continued relationship between art and medical science as they have developed hand in hand for centuries. Do you believe that this confrontation is primarily an educational experience, or is it also alienating for individuals who are uncomfortable with the display of anatomy as human form? Please direct me to any other information on these topics if available.

Does anybody have a good answer? You can reply with a comment to this post (below).

We have problems with a slow host server today. We don’t have the patience to wait for the windows to open. So no postings today.

Here’s the resumé of Adam’s PhD-dissertation ‘History in the flesh – investigating the historicized body’. For further info about the public defence on Friday 15 February, se here.

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Displaying the molecular anatomy of subcellular structures

I thought animations of subcellular anatomy, for example, ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’, were largely didactic tools, and that more serious animations for scientific purposes were restricted to the molecular level (e.g., protein animations).

But that was before I saw this awesome animated model of the molecular architecture of the nuclear pore in a paper in Nature (29 Nov).

The nuclear pore is a regulating port for transporting molecules in and out of the cell nucleus. Like all subcellular structures it has been the objects of thousands of studies which have generated enormous amount of biochemical and morphological data. What the authors of this article did was to piece all these kinds of data (others’ and their own) together using computational methods. There are millions of ways in which the 456 identified proteins of the nuclear pore might fit together, but there is only one optimal solution. In the same way as a puzzle is solved by checking if the pieces fit together one by one with respect to colour, form, over all picture etc., the authors used state-of-the art computational integration methods to puzzle the proteins of the nuclear pore together. The animated model is the result.

(from Frank Alber, Svetlana Dokudovskaya, Liesbeth M. Veenhoff, Wenzhu Zhang, Julia Kipper, Damien Devos, Adisetyantari Suprapto, Orit Karni-Schmidt, Rosemary Williams, Brian T. Chait, Andrej Sali & Michael P. Rout, The molecular architecture of the nuclear pore complex,
Nature 450, 695-701, 2007).