Biomedicine on Display

Susan Squier, Penn State University, will discuss work in progress for her new book in a seminar at Medical Museion on 29 May, 10:00-12:00.

Her previous books include “Liminal lives: Imaginations of the Human in Biomedicine”, “Playing Dolly”, “Babies in Bottles”. 

Location: Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, Fredericiagade 18, 1310 København. Everyone is welcome.

For more information, please contact Susanne Bauer at: sbau@sund.ku.dk

The session “Modelling Futures, Modelling Pasts” (Chair: Thomas Macho, Humboldt University, Berlin) on Friday, Feb 8, 4:45-6:15 pm, at this week’s Science Futures Conference in Zurich offers talks on epidemiology, modelling, numerical experiments and simulation studies:

Susanne Bauer, University of Copenhagen: Epidemiological Studies as ‘Future Machines’: Modelling Population Health and Predicting Individual Risk
Mikaela Sundberg, University of Stockholm: Exploring Simulation Models: Numerical Experiments and Virtual Worlds  
Erika Mattila, London School of Economics: Predicting the Future by Modelling the Past

For the abstract of my talk, see here:  Continue Reading »

The Swiss STS Meeting 2008 , dedicated to ”Science Futures” (for the CFP s. earlier post), offers a 4-day conference  with a number of panels of interest to the cultural studies of biomed/biotech. Session themes include: biological utopias and dystopias, arts and artefacts, brain research and the emotional turn, technoscience and material transformation, simulations and numerical experiments, converging technologies, science fiction and alternative epistemologies… Biomed/biotech topics of plenary talks range from Susan Squier’s “BioPerformativity: Shaping the Future of Chicken and the Chicken of the Future” — to Paul Rabinow’s “Synthetic Biology: From Manifestos to Ramifications”. Plus: a ScienceFutures short-film program, curated by Suzanne Buchan. For the full conference program s. here.

Software collecting as part of curating recent science is controversial among museum curators. At the Medical Museion we have started collecting first software items such as epidemiological risk assessment tools. This raises the issue of how to classify and preserve these objects (s. previous post). Just 20 years from now, hardware availability will be critical in order to run today’s software. As to the practical challenges, historians of computing and computer technology museums will probably be able to help us in preserving medical software for the future.

There are a number of museums dedicated to the history of computers and computing: In our case, potential partners could include Danmarks Teknologisk Museum in Helsingør, which currently has a special exhibition about Denmark’s first calculating machine DASK. Of particular interest is the Dansk Datahistorisk Forening’s - so far virtual - datamuseum; this picture is from their image gallery:

There is a fascinating world of computer history out there, including hardware collecting. See the link list of the Dansk Datahistorisk Forening or the list of computer history organizations and museums by Virginia Tech.
Interestingly, Australian computer technology historians Maxwell M. Burnet and Robert M. Supnik move beyond conservation and call for restoration and even simulation of old computer systems. In the Digital Technical Journal they argue “that an understanding of computing’s past is vital to understanding its future, and thus that restoration, rather than just conservation, of historic systems is an important activity for computer technologists”.

Tuesday, 9 October 2007, 14:00-16:00

Christina Brandt (Max Planck Institute of the History of Science, Berlin) will discuss  fictional imaginations and literary representations of the figure of the clone (late 1960s to early 1980s) from a history of science perspective. 

Location: Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, Fredericiagade 18, 1310 København. Everyone is welcome. For more information, please contact Susanne Bauer at: susanne.bauer@mm.ku.dk 

For the abstract, see here:

Continue Reading »

The organisers of the European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (ZfL) have announced the conference streams - some might be of interest for a potential Biomedicine on Display Session. Deadline for abstracts and session proposals is Oct 15th.  Continue Reading »

An unease with the current scientific publishing system was addressed in two open panels at last year’s EASST conference. Now, a new journal has been launched in order to tackle some of the issues discussed at EASST 2006. The Open peer review process of the International Journal of Feminist Technoscience (IJFT) makes use of ”an interactive framework to secure quality, relevance, efficiency and democracy in scientific publishing” and to foster an open dialogue between actors in the field of technoscience. Programmatically, the first issue is entitled Processes of Cooperation. At stake is the distributed knowledge production in the digital age and the challenges as to the current academic publishing system.

The Deutsches Museum in Munich is organising a workshop ”Die Sichtbarmachung des Unsichtbaren: Mikroskopische Verfahren in der Laborpraxis”, 18-19 Oktober 2007, as part of the programme ”Knowledge Production at the Nanoscale. Images, Visions and Instruments in the Practice of Nanotechnology“.
Here is their call for papers:

Continue Reading »

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in collaboration with the Branco Weiss fellowship “Society-in-Science”  is inviting to a workshop in Berlin on March 1-4 (organizers: Christina Brandt, MPIWG Berlin, and Giuseppe Testa, IEO Milan):   

This workshop is intended to further an interdisciplinary and international discussion on historical, cultural, social and philosophical issues of cloning and stem cell research. Hardly any other research field has evoked such controversies during the last years. In contrast to the vivid ethical debates, there are so far only a few contributions to the history of cloning and stem cell research. Thus, we will pay particular attention to elucidating historical aspects. Not only does the concept of the “clone” itself have a very multiplicitous yet unexplored history since the beginning of the 20th century, but the different trajectories of cloning research practices, their scientific contexts as well as politics, are just as poorly understood from a historical perspective. By analyzing cloning and stem cell research against the background of 20th-century life sciences, the overall aim of the workshop is to arrive at a better understanding of today´s research practices and concepts as well as the debates and politics related to them.               (Thanks to: Christina Brandt) 

For more information, s. http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/workshops/en/cloning.html

For a preliminary programme: Continue Reading »

2nd Annual Symposium of the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network, 14-17 January 2007, hosted by the Medical Museion

The symposium will focus on how the recent biosciences challenge and reconfigure formerly stable categories: The social and the biological, the nature/culture dichotomy and the human/animal boundaries are increasingly blurred and become populated by hybrids, cyborgs and boundary objects. New material objects, visual and virtual representations produced and circulated in biomedicine and biotechnology challenge and disrupt the analytical categories of the historiographical and social studies of science. The new categories emerging in this empirical field of the biosciences raise a host of questions:
What are the sites of contestation and which categories are at stake? What new kinds of contested/ambiguous relations become possible and acquire significance? How are they co-produced and mediated by material objects and visual and virtual representations? What are the theoretical and methodological implications and challenges we face when studying the life sciences? How can comparative and inter-disciplinary studies contribute to exploring the formation and reconfiguration of categories such as race, gender, kinship, life, the body etc? In which ways can concepts such as biosociality, bioindividuality and hybridity address these changes ? Are they useful tools or phenomena of these transformations?

Preliminary Programme: Continue Reading »

Together with Nete Schwennesen (Biocampus and Institute of Public Health), we (Hanne Jessen and Susanne Bauer, Medicinsk Museion) are organising a conference “Contested Categories”, 15-17 January 2007.
This event is an open continuation of last year’s DK-UK network meeting , now the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Group, at BIOS (LSE), London and will take place just before the Health and Citizenship Conference, 18-20 January in Copenhagen.

The symposium “Contested Categories” will focus on how the life sciences challenge and reconfigure formerly stable categories: the social and the biological, the nature/culture dichotomy and the human/animal boundaries are increasingly blurred and become populated by hybrids, cyborgs and boundary objects. New categories emerging in this empirical field of the life sciences raise a host of questions: What are the sites of contestation and which categories are at stake? What new kinds of contested/ambiguous relations become possible and acquire significance? What are the theoretical and methodological implications and challenges we face when studying the life sciences? How can comparative and inter-disciplinary studies contribute to exploring the formation and reconfiguration of categories such as race, gender, kinship and life? In which ways can concepts such as biosociality, bioindividuality and hybridity address these changes - are they useful tools or phenomena of these transformations?

Invitations and calls for both conferences Continue Reading »

A 1-day-conference on biobank governance is held at University of Vienna’s political science department, organized by the interdisciplinary research platform “Life-Science-Governance” (LSG): “Biobank Governance in Comparative Perspective: Strategies - Ethics - Resistance”

This is from their announcement:

This interdisciplinary conference focuses on the governance of biobanks. Biobanks constitute a new challenge for governance, and can themselves be understood as new forms of governing bodies and populations. Biobanks are an important element in the new biopolitical order in which self-guidance through active citizens is as significant as state-led strategies of population politics, body monitoring, the rise of the new bio-economy, and the redefinition of citizenship. Continue Reading »

… talking about biological citizenship etc - this has just arrived in my mailbox:

Call for papers:
Embodiment and the State
Middelfart, Denmark, October 27-28, 2006

Keynote speakers:
Margaret Lock, McGill University - Allan Young, McGill University - Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics - Berardino Palumbo, University of Messina - Sarah Nettleton, University of York - András Zempleni, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique*

Introduction and aims of the conference:
Studies on embodiment processes have gained importance in contemporary anthropology, philosophy, psychology and sociology, stimulating renewals in theoretical as well as methodological perspectives: power is no more considered an abstract and external force, but is observed in its micro-physical fragmentation and influence on the body. Continue Reading »

The 4th European Biannual Conference of the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts will be held in Amsterdam, 13-16 June 2006. Deadline for submission of abstratcs and session proposals is December 5, 2005.
Continue Reading »

The 1st annual symposium of the DK-UK Postgraduate Forum on Bio-studies took place at BIOS Research Centre for the study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics, 17-18 November 2005:
Continue Reading »