Biomedicine on Display

By chance I just found the wonderful exchange below in the Minutes of Evidence of the House of Lords (i.e., the upper house of the British Parliament) Select Committee on Economic Affairs meeting of 14 February. It’s the record of the examination of witnesses on the state of public health research and its importance for the health of the population (don’t ask why I read this kind of stuff :-)

The Lords have called Richard Peto, famous Oxford professor in medical statistics and epidemiology, to the stand. First Lord Skidelsky asks some questions about the epidemiological evidence behind the risks of smoking, and then Lord Vallance of Tummel (sic!) brings up the question of hospital acquired infections:

Sir Richard, I wonder if I may change the subject a little bit because you have already answered the question I was going to ask on smoking en passant. Could we move on to hospital acquired infections.

To which professor Peto answers:

I have been fairly useless on the previous questions and I am probably going to be even more useless on this.

Replies Lord Vallance of Tummel:

That is fine. Do not think that because you are being useless it is not helpful.

To which the Chairman adds:

You may take some comfort from the fact that with some people who are very assertive about what they believe we are not very convinced they are right either. We think you are more likely to be right if you are somebody who shows a little doubt about something.

Words of wisdom — stumbled upon in the minutes of a Select Committee of the House of Lords.

Just a reminder about the meeting in Copenhagen 16-18 September — on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in biomedical science and medical technology.

How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of more or less intangible and invisible scientific, medical and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

We’re aiming for two intensive days with visually enhanced presentations, good discussions and excellent food in beautiful surroundings.
 
Read the full call here. Further information here. Send proposals for presentations, panels etc. to ths@sund.ku.dk, not later than Monday 29 March.

Program committee: Ken Arnold, Wellcome Collection, London; Robert Bud, Science Museum, London; Judy Chelnick, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; Mieneke te Hennepe, Boerhaave Museum, Leiden; Thomas Soderqvist, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (chair).

Nina has a point — her favourite museums are idiosyncratic. There are lots of “perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable” museums, but those that stick in one’s memory are those with individuality, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology. They are often small, because they are not run by committees, and the staff is passionate about what they are doing.

Yet, as Nina points out, most small idiosyncratic museums strive to become bigger and more mainstream rather than remain small, quirky and passionate and cultivating their idiosyncracy. She gives four reasons for this:

Funders and potential donors tend to look for particular benchmarks of professionalism (appropriately), and few are comfortable funding the most risky or content-specific institutions.

As money gets tight, museums look for exhibits, program strategies, and revenue streams that are “proven” by other institutions’ successes, rather than charting their own potentially risky path.

Many museums no longer employ in-house exhibit developers, relying instead on a short list of contractors and consultants. Design firms’ projects often have a common look across different cities and institutions.

Small museums, which are most likely to cultivate local, distinctive voice and approaches, often have an inferiority complex. Rather than asserting their uniqueness, they try to emulate large museums.

Science centers are among the worst. They have, Ninas suggests, three additional reasons for homogeneity:

The audience cycles frequently as families “age out.” Institutions may feel less of a need to offer something unusual or distinctive if the audience will keep refreshing every few years.

The content is often seen as not being community-specific. Science is science, and grocery store exhibits are grocery store exhibits. Funders like the NSF have encouraged science centers in particular to share their techniques and evaluations, which is fabulous but also leads to rampant and sometimes unthinking imitation.

These museums have undergone the fastest growth in the industry in the past thirty years. There is a big business of selling exhibits, copies of exhibits, and exhibit recipe books, and many individuals who start new institutions rely almost entirely on these vehicles to fill their galleries.

I certainly share Nina’s love of idiosyncratic institutions — and I can certainly see the risk of becoming bigger and more established. Can we keep the passion even though we are slowly growing?

Like most museums, Medical Museion is a member of the International  Council of Museums (ICOM). The major benefit of membership is that you don’t have to pay entrance to other member museums (and sometimes are allowed to bypass the queue by getting in through the VIP entrance, which gives a kick of feeling important).

But except for this, one doesn’t really get much out of the hefty membership fee. ICOM, with its headquarters in the UNESCO building in Paris, is just another big transnational bureaucracy.

In the good old days of Western imperialism, ICOM promoted wholesome European and American values. Not so anymore. The 22nd General Conference will be held in Shanghai in November this year on the theme ‘Museums for Social Harmony’.

Took me some time to get my memory in order. In fact, last I heard the term ’social harmony’ was in a Xinhua news report from the Sixth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, held in Beijing in 2006.

Building social harmony, said a CPC spokesperson then, ”is a major strategic move taken by the Party to build a fair and just society and attain sustainable social and economic development”. And now, four years later, this strategic move has already been adopted by ICOM.

As a corollary, ’Museums for Social Harmony’, has also been chosen as the theme for this year’s International Museum Day on Tuesday 18 May.  

Actually, when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. I don’t believe this is a specific ICOM phenomenon. Transnational bureaucracies probably have quite a lot in common with CPC’s world view of a socially harmonic, market economy-based society.

We have a old and pretty dysfunctional website. Shall we rebuild it (using the university’s system) or not?

All other great museums have fancy, big websites with lots of rich media functionalities. They cost hundreds of hours and enormous sums of money to build and maintain. Are they worth it? Or are the days of big websites numbered?

Mitch Joel (TwistImage) believes so (March 6), and I think he has a good argument.  If you think about how people find and connect to brands, they don’t necessarily do so through Google or other search engines anymore: “In fact, more and more people are having their first brand interaction on their mobile device. There are many people who are also connecting to brands for the first time in spaces like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that website is about to become extinct. But it means that institutional branding is much more than one, big and centralized website:  “it is more than likely that we’re going to see more and more brands create multiple spaces and platforms to ensure that they’re connecting with the right people in the right communities”. And even if institutions use microblogging and other platforms, they usually think about them as instruments to drive people back to their own, controlled, website: “The truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it”.

Worth some thought.

The recently published Technology and Medical Practice: Blood, Guts and Machines, edited by Ericka Johnson och Boel Berner (Ashgate), might be interesting reading for medical museum curators. Says the blurb:

The advanced technologies being used in diagnosis and care within modern medicine, whilst supporting and making medical practices possible, may also conflict with established traditions of medicine and care. What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors’, nurses’ and medical scientists’ practices changed when artefacts are involved? How is knowledge negotiated, or relations of power reconfigured? Technology and Medical Practice addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care. Combining science and technology studies with medical sociology, the history of medicine and feminist approaches to science, this book presents analyses of artefacts-in-use across a variety of settings within the UK, USA and Europe, and will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology alike.

For contents, see: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9922&edition_id=12413

Just learned from Beth how to embed a YouTube video  into a powerpoint slide — see this screencast. You need Powerpoint 2007 (and of curse a live Internet connection). Beth wants to put this trick into the Trainer’s Bag of Social Media Tricks.

We have just started a search for 1-2 positions at the level of Associate Professor (alternatively Assistant Professor).

As readers of this blog probably knows, Medical Museion is an integrated research and museum unit for promoting medical science communication based on the material and visual medical heritage. The research profile is centered around the contemporary history of the biomedical sciences, medical science communication studies, and studies of the production of the material and visual medical scientific heritage. We have a world-class collection of historical medical artefacts and images, an active program for the acquisitioning and preservation of the contemporary biomedical and biotechnological heritage, a permanent medical-historical public gallery, and an innovative temporary exhibition program.

We are looking for two new members of faculty to contribute to our integrated research, teaching, heritage and outreach programme focussing on late 20th century and contemporary medical and health sciences in a cultural, aesthetic and historical perspective. The aim of the programme is to develop new modes of research-based collecting, exhibition making and web-based outreach by combining scientific content, cultural interpretation and aesthetic expression in innovative ways.

On the outreach side, we are developing research-based science communication practices for a variety of audiences – spanning from health professionals to the general public – in the form of exhibitions and web products, and with special attention to the aesthetics of science communication.

On the acquisition side, we are in the process of developing research-based curatorial practices (heritage production) in close cooperation with research institutions, hospitals, pharma, biotech and medical device companies, and patient organisations in the region (‘museum 2.0’) .

The appointees are required to do research at an international level and research-based teaching, however most of teaching obligations are substituted with museum work.

Read the official full job description below.
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In the early morning — just before Johanna began to make the usual noices to indicate she wanted to be transferred to our bed for a last cosy hour of sleep — my eyes fell on this sentence in a piece by Douglas Haddow in Adbusters (‘The coming barbarism’):

Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

I admit it’s taken out of context. Nevertheless, try to translate the sentence into the domain of science/medical museums and sci- and bioart, as represented by, for example, the Wellcome Collection:

Dispense with the sci- and bioart gallery and make scientific reality our experimentation lab.

In other words, don’t move the aesthetic out of the laboratory into galleries and museum exhibitions (this is what all sci- and bioartists so far have been doing). Go to the lab instead, do some real experiments and re-frame this practice into an aesthetic experiment within the walls of the lab itself. The lab is your art gallery.

All of us who have been following Nina’s blog about museum 2.0 are happy to hear that her book project about visitor participation in museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries has come to a temporary end.

She describes The Participatory Museum as “a practical guide to visitor participation … the nuts and bolts of successful participatory projects” in cultural institutions. The first half of the book focuses on principles, the other on practice, mission and staff culture. It’s available both in paperback and as a PDF/ebook, but Nina is also about to publish a free online version later this month.

True to the participatory spirit of her blog and book project (she has involved hundreds of volunteers in the writing and production process) Nina will continue to make the website for the book a place for continued discussion and debate.

Nina’s visit here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen in October was inspiring and I’m looking very much forward to reading her book — and to see the reviews and the comments on her website.

When I opened my mailbox this morning I found the following enticing message:

Hello Thomas
I’m writing this to let you know about a brand new featured post we just made over here at Medicareer entitled, “Top 50 Biotech Blogs.” I thought that you and your readers over at Biomedicine on Display might find it to be an interesting read. Please do let me know if you have any feedback — http://phlebotomytechnicianprograms.org/2010/top-50-biotech-blogs/
Warm Regards,
Emily Johnston
Medicareer

Tired as I always am seven o’clock in the morning when I’m preparing breakfast for Johanna I clicked on the link and found a site with a nice long list of blogs — with ours at the top, fairly decently described. But, of course, the site has no contact address, no link to a main site, and no “Emily Johnston” at a company called Medicareer exists on the web. So what do these guys actually get out of bringing all this blog information together? Have I installed malicious code now by clicking on their site? Anyone who knows?

A recent call for submissions to the journal Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies makes me think (again and again and again) about the unfathomable gulf between on the one hand biomedical practice and on the other hand literary and cultural studies about biomedicine.

Concentric asks for papers for an issue on ‘bios’ — i.e., the old Greek word for ‘life course’ which has been used by post-thinkers since Foucault (Agamben, Hardt, Negri and others):

How then are we now to rethink human life in terms of our increasingly intimate relations with machines, perhaps even our posthumanity? How are we to evaluate our “prosthetic life”? How are we now to define, interpret, understand concepts of law and polis (government, nation-state), state power, capitalism and globalization, in relation to human­ and also earthly plant and animal­ life (bios, ecos)? What new and unforeseen power struggles, perhaps even conflicts between human and non-human, life and death, might now be coming into play? In this era of the new bios, and new ecos, must we establish a new bio-(eco-)ethics, construct a new bio-(eco-)subjectivity?

We must ask once again, as philosophers asked thousands of years ago, “What makes us live?” “What ensures our existence?” “What is it that we call human life?” Can we look at (our own human) life anew and write about it afresh? How may the traditional literary genres, and specifically those concerned with life-writing, the writing of memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, be changing in terms of their form and content and their media of expression? What is the significance of “life-writing” at this particular historical moment?

This is all very mainstream ad nauseam — I always wonder if these literary and cultural studies guys have ever paid a visit to a life science lab? And what would their jargon sound like if they had?

Besides the preservation and display of the contemporary medical heritage, one of my major research interests is the methodology of writing the history of contemporary science (see, e.g., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology (1997) and The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (with Ron Doel, 2006)).

Now I am beginning to think about a third volume in the ’series’ to catch up with new trends in science historiography. One of the most interesting issues — both from a museological and historiographical point of view — is how historians should deal with the growing avalanche of scientific digital documents.

I.e., how to preserve, utilise, and make sense of the enormous output of digitalised desk and laboratory data for the writing and displaying of contemporary history of science? Not just gigabytes of text documents (like manuscripts, electronic lab notebooks and emails), but also terabytes of quantitative experimental data — not to forget digitalised images and material things that embody such data (such a microarrays and biobanks).

Our guest blogger Martin Fenner wrote a very inspiring post about digital preservation a few weeks ago. “It’s surprising”, Martin concluded, ”that we have barely started to think about digital preservation”.

Another scholar who has thought about the problem is university archivist and library administration scientist Christopher Prom, currently a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Centre for Archive and Information Studies, University of Dundee.

Prom is giving a talk here in Copenhagen next Thursday (4 March), titled ”Preserving the ‘Papers’ of 21st Century Science”, in which he will review the current state of work in preserving digital records and provide some suggestions regarding methods and tools that archives and others stakeholders can use to make sure that the electronic record of the 21st century will be accessible also in the 22nd. Here’s his abstract:

We cannot understand the full impact of scientific work without access to the correspondence, notes, and other materials that scientists generate on a daily basis. But how, in the digital era, can we best preserve the ‘papers’ generated by scientists? Such records are stored as mere electronic impulses, distributed across many locations, and written in formats that cannot be rendered without machines and software. As a result, rich historical sources, such as correspondence in email format, are at risk. Recent events in East Anglia demonstrate that such records are susceptible to hacking and misrepresentation in the short term. In the long term, they may be even more susceptible to loss through corruption or neglect.

The venue for Prom’s talk is the Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17; it starts at 2.15 pm. Copenhagen historian of physics Finn Aaserud organises the event.

We’re just about to announce two new faculty positions here at Medical Museion — which raises the perennial problem of how to select the best candidates from dozens or more written applications. Seeing and hearing a person in live action often says more than thousands of words and an impressive CV. That’s why we interview selected applicants. But interviews are time-consuming and cost travel money for those involved.

The solution may be YouTube. Just read on The Scholarly Kitchen that Tufts University has now embraced the YouTube generation. Tufts’ official admissions criteria read:

Share a one-minute video that says something about you, upload it to YouTube or another easily accessible website, and give us the URL. What you do or say is totally up to you.

The videos are purely optional, but about 6% of 15,000 applicants submitted them.

Well, I’m afraid our university is not prepared to use this method for job applicants yet. But wait another couple of years …

The most relevant academic question this year is asked by Paul Glasziou (Centre for Evidence-Based medicine, Oxford University), who gives a talk with this title in the Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, on Monday 15 March, at 10am (Øster Farimagsgade 5, room 15.3.15). The talk is based on his and I. Chalmers’s article ‘Avoidable waste in the production and reporting of research evidence’, which was published in Lancet two years ago (vol. 374, 86-89).