Biomedicine on Display

Who would have thought that the torrential rain during the dramatic storms seen in Copenhagen this weekend would have had such devastating consequences? The collection stores here at Medical Museion bore the brunt of it. In some places the water rose to 90 cm.  Dedicated members of the team arrived on Saturday and worked in the evening while the rooms were pumped. On Sunday, many others arrived to plough through the black gooey sludge and salvage more precious boxes.

On Monday, we were organized into groups, some carrying heavy boxes filled with flood damaged artefacts that still remained in the basements. Water was still leaking out of the soaking walls and the humidity did not help the situation. Others have been removing bones from sodden boxes, attempting to dry them a little and repack them temporarily in safer conditions before they will be packed more permanently. Paper, medical photos and other precious documentation was carefully peeled apart and placed between conservation papers and put under weights.  The smell is terrible and the actual cleaning of the damaged rooms will be a whole new and different problem. One floor has completely split open and cracks have appeared on the walls of these beautiful old buildings.

Everyone is working to salvage what he or she can. There is great sadness, determination and a sense of camaraderie.

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’):

COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning

Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture seems to have rather bleak prospects. The looming financial and social global crisis is not conducive to centralized efforts by big museums to save the contemporary STM heritage, not least because the modern state-subsidised museum institution is running out of funding (at least in the West). What can curators then do to uphold their professional obligation to rescue the contemporary STM heritage for future generations? In this paper I will discuss two alternative collecting strategies: distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing. I suggest that the major aim of STM museum acquisition curators should rather be to raise the general awareness among scientists and the engineering and medical professions of the importance of preserving ‘their’ artefacts (heritagemindedness). Drawing on a historical analogy (biological standardisation in the 1950s), I also suggest that this aim might be achieved best by working out guidelines for the collection, preservation and curation of artefacts to be distributed to individual scientists, doctors and engineers in research institutions and private companies, and to interested members of the public. Presently, social media is probably the best vehicle for producing such guidelines and spreading them widely.

Any views? If you want to take issue with it, do it before 15 July, please? (Or in Leiden, of course).

I haven’t been to an interesting scholarly meeting for a long time — so it was pretty frustrating to realise that two meetings on some of my favourite research and curatorial interests are taking place at the same time.

The first meeting (which I’ve already signed up for as a contributor) is a small workshop on “collecting genomics”, 12-14 May. It’s organised by John Durant at the MIT Museum and Liba Taub at HPS Cambridge and there are only going to be 15-20 people around the table; a perfect setting for in-depth discussions about one of the crucial challenges to science, technology and medical museums in the future: how to document, collect and make sense of one of the most important developments in late 20th century ST&M.

The other meeting is no less interesting, at least for me as a combined biographer and science communication/museum person. On 12-13 May, the Royal Society organises a conference titled ‘Science Voices: Scientists speak about science and themselves’ to ”explore the creation and use of a number of projects which bring science and scientists to historians and the public through scientists’ own vibrant personal voices and testimony”. The projects to be discussed include the current project on the history of the Royal Society in the 20th century, the oral history of Natural History Museum project (‘Museum Lives’), and the Oral History of British Science project. Oral history looms large in these three projects — and accordingly the organisers expect discussions about topics like oral history techniques, witness seminars, how to construct coherent intellectual frameworks for interview subject selection and project design, making use of oral history in history and epistemology of science, etc.

The Royal Society meeting (more details here) is important for museum purposes too — after all, I strongly believe that the individual scientific voice (autobiographical or biographical) is one of the best ways to communicate science, also in a museum context. In the best of worlds, somebody would had organised a meeting on ’Collecting the voices and materials of genomics’, or something like that.

But that’s not the case, so I’ll opt for the genomic collection meeting. Not just because I’ve signed up already, but because it’s a smaller, more intimate and discussion-oriented meeting that aims to brake new ground for museum work. Frankly, oral history is a fairly well-chewed methodology. (But oh, my heart beats for scientists speaking about themselves and others).

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize!

Just over 15 years ago, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg spearheaded Dogme 95, a manifesto to purify the art of film-making.

The aim was to engage audiences more profoundly and make sure they weren’t distracted by over-production. The Dogme manifesto ruled out special effects, post-production changes and other tricks in order to focus on the story and the performances.

Since then, writers, theatre directors and other arts practitioners have all found inspiration in Dogme 95’s back-to-basics philosophy. Dogme has been criticised, as have some of the films made according to its rules, but as exhibition producers, this classic vow of chastity has inspired us as a way of guiding and sharpening the creative practice of making science, technology and medicine exhibitions.

These rules have been written and published with almost indecent speed. They are deliberately provocative prompts for further discussion. This manifesto is not a definitive set of working proposals, but a draft, which will no doubt be modified and sharpened through challenge and feedback.

And anyone who knows the institutions we are based at will be aware that the exhibitions we have presided over have often not followed one or more of these rules.

This manifesto is almost reference-free, but this does not mean we think the ideas are purely our own. There are vast bodies of literature on science communication, exhibition making, art history and museology; we have read some of this literature and been influenced by it. We also have learned much from the museums we have visited.

1. Exhibitions should be research-led, not a form of dissemination

Curators should use exhibitions to find things out (for themselves and for their visitors) and not just regurgitate what is already known. Good curators are inspired and imaginative researchers who find and then build on the investigations of experts and colleagues, juxtaposing varied understandings about their chosen topic. They add their own insights and gradually come up with new ideas and perspectives.

2. A scientist should always be involved in the exhibition, a technologist if it is about technology

Don’t shy away from drawing on real expertise in interpreting a topic or finding exhibits. But this is not to say that the aim of the exhibition is simply to give voice to the views of these experts. They are not, nor should they be encouraged to see themselves as, the curators, but it is vital that their perspectives are present in the final exhibition.

3. Be clear about exhibitions being “multi-authored”

Exhibitions emerge from curatorial collaborations between experts and designers. But a show’s funders, the institutional context and other stakeholders have a bearing on the final outcome; it should be possible for exhibition visitors to find out about these influences.

The project teams who make exhibitions deserve to be credited. Those responsible for the show not only need to take a bow, they also need to be held responsible for its contents and impact.

4. Use only original material

Exhibitions should engage audiences with original material rather than reproductions and props. If you cannot illustrate a topic with original artefacts, images and documents, ask yourself if an exhibition is the best way to make the point. Models, replicas and reproductions can be shown, but only if this is the point of showing them.

Reproductions of artworks should not be used, unless the work’s natural medium is “facsimile” – for example, digital photographs. The use of scientific and medical images raises complicated questions, such as what is the “original” format of a microscopic image of a cell?

Most scientific images today are minted as digital data, and their final appearance invariably owes much to enhancements and cropping. How this material should be displayed and labelled needs consideration. It is often better to leave it out all together.

5. Never show ready-made science

Focus on the processes of science: science in the making; the triumph of discovery; the frustration and blind alleys explored along the way. Also, look at the social and cultural processes of scientific ideas becoming accepted and embedded.

6. Jealously guard a place for mystery and wonder

Exhibitions provide opportunities to explore topics in ways that bring new light to sometimes forgotten or less-well understood aspects of medicine, science, technology and their histories. But this urge to demystify subjects should not be allowed to render exhibitions earnestly didactic.

Deliberately include some exhibits about which less, rather than more, is known – curious exhibits that just cannot completely be accounted for. Visitors should leave exhibitions wanting to find out more.

7. Reject most exhibition ideas

Exhibitions represent the meeting point between subjects and material culture, and can be approached from either end – themes or objects first, or a mixture of the two. But often, topics that seem promising will not be worth developing because there simply aren’t good enough objects with which to explore or support them.

Similarly, many areas of material culture end up just not being interesting enough to make a show about. Too often, exhibitions are made from empty ideas of stupid objects. It is worth searching for a topic and a set of objects that harmoniously amplify and mutually enrich each other.

8. Leave out as much as possible

Less is usually more in exhibitions. Visitors will remember and enjoy looking at 10 carefully chosen things more than a 100 that are reasonably well selected.

The most important aspect of an exhibition is its outer boundaries, which keep out the mass of distractions that lie beyond. In the digital era, a core value of a museum exhibition is that it makes its point through displaying a few selected original objects.

9. Embrace the showbusiness of exhibitions

Audiences come to exhibitions in their leisure time and deserve to be lifted out of themselves. They will respond to the drama of the best exhibits, displays, design, writing and lighting.

Make sure that all of this is done well and given the greatest polish. This will enhance the presence of the objects and the impact of the ideas. Don’t be ashamed to admit that making exhibitions is, in part, a matter of putting on a show.

10. Celebrate the ephemeral quality of exhibitions

Catalogues, web-presence and filmed versions of exhibitions can lengthen the shadows cast by exhibitions, but they will never come close to keeping alive the actual experience of visiting a show.

This is an important part of the magic of exhibitions. Like good pieces of theatre, they gain much of their energy by being around for a limited time and then disappearing. The fact that they are time-limited gives their makers a degree of freedom to experiment and be daring. Grasp it!

11. Make exhibitions true to the geography of their venues

The principle is that knowledge is “situated” – the context in which we contemplate and acquire it can seem as important as the ideas or facts themselves. Exhibition makers need to think hard about how to work with the “place” of an exhibition.

Consider what is lost in touring an exhibition where the subject becomes detached from the local context. The country, the city, the venue, the room, and the set and design of an exhibition, even the showcases and the orientation of individual objects – all have a bearing on the meanings that audiences derive from them.

12. Avoid artificial lighting

Use natural light where possible. Start with the light available and build up from it. If possible, reveal the windows and keep the doors open. Let the natural layout of the building be apparent, make it clear where you have introduced false walls. This will enable visitors to keep a sense of where they are.

And don’t fall into the trap of imagining that the background for an exhibition has either to be a neutral black box or a pristine white cube. Ideally, a show should look and feel very different on a midsummer morning to a winter evening.

13. Always involve more than one sense

It is impossible for visitors to turn off their non-visual senses in an exhibition – they will hear, touch and smell things no matter what. So make sure that some of the tactile, audio, or olfactory experiences of an exhibition are curated. Exhibitions work by teasing their visitors into thinking that they could get close enough to what they see to touch it, even while making sure they don’t.

But curators should think about how to introduce at least a few objects that visitors can touch. Never use artificial sounds or odours, but try hard to find ways to enhance the audio and olfactory qualities of the original objects, getting visitors to use their ears and noses.

14. Make exhibitions for inquisitive adults

If you aim at educationally under-achieving primary school children, it will be impossible to engage anyone else (and you are unlikely to engage even your target audience). Many children and teenagers are keenly attracted to adult culture, but very few adults see the attraction of young material.

Never make exhibitions for educational purposes – other media and methods are more effective. It’s also worth bearing in mind that exhibitions are, by their nature, a “childish” medium, bringing out playfulness in all of us. This should be encouraged, but to focus deliberately on young audiences reaps diminishing returns.

15. Remember that visitors ultimately make their own exhibitions

Some visitors might not be interested in reading what the curators write, while others might not look at many objects. Some will be interested in aspects of a topic that the curators might not have come across.

Because of this, when an exhibition opens, it is only ever the second or third draft of an idea that will, through revision, reach maybe its eighth or ninth incarnation by the time it closes.

Exhibitions should be alive, and change is a vital part of life. Even in the most “stable” shows, lights will need adjusting and labels redrafting. An exhibit might even have to be removed or replaced. More radically, some exhibitions should be deliberately half-finished, or set up so that updates can be added halfway through.

16. Make exhibitions the jumping off place for further engagement

Good exhibitions are the point of departure for a longer relationship. The value of exhibitions should only partly be judged by analysing how many people come, how long they spent in a show and what they think of it. On this basis alone, most exhibitions are foolishly expensive ventures, particularly in these cash-strapped times.

Don’t forget that, just occasionally, exhibitions can really change visitors’ lives and this is worth a lot. Effective exhibitions can also bring in new objects to museums, have an impact on recruitment, add to shop sales, improve the organisation’s reputation, and provide a context for corporate celebrations. There is a virtual avalanche of cultural capital that can flow from them: this should be valued from the start.

17. Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent the rules

One of my favourite objects for acquisition and display from the world of biomedical and clinical laboratories is the microplate (microtiter plate, microwell plate).

A microplate is simply a series of small test tubes (‘wells’) arranged in a regular matrix pattern on a plastic plate, usually made from transparent polystyrene.

The little plate makes it possible to handle many samples in parallell—the most common size is 96 wells, but there are plates with several thousand wells—and the results can be read in an automated plate reader. In addition, the small size of the wells reduces sample volumes (from milliliter scale to nanoliter scale), which in turn saves money spent on reagents, like enzymes, which can be forbiddingly expensive.

So it’s simple, low-tech, modest, cheap and cost-saving—no doubt the main reasons why the microplate is a ubiquitous tool in laboratories around the world for all kinds of biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. Most of today’s high-throughput analysis in genomics and proteomics is unthinkable without microplates.

In other words—the perfect lab technology.

What about the history of the microplate? Professional historians of medicine and/or technology haven’t paid much attention to the unassuming plastic lab device. After a few minutes on the web, however, I found out that the earliest microplate seems to have been constructed by the Hungarian medical microbiologist Gyula Takácsy (1914-1980). The Hungarian National Center for Epidemiology writes on their website that:

To respond to the shortage in laboratory supplies and a severe influenza outbreak in the early 50s in Hungary, Dr. Takácsy developed several excellent innovative lab supplies and techniques much ahead of his age. Describing his technical innovation, the spiral loop instead of pipette and glass-plates with wells instead of tubes, he used the term micromethods published in Hungarian in 1952 and in 1955 in English. He was the first to have the notion to apply calibrated spiral wire loops for multiple simultaneous serial dilutions in plastic multiwell strips.

“… very small volumes of blood taken from the fingertip or from laboratory animals can be taken up and diluted for quantitative work. The technique has been found particularly useful in virus research, since it is not negligible how much has to be used from costly immune sera and antigens”.

His paper focused on the use of spiral loops for serial dilutions and the testing methods for haemagglutination and complement fixation, however, the “8×12 grooves” that “can take up to 0.15 ml fluid” could describe the modern microplate.

So disease and shortage of supplies was apparently the mother of microplate invention. Also in the 1950s, US inventor John Liner (who founded a company called Linbro, which was later merged into Flow Laboratories Inc, which in turn was swallowed by ICN Flow, which is taken has been over by MTX Lab Systems; mergers and acquisitions in the medical and laboratory device industry is an extremely interesting history in its own right) introduced a vacuum-formed panel with 96 wells. Looking back in the late 1990′s, Liner wrote that “I consider myself  the grandfather to the disposable microplate, about 1953 I used a white styrene vacuum formed panel …”. Yet another case of multiple invention.

I also found some technical details about the early development of microplate automation here, and I found a reference to a web publication (Ray Manns, Microplate history. 2nd ed. 1999; http://www.microplate.org/history/det_hist.htm) in L.J. Kricka and S.R. Master, ‘Quality Control and Protein Microarrays’, Clinical Chemistry vol. 55: 1053–1055 (2009)—but the publication seems to be removed from the site.

So the microplate is almost untrodden territory for historians of medical technology. Maybe a medical student would like to explore its history and importance for the development of genomics and proteomics in a term paper?

Rollator drawings, 30^th September – 4^th October 2010:

Continuing my appreciation of the aesthetics of seemingly ugly and mundane artefacts we associate with ageing, I investigated a second rollator.

This was a contemporary model. It had a clear plastic tray, a wire shopping basket and four wheels rather than three for extra stability. It was squatter, sturdier and in some ways even uglier than the earlier three wheel model. The hidden complexities and detailing within the design meant it took much longer to draw than I had anticipated.  I intentionally drew it from the position someone would see it if they were approaching it to use it.

The moulded plastic on the handles had been textured for extra grip and had an organic quality. The bolts and connections remained evident but were more refined.

What I found was how much I appreciated the qualities that I had previously missed. The curve of the front bumper and the connection on the front wheel shafts were particularly elegant and the sweep of the handles, handgrips and ergonomic brakes were much more aesthetically thought out than I had initially noticed. The light reflecting on the clear plastic tray formed bright curves and rainbow patterns in contrast to the opaque density of the black mat handles and shelf. The network formed by the basket was highly detailed and the intersecting areas had been welded neatly to form the grid of the shopping basket.

Interestingly, on the back of the rear metal legs were two orange rectangular strips of reflective material to ensure safety at night. The four wheels were not as fat as in the earlier model and the two at the back remained fixed whilst the two front wheels acted more like a shopping trolley.

Other things had not changed. The cuffs around the wheels remained the same, the mechanism for folding had not changed and the brake system appeared to be similar. The handles used to adjust the height of had become elongated and needed less effort to use.

Perhaps because these objects are so new, they are too close to us to be perceived as historical objects so have yet to become ‘artefacts’ i.e. something worthy of being presented within the auspices of a curated museum display where they would be expected to attract crowds who wish to engage with them. What would a member of the public hope to see when looking at an object such as this?

When objects are utilitarian, essential to many and in such common usage they can easily become invisible. The rollator is associated with assisting those who do not suffer from a terrible incurable disease but simply aids those who are just ageing as we all are, and need a little extra help. Is it because this is so uneventful, so usual we are not interested in looking at items associated with this natural process? Is it because the materials are thought of as utilitarian and not beautiful, or is it because we choose to turn away and not see something we find distasteful or fear but certainly do not welcome and embrace – the everyday process of ageing?

Rollator drawings  27^th–28^th, 28^th–29^th September 2010:

When I began drawing the rollator I asked myself why I was drawing something that was so boring, so ugly with no interesting features.

I was reminded of the talk Nurin Veis, Deputy Head Sciences – Science Communication and Senior Curator of Human Biology and Medicine at Museum Victoria, Australia, gave at the EAMHMS conference. In her talk about issues in displaying the cochlear implant, Nurin stated that the problem lies with our insistence in seeing the ‘black box’ item as ugly and not suitable as a museum artefact. Rather than trying to avoid it, rewrite it change or replace it with something explaining something about it, she asked why couldn’t we just accept it and learn to appreciate it? Maybe it is our job to see the aesthetic qualities of these ‘black box’ objects rather than try and avoid them.

The rollator’s use is essential to many, there is no doubt about that, but as an object, as a thing, it is so unappealing and uninteresting. It would not take long to draw such a simple plain thing.

Or so I thought. As I began I realized that the plastics had degenerated and the handles and wheels had an organic, sticky feeling to them. The way the brakes were attached to the wheels were far more complex than I had at first seen, but they were also connected by crude looking bolts. Mass produced steel rods had a feeling of hand madeness at the apex where they joined and the whole object took on a far more complicated nuance and styling than I had realized.

After 2 days, the amount of detail I had noticed changed my view of this object from boring and ugly to beautiful and fascinating. It’s complexities were hidden behind my prejudices and became seen clearly through my making the effort to spend time actually looking at this object and to stop making huge assumptions about it. How it worked, how it was made and the aesthetic of the object became more and more apparent during the two days I spent drawing it. Paying attention to such a modest and overlooked ungainly looking object showed it to be far more than I had at first perceived.

Overlooking such a vital yet seemingly unattractive object highlighted the need to spend time looking and building relationships with artefacts. The rollator has become, in my opinion a very beautiful object and reactions from others have been surprising also. Others have seen far more beauty in the drawing than they thought would ever be found in such an object. Maybe they will re-look at them and see them in a new way.

So many things associated with the ageing process are thought to be boring, ugly, utilitarian and uninteresting to look at. I am discovering for myself how wrong this assumption is. The toothless skull, so iconic of the image of ageing is fascinating and beautiful rather than ridiculous and unattractive.

Objects that help and assist the elderly, items used to test for ailments associated with ageing and objects used for treating them are all seen as having little aesthetic value as objects in their own right. And often the ageing population, the people themselves, are not regarded as being aesthetic so ingrained is it that beauty is connected with youth and newness.

Spending time looking at them, overcoming assumptions about them, elevating them from mere boring utilitarian thing to being experienced as unique, beautiful and fascinating encounters helps to re-see aspects of ageing in a much wider and more positive way.

One of the sessions at the September conference dealt with the problems and challenges in collecting contemporary medicine.

Judy M. Chelnick presented the challenges of collecting today as being mainly lack of space, and the difficulty in trying to guess what objects will be historically valuable to your collections in the future. Read Judy’s full abstract here.

James Edmonson went on to talk about the importance of collecting the advertising and marketing strategies of contemporary medicine as well as the products themselves, because money plays such a major role in the medical industry of today. Read James’ full abstract here.

The last speaker of the session John Durant suggested the need to further develop our relationships with researchers and scientists, who despite their commitment to public outreach are forward-thinking and little inclined to preserve their own immediate past. Unfortunately, due to technical problems, John’s presentation was not video recorded; however you can read the full abstract for his talk here.

The discussion afterwards included comments from Roger Cooter, Jennifer Nieves and Robert Bud.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

In four earlier posts (# 1 here, #2 here, #3 here, and #4 here), I’ve argued for a more proactive practice with respect to the preservation of the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage. The posts were provoked by Christian Sichau’s negative attitude (quoted here). There is no space for the new acquisitions, he claimed, and the exhibition curators receive all the museum money anyway. So forget about collecting.

I don’t agree. In my last post I made an argument for distributed curatorial expertise as a way of solving the space problem. Here I’ll argue for another way to overcome the space and resource problem, namely to strengthen the co-operation between museums across the European borders.

Sichau’s pessimistic view is quite understandable as long as museums think of themselves as regional or national actors. From this point of view, not even giants like Deutsches Museum, Science Museum in London, or the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., have the staff, time, and money to embark on systematic (or even systematically selective) collecting programs to cover all or most of the contemporary science, technology, and medicine. As long as they think of themselves as national actors, they will continue to have a space problem.

It’s not made easier by the fact that museums of science, technology, and medicine have very little tradition for working together on collections (except for occasional collaborative projects at the interpersonal level). Museums act as if they are international competitors rather than collaborators and as if each is in principle responsible for the preservation of the entire scientific, technological, and medical heritage.

So as long as you think in terms of a national museum, I guess it is quite difficult to avoid the kind defeatism that Sichau expresses (unless we develop very radical distributed collecting procedures, as outlined in the former post).

But if we think in European terms, the space problem would be more easy to overcome. Why shouldn’t we be able to establish a co-operative collecting program in which national and regional museums agree on how to divide the scientific, technological, and medical heritage between them? One museum specialising on, for example, biomedical laboratory equipment, another on solid state physics, a third on imaging technologies, and so forth. 

After all, there are plenty of historical precedents for doing this. Hundreds of local and regional collections of science, technology, and medicine all over Europe have, throughout the last couple of hundred years, developed rather specialised collections — for example, the collection of surgical instrument and medical instrument catalogues at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, or the collection of eighteenth and early nineteenth century pathological specimens in the Hunterian Museum in London.

True, there are so far no examples of national museums that have deliberately divided the collecting of the late twentieth century and contemporary science, technology, and medicine heritage among them. And admittedly, this is not an easy task. No museum, especially not a national museum, would probablty give up its ambitions to comprehensiveness easily. Even if they do not have the resources today to collect in a comprehensive way today, their ambition is still to cover everything (in some unforeseeable future when they get that precious extra storing space). Without binding agreements of co-operation, no museum will abstain from some areas of acquisitioning and let one of its national or regional competitors take over that particular domain of artefacts.

So to give chunks of the potential artefact acquisition spectrum away to other museums, be they national or regional, is not something that comes easily. Would Science Museum just abstain from collecting nanotechnological and nanomedical objects and let Deutsches Museum take over this burgeoning field? Would Medical Museion stop collecting artefacts from contemporary protein research even if we realised that another European museum maybe had better resources and a more skilled staff to do this?

There are also big administrative and logistic problems involved — how, for example, to develop a continuously updated prospective collection list of the enormous number of artefacts in fields like medical device technology, where a new patent is granted every hour or so?

Yet I believe these are problems that need to be overcome if the development of the contemporary scientific, technical and medical culture over the last decades shall not end on the garbage dumps. If we want to preserve more than infinitesimal parts of the contemporary scientific, technological, and medical heritage, we need to work out a co-operative collecting policy on the European level.

In three earlier posts (here, here and here), I’ve argued in favour of a more proactive acquisition practice with respect to the contemporary medical scientific and technological heritage.

Against some curators who believe we need to restrict acquisitioning (for economic, space etc. reasons), I suggest that we should rather open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

Immediately, this sounds like an impossibility. All science, medical and technology museums have limited staff and resources. How could we ever dream of acquiring, keeping and managing the tsunami of images, documents and used artefacts that would arrive from the contemporary world of medicine?

The solution, as I see it, is to begin re-thinking museum acquisition and curating practices in terms of distributed curatorial expertise.

Distributed expertise is a variety of crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a Wired magazine article in 2006. Wikipedia defines it as a ‘‘distributed problem-solving and production model’’:

Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place—the crowdsourcer—and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. […] Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Crowdsourcing is only one of many social technologies for participatory knowledge production that have emerged in recent years. In analogy to the notion of ‘web 2.0’, museologists like Nina Simon have coined the notion of ‘museum 2.0’. Simon’s idea is not primarily to employ social web media as tools in museum outreach, but rather to rethink the physical museum in terms of the conceptual apparatus of ‘web 2.0’; that is, a participatory museum, in analogy to the participatory web.

The ambitious task of museum 2.0 is to reconceptualise all activities of the museum — research, acquisitions, curating, exhibition making and other kinds of outreach — in terms of user participation, user creativity and distributed knowledge.

To think about the acquisitioning of scientific, technological, and medical artefacts in terms of museum 2.0 implies that everyone who deals, in his/her daily work, with objects which could become potential museum artefacts is a potential curator.

The goal for the participatory museum would be to transform such potential curators into active participants in the acquisition and curating of collections (I call it ‘crowd acquisitioning’).

Social technologies like distributing, curating, and crowd acquisitioning do not by themselves solve the space problem associated with the collecting of the contemporary scientific, technological and medical heritage. However, one of the implications of the participatory museum is that its collections do not necessarily have to be physically located in a central museum building. If curating and curators can be distributed, so can collections.

The idea of a distributed museum collection is not a central museum with peripheral repositories to which only professional curators have keys and access. It should rather be understood as a network of local collections. each managed by its local adjunct curator.

Most departments in most universities have their own small collections, sometimes just a small cupboard with a few objects kept for commemorative and nostalgic reasons. The governing role of the central museum vis-á-vis the distributed museum collection would then primarily be to offer advice in the form of guidelines for ‘best museum practice’ in acquisitions and curating.

To think in terms of a network of distributed museum collections not only promises to solve some of the problems with lack of storage space. It may also become a powerful instrument for raising the historical awareness and responsibility of practitioners-curators. Instead of employing more professional staff to collect, curate, and register artefacts in the central museum repository, scarce resources would be better used by training practitioner-curators to become gatekeepers that build relations between the museum and the rest of the university.

In this scenario — what would the role of the curator be? Instead of doing all the curatorial work themselves, professional museum curators would rather develop guidelines for how the network of distributed curators shall curate and preserve; the professionals would also distribute protocols for registration in a wiki-based central database; and, most importantly, they would spend much time and energy raising discussions among the practitioners of why the scientific, technological, and medical heritage is worth keeping and its role in the creation of cultural identity. In short, the main role of professional museum curators would be to build a distributed curatorial experience.

Much of this is hardly new. Many local and regional museums have worked along these lines long before the concept ‘museum 2.0’ was coined. Many science, technology, and medical museums once started as participatory collecting projects initiated by enthusiastic practitioners, who created small local collections, some of which still remain in the custody of departments and scientific societies.

Medical Museion is a case in point. Today the museum has one of Europe’s largest, richest, and most varied collections of medical artefacts of all kinds — but actually it once started as a private initiative by Copenhagen doctors on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Danish Medical Association (DADL) in 1907. Initially conceived as a collection of contemporary medical devices for a temporary show to commemorate the progress of medicine since the founding of DADL in 1857, the collection was made permanent and the museum continued to grow, largely thanks to the enthusiasm of the contributors, and it continued to do so for at least two or three generations.

Today, such participatory acquisition practices have largely been abolished. The progressive professionalisation in science, technical, and medical museums throughout the twentieth century has made such practices look amateurish and antiquated.

However, I believe it is time to rethink the advantage of bringing practitioners of science, technology, and medicine into more active roles in the work of acquisitioning and curating. Citizen-science projects such as fold.it and Galaxy Zoo are excellent examples of how this can be done in principle — although the specific features of museum knowledge production, that is, its material artefact, is an extra challenge to overcome (affter all museums cannot be run in the virtual space only).

Read the final and last post in this series of five here.

I just got a mail saying that the Canada Science and Technology Museum is organising a summer institute in material culture research on the theme ‘Reading Artefacts’, in Ottawa, 16-20 August.

Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand their research methods” — are welcome to attend. Because of the venue, there will probably be a lot of focus on sci, tech and med museum artefacts.

Great initative. My only hesitation is the title — Reading Artefacts. What do the organisers actually mean by reading an artefact?

In my understanding of reading, there is a text to be read. But an artefact is not a text (unless there is a label glued on to it), so there is nothing to read.

The only way I can make sense of the title is that they use the verb ‘read’ metaphorically. That is, they probably don’t believe that an artefact is a literal text which is read like the text you are reading now. What they probably mean is that curators and historians engage with artefacts in a way that is analogous to the way readers read texts, and they use the verb ‘read’ as a short-hand for this analogy.

But how useful is it to think about our engagement with artefacts in analogy with reading texts? Granted, it may be useful as a rhetorical device, or for science journalism purposes. But I’m afraid the analogy is counterproductive from a scholarly point of view, because it draws one’s attention away from the epistemologically thorny issues at stake:

How do we actually engage with material artefacts? How do we make sense of them? How do they actually influence us? Is there any kind of seimotic interaction going on between humans and dead material things, or is it ‘merely’ physical interaction?

In other words, ‘reading artefacts’ is not one of those metaphors that curators ‘live by’. On the contrary, I suggest it’s one of those metaphors that kills the curatorial imagination.

That said, however, the course looks very useful; it will give the participants an opportunity to:

• investigate artifacts, trade literature and photographic collections as resources for research, teaching, and the public presentation of history
• work with leading collection scholars in a national museum setting to explore material culture methodologies and approaches
• use artifacts as the centre of discussion and hands-on activities
• immerse themselves in a material culture perspective of the technological past
• learn the basics of conservation, cataloguing and developing collections in local environments – a growing and essential resource for history studies.

Tuition fee is 250 Can. $ for students, 350 for postdocs and 450 for faculty and professionals (but it includes breaks, lunches, and a field trip; and students can get some financial support). Register here before 16 June, but do it long before then, because they can only accomodate 30 participants. Further info from Anna Adamek, aadamek@technomuses.ca. One can also join the Google Group here.

A couple of days ago, I argued against Christian Sichau’s restrictive acquisition policy for museums of science, technology and medicine. I suggested, not only to actively promote the acquisition of visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms, but indeed to open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

An optimistic ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is nicer and wiser than a pessimistic ‘‘Nein’’ policy.

My argument is based on my experiences from Medical Museion’s integrated research and curatorial program ‘‘Biomedicine on Display’’. The program was launched in 2005 with the explicit intention to lay the research foundation for the acquisition and public outreach of the visual and material culture of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine — a time period which so far has been very sparsely represented in museums of science, technology, and medicine.

During the past four years we have run a number of research projects on a variety of aspects of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine. Parallel to these research projects, we have set up a series of exhibitions with more or less explicit connection to contemporary science (‘Oldetopia’, ‘Design4Science’, ‘Eye Catchers and Swagger Images’, ‘Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’, ‘Primary Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research’, and ‘Healthy Aging’).

These research projects and exhibitions have been more or less closely associated with the collection of a large number of recent artefacts from laboratories and hospitals in the Copenhagen region. Some artefacts were chosen to satisfy the needs of the exhibitions, others were unsolicited donations from university laboratories, hospital clinics, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

We have an acute lack of space and certainly do not have enough professional curatorial staff to take care of everything properly. Registration is constantly lagging behind. Nevertheless we rarely say ‘‘No’’. In some concrete cases we have, with some trepidation, done so, but not as a general policy. Why?

Basically, I suggest, because a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy opens up a whole array of fruitful interactions between museums and practitioners of science, technology, and medicine. Indeed, it promises to change the way science, technology, and medical museums place themselves in relation to the rest of the university.

Instead of seeing the university museum as a closed repository for exquisite objects guarded by professional curators, a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is an open invitation to every single researcher, technician, and student at the university to become adjunct curators of their own heritage.

Sichau is right in the sense that museums will never be able to employ enough professional curators to describe, register, and evaluate every single artefact and image in the university’s laboratories and storage rooms. But with the help of our colleagues in science, technology, and medicine, we can create a distributed curatorial expertise.

In the next post, I will discuss the notion of ‘distributed curatorial expertise’ further.

(this is the third part in a series of posts about the participatory museum and distributed curating was  brought yesterday — see the first part here and the second part here. To be continued)

In an article titled ‘Einstein, interaktiv und zum Anfassen. Oder: die drohende Auflösung des Museums?’ in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (vol. 17, 85–92, 2009), Christian Sichau has argued for a severely restrictive attitude to new acquisitions.

He develops his argument for a next-to-zero collecting policy in opposition to a short appeal made by the historian Klaus Hentschel in Physik Journal in March 2008 (‘Bitte nicht wegwerfen! Allzu oft werden Quellen der Physikgeschichte achtlos entsorgt, statt sie zu sichern’). Here Hentschel gave a chilling example of the accidental destruction of some of the important sources for the history of early German solid state physics. Hentschel called on physicists to be more aware of their heritage, and asked them to contact archives and museums before throwing out older material of any kind.

Sichau takes Hentschel’s appeal as his point of departure for articulating a deliberately pessimistic position. Because there is very limited space available in museums, the daily routine for curators is to reject, rather than accept, new objects. Furthermore, contemporary objects are not spectacular enough for exhibitions; they neither give us clues to the historical past nor relate to what goes on at the frontiers of science, technology, and medicine today. Finally, the need for public outreach more often than not trumps the need to preserve the heritage, and today’s exhibitions tend to rely rather on dramatic multimedia than objects anyway. So even if there may be good scholarly reasons for collecting objects, ‘‘werde ich als Kurator ‘Nein’ sagen müssen’’, concludes Sichau.

If I had agreed with Sichau’s arguments, I would never have devoted so much energy to trying to represent the material culture of contemporary science, technology, and medicine. I have chosen to focus Medical Museion’s efforts — our research, our acquisitioning activities, and our public outreach — precisely on late twentieth century and contemporary medical science and medical technology, and I have come to rather different conclusions than Sichau.

All museum people are familiar with the problems that Sichau is confronting, and I can easily understand why he expresses such defeatist views. I too believe that the acquisitioning and keeping of contemporary science instruments and artefacts is a very demanding task for museums, especially university museums. The current cultural and political climate places university museums uncomfortably between, on the one hand, a museum logic that favors the creation of spectacular public shows and events and, on the other hand, the prevailing logic of university departments, which is to publish as many often-cited scholarly papers in high-ranked journals as possible.

Today’s university museum is placed somewhere between these two entrenched logics. This borderline position is problematic, because curating scientific instruments, technological devices, and medical artefacts does not necessarily lead either to popular blockbuster shows or to a steady flow of articles in high-impact journals. Acquiring and curating material artefact, image, and document collections all too easily becomes a neither-nor; an unspectacular and invisible activity resulting in insignificant publications in low-ranked journals.

In contrast to Sichau, I am not pessimistic, because I believe these problems occasion a number of interesting challenges: intellectual, logistic, and political (see Söderqvist and Bencard 2008; Söderqvist, Bencard and Mordhorst 2009). I see opportunities rather than obstacles. I therefore believe that we should, as a rule, say ‘‘Yes, please’’ when we get a chance to collect visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms. I suggest that we should even, in Hentschel’s spirit, actively promote the acquisition of such objects. In other words, not only should we not be restrictive, we should indeed open up the sluice gates. An optimistic ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is nicer and wiser than a pessimistic ‘‘Nein’’ policy.

In the next couple of posts I will explain why this position is not as naïve as it sounds. See next post here.

—
Söderqvist, T. and Bencard, A., 2008. Making Sense or Sensing the Made? Research into Presence Production in Museums of Science, Technology and Medicine. In: G. Cavalli-Björkman and S. Lindqvist (eds), Research and Museums, Stockholm, 161–173.

Söderqvist, T., Bencard, A. and Mordhorst, C., 2009. Between Meaning Culture and Presence Effects. Contemporary Biomedical Objects as a Challenge to Museums, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 40, 431–438.

(the first part of the series of posts about the participatory museum and distributed curating was  brought yesterday — to be continued)

The journal NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin is currently running a series of articles about university collections and museums. These articles raise a number of interesting issues, which are otherwise rarely brought up in discussions about the historiography of science, technology, and medicine.

In nr 4/2008, Anke te Heesen (Tübingen) pointed to the often forgotten fact that university collections are an integral part of many fields of university research and teaching; this active role of the collections in these primary functions of the university is therefore an important parameter to take into account when developing acquisition and exhibition agendas for university museums.

In the following issue (nr 1/2009), Christian Sichau (Deutsches Museum in Munich) warned against the rapidly deteriorating political, intellectual, and economic status of traditional curatorial work in collections; this is a serious long-term threat to museums because the current trend towards blockbuster exhibitions and event culture—even in science, technology, and medical museums—undermines the role of the museum as a space for the preservation of the heritage and the acquisition of new artefacts.

In the latest issue (nr 1/2010) Thomas Schnalke (Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum), largely ignores the question of collections, artefact curating, and new acquisitions in favour of an inspiring discussion about the potentially great role of museum exhibitions in science communication, both internally in the university and externally for a larger general public.

All three authors have long-term experience from the science, technology, and medical museum world. Together, their contributions provide an excellent platform for future discussions about the role of collections in museums in general and in university museums in particular, and therefore I thought I would give my views on these interesting issues (my article will be published in nr 1/2010; a slightly different version of the manuscript is brought on this blog in a series of blogposts in the next two weeks).

I will I restrict myself to an important question brought up by Sichau—and which neither te Heesen nor Schnalke pays much attention to—viz, how science, technology, and medicine museums should handle the problem of new acquisitions. How should they manage the steadily growing output of scientific, technical, and medical artefacts, documents, and images from offices and research laboratories?

Should they at all try to catch up with the perpetual tsunami of potential collection items? Should they try to bring in almost everything, or should they restrict themselves to samples (and if so, what are the rules of the sampling game)? Should they have a global focus or should they concentrate on objects produced and/or used in the local university (and if so what does ‘locally produced’ and ‘locally used’ actually mean in a world with increasingly globalised knowledge and artefact production)? Or should museums let the event logic of their outreach staff determine what to collect, so that they bring in an electron microscope only if an exhibition on microscopy is in the pipeline—and refuse to accept it if the outreach people plan for an obesity show instead?

(to be continued, see here)

Nanowerk reports that researchers at the Micro and Nanosystems Department, Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona have recently demonstrated that it is possible to produce and place small silicon chips inside living HeLa cells by means of different techniques, like lipofection, phagocytosis or microinjection. 90% of the cells remained alive and healthy for a week.

We’re talking about quite ordinary (but extraordinarily small) silicon chips that are made of a normal semiconductor material and produced by usual manufacturing methods. The chips can be used as intracellular sensors and the possibilites are endless — e.g., characterization, quantification and IRT monitoring of molecular processes at the single cell level.

This sounds like a promising route for molecular medicine. But it’s a potential nightmare for future medical museum curators. Good old steampunk medicine was about surgical instruments that operated on the level of visible organs. Now we’ve got a double problem: not only do we have to collect and preserve invisible cell-lines, but also take care of their invisible chips. 

Does this mean the end of medical museum collections as we know them? Has anybody got a good idea for how to collect, preserve and display these creatures?