Biomedicine on Display

I very much like pipettes as mundane lab artefacts. And I’m wild with Eppendorf (see earlier posts here and here) because they produce these little ephemeral biomedical objects (like microcentrifuge tubes) which are museologically much more interesting than the fancy and first-time-ever stuff that is usually displayed in science, tech and medical museums.

I’m also fascinated with biomedical music videos (like Illumina’s breakdancing lab bench objects) because these reveal that selling PCRs and microwells isn’t much different from selling kitchenware and H&M garment. And with biomedicine on YouTube because it says something about how the biomedical and biotech world is rapidly becoming attuned to the participatory web.

So what could be more exciting for a biomedical museologist than this Eppendorf sales video on Youtube on the theme ‘I love pipetting — how about you?’:

(see it in the right context, and better resolution, on Eppendorf’s website). Lyrics here.

It’s all about selling this new automated pipetting system called EpMotion (image from their catalogue):

* * * * * * * * (thanks to Bioephemera, yesterday, for the tip) 

What’s a ‘liquid image’ (or ‘the liquidity of the image’ for that sake)? The answer may be given at the Second International Conference on Image Science in the Göttweig Monastery near Vienna, 16-18 October.

The conference — which is organized by the Department für Bildwissenschaften at Donau Universität Krems (with the witty German subtitle Wider den ‘Analpha-BILD-ismus’) — will discuss the classification and historiography of the recent worlds of images in art, science and popular culture; and there is something in it for museums too:

Never before the world of images has changed so fast and the way images are produced transformed so drastically like in the latest presence: Second Life, Micromovies, Flickr, Virtual Reality, You Tube, Visual Music, Scientific Visualisation, Google Earth etc. are keywords standing for a multitude of new possibilities for individual producing, projecting and distributing of visual material […] Which artistic inspirations new worlds of images have to face? What influence does the medium have on the iconic character of the image? What chances and challenges do museums and image dealers face with the “liquidity” of the image?

Probably some of the keynote speakers — Felice Frankel (Harvard, MIT), Barbara Stafford (Chicago) and Peter Weibel (ZKM) — or other announced speakers will explain what the ‘liquidity’ of the image means and how this is relevant for science, medical and technology museums. Much more info here: http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/dis/goettweig2008.

Apropos Fleur’s comment on the critical function of art — Royal College of Art student Revital Cohen’s project ‘Life Support’ problematizes the possible future use of animals as medical devices:

Assistance animals - from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats - unlike computerised machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could animals be transformed into medical devices? This project proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement. The use of transgenic farm animals, or retired working dogs, as life support ‘devices’ for renal and respiratory patients offers an alternative to inhumane medical therapies. Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Could humans become parasites and live off another organism’s bodily functions?

(from Cohen’s project description which also has a larger photo)

(thanks to Medgadget for the tip — in addition we make money not art has an excellent comment on Cohen’s project)

The city of Kalmar on the southeast coast of Sweden has just been endowed with a fabulous new art museum: Kalmar Konstmuseum—a tall, black, wood-covered concrete building hidden among the high trees in the old city park. Something like a hybrid between a postmodern fire watch tower and the Royal Library building in Copenhagen (the Black Diamond). The architectural innovation has received much acclaim, both in Sweden (e.g., here) and internationally (see last issue of Icon, not on the net yet)

In my mind, the most impressive of the three inaugural exhibitions is Swetlana Heger’s ’Smoke (Liberté Toujours)’—five collages of small photos of women, each and everyone of them smoking a cigarette.

A face and a cigarette, a face and a cigarette, a face and a cigarette … hundreds of women: posing, contemplating, inhaling, exhaling.
 
Never have I seen such a collection of images of beautiful, smart, independent, distinguished, alluring and gorgeous women devoted to the necessity of smoking. Never has the idea of the sublimity of the practice of smoking been expressed so manifestly in art. Smoking is most certainly addictive, disgusting and deadly dangerous. But it also aesthetically forceful. (This was the theme of Richard Klein’s excellent book Cigarettes are sublime, 1994).

The aesthetics, economy and politics of smoking is a difficult field. On the one hand, the health-care establishment, backed by strong epidemiological evidence, has really good arguments for intensifying the war on smoking, especially in the developing world. On the other hand, millions of smokers cannot be wrong, can they? People don’t just smoke because they crave for nicotine or are manipulated by tobacco advertisements. If smoking wasn’t a pleasure—and an aesthetically attractive (at least if you don’t kiss the smoker) one as well—nobody would buy these sexy little suicide sticks.

Swetlana Heger’s exhibition in Kalmar addresses this dilemma indirectly without becoming didactic or explicitly political. Excellent public health art!

Yesterday I wrote about my experience of visiting Le Laboratoire in Paris. In Chapter 6 of his recent book Artscience (2008) the founder, David Edwards, explains the background for his art-science center.

The son of a chemist, David was trained as a chemical engineer, then continued to graduate school where he did theoretical fluid mechanics. After his PhD in the 1980s he took up a postdoc in Haifa where the first Intifada opened his eyes to the world outside theoretical chemistry. He started creative writing as a side chore and in the 1990s he shared his time between MIT’s writing programme and working in Robert Langer’s (this year’s Millennium Prize winner) biotech lab on drug-delivery through aerosols. The lab work led to a paper in Science, in 1997, that suggested a new and better method for manufacturing and distributing drug particles.

Like so many other biotech researchers, David used his knowledge to start a biotech company. The aim of David’s company was to deliver insulin in the form of the new kind of aerosol. It apparently went very well, because only two years later he and his co-founders sold to a big pharma company, earning a lot of money (“the largest accrual of value at the time in biotechnology history”), giving David, his wife and his kids enough to realise some of their dreams.

Armed with this new and unexpected wealth, David and his family established dual living in Paris and Cambridge, Mass. In both cities they created arts foundations for poor urban youth and David also founded a research lab at Harvard to study how his aerosol idea could be used in treating TB in the developing world. But even though both sides of his life were directed to alleviating the suffering of unprivileged people, he seems at that time to have considered them as separate activities. Art and science still didn’t mix.

Then, in the early 2000s, and partly as an outcome of former Harvard president Larry Summers’s attempts to restructure the university, David engaged in a series of meetings with faculty around campus and the surrounding professional schools. Surprised by the lack of mixing of cultures in what was nominally the combined Faculty of Arts and Sciences, he started to engage in conversations with artists and scientists about ways to achieve a creative fusion of art and science. (Why? Because he felt he needed some connection is his own life?)

All these life strands came together in Paris. David found an abandoned film studio close to Louvre and started renovating what was to become Le Laboratorie. On top of his own personal investment, David raised the support from a number of institutional and private sponsors.

Initially he imagined it as a “spot where art and science might come together to address the global health problems touching youth”, for example, he invited musicians and choreographers to work with medical scientists from Africa and Asia on interpretations of health care to the poor. Then the scope widened: artist Fabrice Hyber collaborated with Langer on an artscience installation that would give the audience “the sense of being a stem cell transforming into a neuron”, a designer helped David create air filters that “made plants smarter at obsorbing noxious gases”, and so forth.

It is not difficult to understand David’s joy. Le Laboratorie was, he writes, “like the home I would not be asked to leave”. It seemed to him that:

to live at this intersection of the arts and sciences is the most meaningful work of all, more than the creation of a new business, the completion of a novel, or the startup of a cultural center (p. 157).

(to be continued)

Last august, we invited the founder of Le Laboratorie in Paris, David Edwards, to our workhop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’. His presentation was short and (and at least to me) not very clear, so last time I was in Paris I took the opportunity to see his new art and science meeting spot.

Le Laboratoire is placed in a former film studio close to the Louvre in the heart of Paris. The exterior is non-assuming; you have to look for it to find it.

Inside/downstairs is a big room with a raw, industrial look. Texts explain this is a “center of experimentation in art and design based on the notion of art and science as process toward a creative end”. It is emphatically not a museum (it eludes “classical curatorial care”) but is about innovation—to “facilitate discipline crossing” and “catalyzing innovation” by means of “artscience, this ability to appreciate and develop an aesthetic and scientific sensibility”:

We work with highy creative artists and designers and seek dreams of idea translation that cannot be formulated without the participation of a leading scientist

When I visited in April, the current show (by colloid scientist Jerome Bibette and renown chéf Thierry Marx) was about colloid chemistry and molecular gastronomy.

In one end of the room two girls made coffee—served, not with a cookie, but with a small plastic inhaler tube, le whif, through which you could take a sniff of chocolate colloid particles:

Pictures of colloids were projected on screens and tables scattered around the room, and billboards explained aspects of taste and molecular cuisine.

There should have been some other tasting activities as well, but these were cancelled for reasons I didn’t quite understand (my French is rusty).

The room and the lighting was great, but the whole experience somewhat enigmatic. I wasn’t really sure about what the place is supposed to do. So I bought Edwards’s recent book Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Harvard University Press, 2008; cf. yesterday’s post) to learn more about the background for the project.
(continued tomorrow)

Continuing the thread of thought in our art-science session at the SLSA meeting in Berlin in early June, I’ve just read David Edwards’s Artscience: creativity in the post-Google generation (Harvard University Press, 2008).

In Chapter 3 (“Idea translations in cultural institutions”), Edwards gives an interesting argument for bringing art into science and medical museums through the example of Wolf Peter Fehlhammer’s directorship of Deutsches Museum in Munich, the first and biggest science and technology museum in Germany, in 1993-2004.

As Edwards points out science museums and science centers have traditionally used art “to communicate the science message” in order to reverse the public skepticism of science. This was not Fehlhammer’s view of the art-science relation. Coming from a position as professor in chemistry at Freie Universität in Berlin “with a passion for the aesthetics of science” and with a belief that the future flourishing of science depends on “its ability to embrace the art of science”, he took another road when he was hired to head Deutsches Museum in 1993.

Fehlhammer wanted a science renaissance in the museum. In his own words, he wished to

reconcile people with the fascinating if challenging ‘Leonardo world’ [i.e., the world of contemporary science] around them. And, then, science might regain its former place, even reach new heights, and at the same time reestablish a social contract (p. 63).

This idea were realised in a number of events, including a Kunst-und-Wissenschaft programme, a laboratory for new electronic music, and several exhibitions. Fehlhammer’s favourite, says Edwards, was a performance art exhibit where artist Theda Radtke parodied a scientific lecture, showing how academic form takes over research substance. The art performance deconstructed the standardised rituals of science in order to remind the spectators about the original freshness, vulnerability, surprise and groping for truth that basically motivate most scientists to do science.

The idea was then not just to get art works as such into the Deutsche Museum. What concerned Fehlhammer, according to Edwards, was “how to engage artists to disrupt the way the public viewed science, how to empower artists within the museum … to challenge and disturb, to show the complexity of art and science and the dialog that must take place between the two” (p. 62). In other words, Fehlhammer wanted “to see art in the museum as provocateur” (pp. 59-60).
 
This is an interesting way of seeing the art-science relation in museums. In Fehlhammer’s vision, art should play the same role in science museums as it often does, or at least should do, in galleries and art museums, viz., to shatter our taken-for-granted views and understandings of the world. Accordingly, under Peter Fehlhammer’s directorship Deutsche Museum was partly turned into an art museum, and when the museum celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2003 “Fehlhammer received laudatory letters of congratulation from art museums all over the world” (p. 67).

(In a later post I will get back to David Edwards’s idea of a ‘laboratory’ for “experiment, action, and movement in and between the arts and sciences” which he is creating in Paris right now.)

At last, here’s my final post in the series of rationalities for bringing art and science together in science, technology and medical museums. This one also has to do with the issue of identity formation (see last post), but now among museum curators. Here’s the argument:

In the eyes of the general adult public, STM-museums are usually perceived as either nerdish, unsmart, dusty, serious (in the bad sense), etc.—or childish. In other words, our kind of museums either appeal to specialists with a deep interest in scientific instruments or, more commonly, to children, especially if we display dinosaurs, robots, human skeletons, and so forth.

In other words, our kind of museums have difficulties appealing to a generally educated, culturally interested audience between the age of 16 and 96. Grown-ups rarely visit STM-museums, unless they are specialists or are accompanying children.

The remedy for this is art. Art is smart, art is chic, art is sophisticated. Art draws an adult audience and thus helps raising the prestige of STM-museums—from being collections for afficionadoses or amusement parks disguised as museums, to becoming serious (in the good sense) and respected members of the museum world.

This, I believe, is the major reason why STM-museums will soon begin to compete among themselves for all the exciting wet-art that is being produced right now—from Oron Catts’ tissue cultures to Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willett’s Bioteknica stuff. Recent exhibition successes like Jens Hauser’s Sk-interfaces in Liverpool is setting new milestones for museums.

—

Summing up, these five rationalities do not exclude each other. They can operate simultaneously, in different degrees, in different museums. And the list can probably be made much longer. I would be grateful for hearing some other suggestions and arguments for or against some of these I have mentioned here, before I deepen the argument, put the appropriate footnotes in and write the whole thing up for the jopurnal Museum and Society (and doing so, I will consult Paolo Palladino and Adrian Mckenzies’s thoughts on bioart, which I have deliberately stayed away from in order to sort out my own ideas first).

—

Finally, as I wrote last week, this and the preceeding six posts on “Why do museums want to bring art and science together?” are parts of a paper I gave at the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences” organised by Ingeborg Reichle for the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) meeting in Berlin a couple of weeks ago under the title “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together”. The other speakers in the session were Suzanne Anker (New York) and Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden) (see photo here).

And here is part of our audience a few minutes before we started the session:

In five earlier posts I have discussed why science, technology and medical museums are increasingly employing art in their exhibitions. The fourth reason in my list of ideal-typical rationalities for bringing art and science together goes like this:

If you believe in what some sociologists have recently called ‘biocitizenship’, i.e., the biomedical version of what European bureaucrats call ‘scientific citizenship’ – then, STM-museums are among the most crucial media institutions involved in the formation of such citizenship (cf. Elam and Bertilsson, 2004). This is the phenomenon of ‘governmediality’, to use Christoph Engemann’s term.

There is of course a strong discursive aspect to the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, it is partly through texts that individuals are socialized into the conceptual world of biomedicine and biotechnology and form their basic identity (like “I’m a cancer patient”, rather than “I’m Swedish”). But there is also a less discursive aspect, which is probably as important, or perhaps even more important. Ridley Scott’s movie ‘Blade Runner’ is a major piece of 1980s art which probably meant more for the formation of many people’s identity as potentially bio-engineered bodies than all textual media taken together.

Thus, the fourth rationale for incorporating art works in medical museums is that they know, consciously or unconsciously, that such museums are efficient tools for the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, as museums we are employing a strategy that will keep all the powerful stakeholders of ‘Empire’ (pace Michael Hardt and Tony Negri) happy – that is, we help translating the ‘multitude’ into biocitizens of the emerging transnational Empire.

[the next and last part of the series of “Why do medical museums want to bring art and science together” posts will follow tomorrow].

The third item on my list of ideal-typical reasons why museums want to bring art and science together is that art is a great cross-disciplinary integrator. The argument goes like this:

As culturally established factories for the production of meaning in the knowledge society, the humanities have a strong disciplinary function. In other words, our research practices tend to lie within the disciplinary boundaries of pre-established conceptual power-games (philosophy, sociology, political science, history etc.). Such games are keeping our universities orderly and are holding professors and students safely away from the scandal of real global problems. (I guess Slavoj Zizek could have said this.)

And here is where art comes in. Thinking about biomedical laboratories and practices in aesthetic terms can help us raise our awareness of seeing biomedical objects phenomenologically, seeing them outside pregiven disciplinary boundaries. Instead of explaining objects in terms of disciplinary conceptual structures and narratives, museums ask their audience to engage with the objects in a bottom-up process, thereby providing opportunities to formulate new questions about the biomedical world (cf. Daniel Miller’s book, The Comfort of Things, on this).
[the next post will be about art and scientific citizenship]

As I wrote in the last post, our co-operation with the Danish Museum of Art and Design in 2004 was the founding rationale for our pilgrimage into art, design and science. Then things went rapidly. In 2006 we engaged Canadian-British artist-curator Martha Fleming to help us organise a workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, followed by a public conference on ‘Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body’ hosted by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

We also began experimenting with different kinds of art exhibitions and installation, for example the street exhibition ‘The Face of Disease’, the photo collage exhibition ‘100 Light Years’, and the installation ‘Labyrinthitis’, a medical technology-inspired installation by Berlin-based sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard.

In this process, we were, in my ideal-typical reconstruction, entertaining another rationality for bringing art and science together, namely that art is a way of representing the new biomedical invisibles (see Martha’s article ‘The huge invisibles’). Medical museums have traditionally dealt with visible artefacts at a phenomenologically accessible macrolevel. The audience loves to see all these highly evocative objects: amputation saws, trepanations sets, pickled tumours, and so forth. But the armamentarium of contemporary biomedicine (HPLC columns, gene chips, etc.) are not particularly evocative, and the body they help researchers to represent is invisible (mainly protein interactions).

Hence another reason why art enters into the strategy of medical museums these days. Art is considered a way of bridging the everyday world and the invisible cellular and molecular domains.

This is what the annual Wellcome Image Awards are about: “the winning pictures”, they say, “show a wide variety of subjects, normally invisible to the naked eye, revealing new layers of complexity and making the ordinary extraordinary”. They probably mean making the extraordinary ordinary, though :-)
[the next post will be about art as a great cross-disciplinary integrator]

Which were Medical Museion’s reasons for going into art and aesthetics? The first on my list of ideal-typical rationalities is what I call “once-aesthetically-corrupted, always-corrupted”.

The argument goes like this: As Sepp Gumbrecht pointed out in his seminal 2004 book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, most humanities scholars, including historians, are engaged in interpretative and hermeneutic practices. But rarely in aestethic practices, i.e., what he calls the ‘production of presence’. Same for historian-as-curators in the world of science, technology and medical museums: Most STM-curators see their museums as sites for historical narration, interpretation and contextualisation, but rarely as sites where visitors are engaged in sensual and aesthetic experiences, in presence-production.

What changed our minds, from seeing our museum as an institution for meaning-production only, to an institution involved also in presence-production was when our neighbour, the Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen, was setting up an anniversary exhibition in 2004. Since we were, and still are, good neighbours, their curators went over to our place to take a close look at our collections, and they went back with over 60 artefacts which we had, until then, routinely classified as historical objects. But they decided these were aesthetic objects.

That was our aesthetic epiphany, our moment of entrance into the aesthetics of medical objects. And since then our museum has never really been the same. Suddenly we saw things that medical historians have never really seen. And more generally speaking, I believe that this is one of the rationales for why STM-museums in the last 15-20 years have, more or less by default, begun to incorporate aesthetic approaches and art in their exhibitions:  Once you have tried it, there is no way back.

Once the discursive rationality of the historian has been corrupted by the irrationality of aesthetic judgement, you cannot really undo it.

More and more of us, former science, technology and medical history museums, are becoming fallen historical angels.
(Photo: Snowrunner 2006, from Flickr; creative commons)

[next post will be about biomedical invisibles]

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades?

I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s a topic for a serious research project and even a book. Instead I will take on a more preliminary task: I will try to reconstruct a handfull of ideal-typical rationalities for why STM-museum curators around the world are engaged in bringing art and the biomedical sciences together.

I hasten to add that I haven’t done any fieldwork, or asked curators to fill in any questionaires. The reconstructions that follow in the next couple of posts are based primarily on websites and occasional discussions, and especially on my own experiences as the director of Medical Museion in Copenhagen.

Sizewise, Medical Museion is somewhere between the Jurassic midgets and the contemporary Power giants. We are placed in an old 18th century palace-looking building (the former Royal Academy of Surgeons) in the Copenhagen inner city area, with approx 4000 square meters of storage, exhibition and office space. Our biggest asset, besides the building, is a huge collection of medicotechnical artefacts, wet specimens and hard human remains — actually one of the biggest collections in northern Europe — ranging from 18th century medical curiosities to 20th century everyday medical care objects. We believe we have a total of around 200.000 objects plus another 60.000 images.

Like many other similar medium-size traditional medical history museums around the world, our museum was – until recently, when it was still called the Medical History Museum at the University of Copenhagen – content with taking care of and displaying the old treasures. Some medical history museums are in fact still quite satisfied with such a role; they are not interested in becoming engaged with the rapidly changing biomedical landscape, i.e, all these revolutionary things that are happening on the interface between postgenomic cell biology, pharma production, medical technology, biotech industry and computer science. It’s a messy world, so I think it’s perfectly legitimate (and probably even quite wise) to stay away from it.

But we decided to jump on the life science bandwagon, to engage with the hurly-burly of the contemporary life science world. So in the last four-five years we have turned both our research efforts, our acquisitions of new artefacts, and our temporary exhibitions towards investigating and displaying contemporary developments in the biomedical field. And a few years ago, a private Danish research foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, decided that this approach was worthwhile supporting.

So now we are in the midst of a combined research and curatorial project called ‘Biomedicine on Display’. I say ‘combined’, because we seek to integrate research, the acquisitions of the material and visual culture of biomedicine, and the creation of exhibitions. And we do indeed have a great interest in bringing art, aesthetics and medicine together.

So in a sense, we are not just a medical history museum anymore, but a medical museum. That’s one of the reasons we changed our name to Medical Museion. So, which were our reasons for going into art and aesthetics?
[I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow].

Museums are a significant part of the global science learning and experience economy. There are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of science, technology and medical museums and science centers around the world. The Association of Science-Technology Centers presently lists 447 institutions, but they don’t list small, regional and local museums.

This STM-sector of the museum industry (let’s forget about science centers) spans everything from small, regional, amateur-driven collections and displays run by retired scientists, engineers and medical doctors to large professional-driven institutions supported by state grants and having hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of visitors each year—like the Science Museum in London, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, just to mention three big STM-museums on three different continents, who are among the significant actors in the global cultural and experience economy.

Whether they work on a small scale or as large operations, many STM-museums nowadays are involved in bringing art and science (art and technology, art and medicine) together. This is true both for the very small, queer and curiousities-filled ones, like my personal favourite, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. It’s true for the middle-sized ones, like the Wellcome Collection in London which is deliberately exploring the art-life science connection. And it’s true for the Big Ones, like Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris which has even published a guide to their own artworks.

Why then has art and aesthetics entered the STM-museum sector? In a number of posts over the next couple of days I will discuss five possible reasons why museums are increasingly bringing art and science together.

These posts are parts of a paper I gave at the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences” organised by Ingeborg Reichle for the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) meeting in Berlin a couple of weeks ago under the title “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together”.

The other speakers in the session were Suzanne Anker (New York) and Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden). Above are Rob, Susanne and Ingeborg before we started the session.
[to be followed]

We have repeatedly come back to the art of medical animation on this blog. Although in principle we are more interested in animation of invisible biomedical microstructures, animations of classical macroanatomical structures are still a source of awe and fascination, especially when they are well-done. See, for example, this beautiful animation of a human heart:

One thing is that it has an almost haptic quality — another bonus feature is that you can move an interface slider to seamlessly disclose the working of the valves beneath the increasingly transparent muscular ‘glass’ surface. Nifty! Imagine an exhibition room in which a real, preserved heart was shown with this animation in the background. (I don’t think they used any of these in the Wellcome Collection’s Heart-exhbition?).

The interactive heart is produced by Hybrid Medical Animation, a small Minneapolis-based company which specialises in creative medical and scientific imaging. And they don’t restrict their productions to macroanatomy; for example, they have also done instruction movies about molecular targeting, like the one to the right.

See more examples here.

(thanks to today’s Medgadget for the tip)