Biomedicine on Display

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).

Association for Medical Humanities
8th Annual Conference
Mon 5th – Wed 7th July 2010: Truro and Tate St Ives, UK

Humanities at the Cutting Edge:
Conversations between surgery, pathology, the humanities and the arts

This looks like it could be an interesting conference where invited speakers range from surgeons to artists and parallel sessions will be running workshops, conference papers and art exhibitions/performances. There is a provisional programme and the deadline for abstracts has been extended to 31 March 2010
Please include

Title and name:
Institutional affiliation:
Address for correspondence:
Email:
Telephone contact:
Title of proposed presentation:
Abstract (maximum 250 words):

Please return to: petrina.bradbrook@pms.ac.uk
Copy to: alan.bleakley@pms.ac.uk  and robert.marshall@rcht.cornwall.nhs.uk

AMH 2010
HUMANITIES AT THE CUTTING EDGE
CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN SURGERY, PATHOLOGY, THE HUMANITIES & THE ARTS

‘with a knife, with a little knife which scarcely fits into the hand but penetrates thinly through the astounded flesh’
- Federico Garcia Lorca

PROGRAMME
DAY 1: Monday July 5th
Early evening: Parallel events (tickets on first-come-first-served basis):
Registration at Tate or at Knowledge Spa: 6.00-6.30
Tate St Ives event
18.30-19.15: Talk by David Cotterrell, introduced by Alan Bleakley
19.15-19.45: Questions and discussion chaired by Christine Borland
19.45-21.30: Drinks and food reception Tate Café
Knowledge Spa, Truro event
18.30-19.30: Talk by Francis Wells, introduced by Tony Pinching
19.30-19.45: Questions and discussion chaired by Tony Pinching
19.45-21.30: Drinks and food reception in the atrium

DAY 2: Tuesday July 6th
8.30-9.00: Registration and coffee, Knowledge Spa, Truro
9.00-9.15: Opening – Alan Bleakley and Rob Marshall
9.15-9.30: Welcome – Professor Liz Kay, Dean of Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry
9.30-10.30: Plenary – Allison Crawford (Toronto)
10.30-11.00: Break
11.00-12.30: Workshops 1, parallel paper sessions 1, exhibition
Workshops 1
Juliet Percival: drawing on the body for Gunther von Hagens
Marie-Christine Pouchelle and Francis McKee: Robotics
Parallel sessions 1
Participants’ papers
12.30-14.00: Lunch and exhibitions/ AMH AGM 2010
14.00-15.30: Workshops 2, parallel paper sessions 2, exhibition
Workshops 2
Mark Kidel: representations of surgery in film
Deborah Kirklin: writing for Medical Humanities
Parallel sessions 2
Participants’ papers
15.30-16.00: Tea
16.00-17.00: Plenary – Kevin Patterson (Vancouver), introduced by Alan Bleakley
18.30-19.30: Speakers and guests – drinks at the Bleakleys
20.00-late: Conference dinner at the Beach Café, Sennen

DAY 3: Wednesday July 7th
8.30-8.45: Registration and coffee, Knowledge Spa, Truro
8.45-9.00: AMH 2011 Leicester – Paul Lazarus
9.00-10.00: Plenary – Must – performance by Peggy Shaw (New York) and Clod Ensemble (London)
10.00-10.30: Break
10.30-12.00: Workshops 3, parallel paper sessions 3, exhibition
Workshops 3
Peggy Shaw & Clod Ensemble
Roger Kneebone and group (simulation)
Parallel sessions 3
Participants’ papers
12.00-13.30: Lunch and exhibitions
13.30-14.30: Plenary – Roger Kneebone – simulation (London)
14.30-15.00: Summing up and reflections

Exhibition open
Waterstone’s bookshop and stalls throughout the conference

I’m thrilled by the fact that an historian of medicine (Richard Barnett of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge) will chair a panel debate on health care in the digital age (taking place in Cambridge, UK, on Thursday) — it sustains the tendency that historians of medicine are becoming more engaged in contemporary debates about the health care system; and almost always for the better.

Titled ‘Saved by SMS’, the panel debate is about a worldwide healthcare system in crisis and the future prospects of bringing health care practitioners and patients into the digital information age:

From tracking malaria drugs in the developing world by SMS, sharing information about disease outbreaks via social networking sites, to empowering patients and doctors to share diagnosis and treatment ideas, significant changes to the digital and social infrastructure of the global healthcare system could revolutionise the way we look after own health, and other peoples.

Bertalan Meskó (Science Roll) and others have been instrumental in putting medicine 2.0 on the agenda. Historians of medicine and medical museum could play a much more active role in these crucial discussions. The fact that Richard Barnett will chair the meeting on Thursday is a good sign — hopefully he will also infuse some historical perspective into the discussion.

The Thackray Museum in Leeds is hosting an interesting meeting organised by artist Paul Digby on Saturday 20 March. Titled ‘Hybrid’ it gathers a group of interesting thinkers and practicioners on the interface between art and science:

Siân Ede (Arts Director at the UK Branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and author of Strange and Charmed: Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts) will talk about ‘Light echoes in art and science’:

A light echo is a phenomenon observed in astronomy and is produced when a sudden burst of light is reflected off a source, arriving at the viewer some time after the initial flash. Investigative approaches in art and science have little in common but co-exist in the same human context and may unwittingly reflect each other’s thought processes and imagery. In this talk I will venture to explore how far images in contemporary art and science reflect each other’s aesthetic and epistemological currencies.

The philosopher Mary Midgley will speak about ‘Science and poetry’:

Science and Poetry are not rival concerns competing for our attention. They are complementary aspects of our lives. The same imaginative faculties forge both of them, providing the basic structures round which they grow. In every age, scientists need to have a suitable guiding vision, a vision which is adapted both to new data and to changes in the background culture. Some of the visions which are still thought of as central to modern science – e.g atomism and mechanism – were actually forged in the seventeenth century and have become in some ways, unsuitable for the thinking which has since developed. We need to attend to these visions and keep them up to date.

Then James Peto (Senior Curator at the Wellcome Collection) will talk about ‘The culture of medicine: exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection’:

Since the Wellcome Collection opened two years ago, its exhibitions have covered such diverse subjects as the relationship between medicine and warfare; what we understand – or imagine – is happening in our brains and bodies while we sleep; how artists and scientists have grappled with the question of human identity; the history of our understanding of the anatomical and symbolic role of the human heart; the relationship between mental illness and the visual arts in Freud’s Vienna. Showing examples from exhibitions which have been shaped by artists and scientists in equal measure, James Peto will discuss how the Wellcome Collection approaches science as part of culture, rather than as something separate.

And finally Mike Vanden Heuvel (author of Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text) will give talk on ‘To Infinity, and Beyond!’ Can Theatre Play with Science?’

Given the recent appearance of a number of well-received plays with scientific themes, characters, and metaphors, it is no surprise that critical discourse is just beginning to assess the quality and accomplishments of science plays. A leading spokesperson for one critical approach is Carl Djerassi, an award-winning chemist who, after retiring from academia, has published a number of plays on science themes (Oxygen; An Immaculate Misconception). As well, Djerassi has become a respected polemicist for adjudicating which plays belong to the category of what he terms “science-in-theatre.” In my paper I explore some ramifications of Djerassi’s assumptions, focusing on how they position theatre and performance as a mirror held up to the nature that a given science proposes. I argue that such expectations have led a good deal of playwrights to pursue a strategy of “veracity” in their presentation of scientific themes (using Frayn’s Copenhagen as a readily-recognizable example). In contrast to these assumptions, I present the work of less-known playwrights and theatre devisers (such as Luca Ronconi) whose strategy is rather one of what I term “variety” – “theatre-in-science,” to reverse Djerassi’s formulation. In their work, theatre and performance are recognized, and celebrated, for their ability to warp the mirror of scientific veracity and to awaken imaginative responses that still honor complex scientific ideas (such as Ronconi’s Infinities, created in collaboration with the cosmologist John Barrow). In my conclusion, I interrogate the consequences of what I consider a too-heavy investment of science-in-theatre at the expense of theatre-in-science, considering how art/science collaborations are normally funded and for what purpose they usually come into being.

Limited number of seats — contact Paul Digby, pj.digby@ntlworld.com, for more information.

(thanks to Lucy for the tip)

A few months ago, I advertised the meeting ‘KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen’ to be held at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, 22-24 April.

Now the program has been finalised — and it looks very good! After a plenary discussion on ‘Schauplätze der Schönheit: Klinik, Kunst, Medien und Museen’ on Thursday evening, there follows two days of presentations, most of which seem to be very relevant for the future of medical and science museums:

• ‘Körperspuren im Deutschen Hygiene-Museum. Strategien und Objekte’ (Susanne Roeßiger, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden)
• ‘Auf Biegen und Brechen. Zur (In)Formierung des Körpers’ (Stefan Rieger, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
• ‘Der Körper und seine Teile. Vom Präparat zum transplantierten Organ’ (Katrin Solhdju, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
• ‘Vom Körper zum Maß. Zur Geschichte der Konfektionsgrößen’ (Daniela Döring, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• Vermessene Menschen. Vom Fingerabdruck bis zum Ganzkörperscan’ (Erika Feyerabend, BioSkop-Forum zur Beobachtung der Biowissenschaften e.V.)
• ‘Prothesen exponieren. Sichtbarkeiten neuer Technologien’ (Karin Harrasse, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
• ‘Design in der Orthetik. Innovative Prinzipien der Körperanformung’ (Andreas Mühlenberend, resolutdesign; Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal)
• ‘Wie sieht der bionische Mensch aus?’ (Friedrich Ditsch, Technische Universität Dresden)
• ‘”It’s a Material World”´: Situiertheit, Verkörperung und Materialität in der neueren Robotik’ (Jutta Weber, Universität Bielefeld)
• ‘Von der Nasen- zur Gesichtstransplantation: Zur Geschichte und Zukunft der kosmetischen Chirurgie’ (Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, Atlanta)
• ‘Science Fashion´: TechnoNaturen und deren alltagskulturellen Umdeutungen im System der Mode’ (Elke Gaugel, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien)
• ‘Wie kommt die Seele ins Museum? Medizinische Museen und das Transzendentale’ (Robert Bud, Science Museum, London)
• ‘Den biomedizinischen Apparat ausstellen: Materialität und Digitalität in “Split + Splice” (Kopenhagen)’ (Susanne Bauer, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• ‘Die Schärfung des Blicks. Kunstinterventionen in anatomischen Sammlungen’ (Ingeborg Reichle, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
• ‘Körperwissen in der Kunst’ (Ute Meta Bauer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston)

As you can see, all presentations are in German — so the germanophilically challenged may have problems.

More here and here.

Last September, we announced the call for an upcoming meeting on digestive history in Dublin 30 April–1 May.

Now it has materialised with a programme. As expected most talks are about 19th and early 20th century, with one exception — Katherine Angel (Warwick University) who will speak about “A Very Simple Answer: Causal Reasoning in the Last Twenty Five Years of Peptic Ulcer”.

For more information or to register, contact michael.liffey@ucd.ie.

As mentioned in a previous blogpost, I’m currently doing a ph.d.-project here at Medical Museion concerning the history of the concept of successful aging in neuroscience and its relation to ideas on cognitive enhancement.

Part of my work, therefore, is going to conferences like this one, held in Copenhagen last week:

The conference was arranged by the Danish research center GNOSIS, and featured both neuroscientists and philosophers – as an attempt to bridge the disciplinary boundaries and maybe produce some kind of synergy.

The first day especially had that feeling. Themed under the headline ‘Brain Plasticity’ and featuring, among others, the English philosophical-minded neuroscientist Steven Rose, German phenomenological philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs, and Danish biologist and anthropologist Andreas Roepstorff, there was a real feel of cross-disciplinary science communication. A science communication which was also a communication of the immense complexity of the brain and of the production of knowledge concerning it.

As Steven Rose pointed out, neuroscience is ‘data rich, but theory poor’, needing some theorizing on how best to manage the complexities of the huge amount of collected data. One common perspective to most of the talks at the conference were that the brain’s workings can best be understood viewed as a complex, irreducible and indeterminate, continuously developing process. This was conceptualized from both phenomenology, developmental systems theory (or autopoiesis, as Rose termed it), and biosemiotics – all in one way or the other emphasizing the brain as embodied (or the body as ‘embrained’, as someone smartly put it), and emphasizing the body’s embeddedness in the world (emworlded). Dichotomies and dualisms, determinacy and reductionism were (with maybe one exception) not only forcibly opposed, they were long left behind, it seemed.

But still there was a sense that, despite agreement on the general perspective, this did not solve the concrete methodological challenge of, for instance, going from correlates to causality, inducing from the particular to the common, or explaining the relationship between brain and mind/consciousness/awareness/attention etc. Neuroscience, it seems, brings new attention to a lot of old philosophical problems. The multidisciplinary collaborations within the field of neuroscience, and the demand for new theoretical developments and new conceptualizations, may not find a solution to these problems, but it sure sets the stage for interesting theoretical developments in the years to come.

As for the link to my project on successful aging, this development in neuroscience seems to run almost parallel to the overall development of the field of gerontology and aging research in the last couple of decades from around the time that the concept of successful aging was introduced. Many of the same philosophical problems are also seen in other parts of aging research than the parts including the neurosciences.

Aging research (as well as maybe most other fields in the health sciences?) is becoming a multidisciplinary field where dichotomies and dualisms between brain-mind, body-world, and individual-society are being tested and challenged.

Medical museums are usually full with old and new medical science instruments. But they tend to be kept in storage because it is difficult to display them in a meaningful way. It’s much easier to put moulages, pickled organs and surgical instruments on show. Medical science instruments usually need truckloads of description and contextualisaton to make sense in museum displays. (Probably because they don’t ‘talk’, some people would say :-)

Neither do many museum curators give much thought to the historicity of their display techniques. How have display practices changed over time and how do these practices reflect museum culture, politics and technologies?

Such question wil hopefully be discussed at the 29th symposium of the Scientific Instrument Commission, which will be held in Firenze, 4-9 October 2010 on the theme ‘Instruments on display’, i.e., how instruments have been presented in scientific collections, museums and permanent and temporary exhibitions throughout modern history up to the present:

Did didactic, scientific, celebrative, propagandistic and rhetorical considerations significantly influence the manner of displaying instruments? How were instruments presented in a Wunderkammer of the Renaissance, in a 18th-century cabinet or in a 19th-century exhibition? How and why are they shown in contemporary science museums?

This year’s symposium is sponsored and organized by Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Museo Galileo) and Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica. The meeting is open to “anyone interested in the history, preservation, documentation of use of scientific instruments”, whether academic scholars, curators, collectors or students.

Send abstract before 1 June, 2010 by filling in this template.
More info on the symposium website.

The 23rd Nordic Medical History Congress will be held in Oslo, 25-27 May 2011. Contact Olav Hamran, Norwegian National Medical Museum (medisin@tekniskmuseum.no) for more info.

It’s soon time for a new meeting in the ‘Artefacts’ series (for posts on earlier meetings, see here, here, here and here). This is the 15th annual meeting since the inception of the series in the mid-1990s, and this year’s theme is ‘Knowledge on the Move: Conflict, Displacement and Re-Engineering Society: 1933 to 1989′:

The mass movement of people displaced in Europe was a transformative social phenomenon of the period leading up to and following the Second World War. Many of those immigrants were scientists, engineers, designers and others with technical skills and pent up innovative energies. Their institutions and innovative technologies were left behind or unceremoniously stripped away but their knowledge of science and technology, aesthetic theories and convictions invigorated their new environments and adopted institutions. The result, from the turbulent ‘30s to the end of the Cold War, was a technological and cultural transformation of their — and our — world. This Artefacts workshop will investigate that transformation and movement of scientific and technological artefacts — from communications, to computers, art, music, and, of course, science.

Artefacts XV is held at the Canada Science and Technology Museum and Canada Aviation Museum in Ottawa, September 19-21, 2010. Deadline for proposals for sessions and papers is Friday, 11 June; send to Randall Brooks at RBrooks@technomuses.ca; and, most importantly, please indicate in the proposal how selected objects will play a critical role in your presentation.

Historians of medicine and medical museum curators have invested a lot of interest in changing historical conceptions of death and the material remains that signify death and afterlife.

But few have turned their attention to death on the internet and other digital media. The announced one-day seminar on ‘Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age’ to be held at the National University of Singapore on 17 April promises to provide some interesting input to how museums could incorporate these new conceptions of death:

How is the dash between life and death, being and oblivion reflected in the age of digital media? How can we approach the subtleties of different cultural practices and beliefs through design? What is the technological response to the ephemerality of our digital and physical existence? What are the issues around ordinary technologies transforming into memorials, evoking powerful memories, nostalgia etc? What is the function of different projects offering technological response to death and afterlife? Are we simply witnessing technological sentimentality and kitsch and designing new forms of ‘earthly and ridiculous immortality’ as Milan Kundera would inspire us to think? What are different design solutions responding to? For example, are they trying to respond to the immense indifference of nature and the universe to human life and death? How can we respond to the ever-increasing mass of digital refuse or ‘dead’ data and what are the implications of and insights provided by reflecting on the inevitable end of ‘civilisation’? What are the legal and ethical implications of ‘freedom of choice’ being supported through technology, digital desecration and the hybridisation of (the remains of) the dead with the living?

Keywords include:

• possible immortality and afterlife through digital media
• cultural issues with dying, death, afterlife and technology
• new forms of grieving and commemorating via emerging technologies
• the motivation, role and function of technological responses to mortality
• digital archiving and the preservation of self and society
• the ethics of supporting death and desecration through technology
• the hybridisation of once living, sentient beings with other biological and robotic entities.

Excellent questions and topics. Hope one of the organizers would like to come over to Copenhagen one day and create an exhibition around these themes with us.

I’ve just received the announcement for the 11th annual meeting of Universeum (the European network for university heritage) in my inbox.

The meeting will be held in Uppsala, 17-20 June, on the theme ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’. The organisers invite submissions of papers devoted to “academic heritage in its broadest sense, tangible and intangible, namely the preservation, study, access and promotion of university collections, museums, archives, libraries, and buildings of historical and scientific significance”.

Academic heritage institutions traditional roles are collecting, preservation, research and teaching. Increasingly, they are expected to develop public programs and exhibitions as well as to assume a stronger role in marketing their university’s identity. These roles can pose considerable challenges. How can we position ourselves within the growing constraints of generating external funding, creating new audiences and keeping our institutions’ identity?

The present and future status of university museums is a very important topic for a museum like ours (we are a unit under the University of Copenhagen). But frankly, this call doesn’t sound as inspiring as it could have been. I had expected a more clearly defined theme for the meeting, focusing more on, for example, the complicated transition phase that university museums are in at the moment — squeezed as they are between, on the one hand, schemes for national research governance based on scientometrics etc. and, on the other hand, new market-oriented and populist national museum policies. Both trends are eroding traditional scholarly ideals for the production and preservation of and engagement with the academic heritage.

And frankly, the format of the meeting looks pretty uninspiring too. Proposals are invited for the usual 20 min (including 5 min discussion!) presentation format only. I would have expected a somewhat more imaginative spectrum of formats, like panels, group discussions, small workshops on selected topics, etc. I don’t expect online Twitter-sessions, but if Universeum has the ambition to set agendas for the future of European university museums, it should strive for sharper thematic programmes and a more up-to-date meeting format.

But one can of course be happily surprised. And Uppsala is absolutely gorgeous in early June. So if you haven’t been discouraged by this post, send your proposal + short bio + short mention of research interests to universeum@gustavianum.uu.se — before 15 March, 2010. 

More info here: http://www.gustavianum.uu.se/universeum2010.

As one of those historians of contemporary science, technology and medicine who have tried my hands and brain extensively on interviewing scientists about the past (see, e.g., here and here), I have pretty ambiguous feelings about ‘oral history’ as a historical specialty in its own right

If you want to study the history of the science, technology and medicine of the near past, you often have no other choice but questioning living actors, since most written, visual and material sources aren’t yet deposited in archives and museums. Speaking with living historical actors also give a special additional flavour to a narrative based on written, visual and material source material. On the other hand, too many ‘oral historians’ use sloppy methodologies, ask questions without being properly prepared, don’t spend enough time to ‘warm up’ to their interviewees, and don’t think of using other kinds of sources to back up the results of their questioning.

Most importantly, the idea of a pure ‘oral history’ as a special kind of history that can stand alone, apparently untouched by ‘non-oral history’, is historiographically questionable. Utilising the speaking voices of historical actors in just one of many methodologies available to historians of the near past, especially in these days, when actors’ voices take so many forms. Today’s actors don’t just talk, they also write articles and books, memoirs and emails, and present themselves in chatrooms and blogposts and a host of other online media. Contemporary history must be based on all these kinds of expressions, not just oral voices. So ‘oral history’ is just one complementary methodology in the contemporary historian’s toolbox, nothing else.

I came to think of this when I read the call for papers for the 2010 annual meeting of the Oral History Association, to be held on the theme ‘Times of Crisis, Times of Change: Human Stories on the Edge of Transformation’. The theme as such is highly relevant, also for historians of science, technology and medicine:

The economic, political and environmental tensions of the present moment are powerfully reshaping our world. People find themselves trapped within global forces, whether economic collapse, war and genocide, forced displacement and relocation, or the threat of environmental disaster. These forces often appear to act upon people in ways beyond their control. At the same time, moments of great crisis engender powerful new visions of change and transformation. Whether as involuntary subjects or active agents, leaders or witnesses, people live and embody these changes. Their memories are critical windows on human struggles, resilience, myth-making, and the political power of stories, forcing a reckoning with the past as well as a reconsideration of the future. Such stories speak to both collective and contested understandings of life on the edge of transformation.

A theme that gives rise to questions like: “How have people struggled and survived in times of crisis? How do people create change and bear witness to it? How do they construct their stories of these moments? In what ways have stories of crisis and change shaped public memories of pivotal historical eras? How do we reconcile contradictory stories of crisis and change?” (read the whole CFP here).

Excellent and very timely questions! But that said, why should historians of the contemporary world limit themselves to using ‘oral history’ methods to study these stories and memories? Why talk with people about these things with a voice-recording machine, when you have millions of written responses to the current political, economic and environmental crisis available on the internet? A single world news article on Huffington Post easily draws several thousands of comments, which bear witness to how people handle the present and the near past.

This fascinating cacaphony (or maybe symphony :-) of millions of daily public reactions — from the ultraright to the far left — to all kinds of current world affairs isn’t oral: it’s produced on keyboards, in writing. It’s a daily testimony to the fact that ‘online history’ and ’social web history’ has become much more relevant for historians interested in the contemporary world than ‘oral history’ — which now seems to be a speciality on its way to insignificance.

People interested in medical science communication in museums are well advised to broaden their vision to other domains of science communication studies and practices. There is much to be learned from science communication studies dealing with a wide array of sciences through a variety of media.

One forum for such learning from others is the series of annual ‘Science and the Public’ conferences in UK. These meetings aim to bring together, as the organisers put it, “the various strands of academia which consider science’s relationships with groups generally called ‘the public’”  (I must admit that I love that phrasing, “groups generally called’ the public’”, it sounds so academically keep-a-distance-ish :-).

I participated (and presented) at the meeting in Manchester in 2008 — a very positive experience; very informal atmosphere and high quality presentations; good scholarly karma.

Next year’s meeting is going to be held at Imperial College in London, 3-4 July 2010. Alice Bell and her organiser-colleagues are expecting participants and contributions from a wide range of disciplines, like science and technology studies, history of science, geography, psychology, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, development studies, English literature, science policy studies and much more. And the range of topics covered may include (but are not limited to):

* PUS, PEST, PR.
* Surveying public knowledge and attitudes.
* Science and the arts (including science fiction).
* Science, publics and personal identity.
* The role of industry and/ or the third sector in public engagement
and scientific research.
* The challenges of ‘upstream’ engagement.
* Popular science and professionalization.
* Specific public-science issues: e.g. climate change, MMR, energy policy, GMOs.
* Studies of specific media: e.g. film, books, the internet, museums, radio.
* Science, religion and the ‘New Atheism’.
* Politically engaged scientists.
* Churnalism vs. investigative science journalism.
* Edu-tainment.
* Scientific advisers, spin and secrecy.
* Patients and publics in health services.
* Science and the sceptics.
* Amateur science.

I guess that would cater for most science communication palates. Send a 300 word abstract to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com by 1 March 2010. You can also send in a panel proposals.

(Thanks to Alice for the info).

In late March, Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard (which several of us here at Medical Museion met when she gave a seminar here a couple of years ago and who is now working at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge) is organising a meeting of great relevance for anyone interested in biomedicine on display, whether in museums or on the screen.

Titled ‘Have you ever seen a molecule? Art, science and visual communication’, the two-day meeting at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), 25-26 March, concentrates on the correlation between art/design and molecular biology, in particular structural biology, and on the impact of the arts and artistic practices on scientific culture. Current molecular biological research is very dependent upon visualisation methods, both in the production of intepreted data and in the communication to other scientists and the public at large. The call for papers explains the relevance of this topical issue, both for scientists and for science communicators, understood broadly:

Despite the fact that structural images of individual projects are made by thousands of researchers in laboratories around the world, there is as yet no general consensus on what makes a good image. Consequently, there is no obvious and necessary correlation between the images made for pragmatic and heuristic purposes in the laboratory, those chosen for posters and conference presentations, the images accompanying article submissions, and finally those that will be selected or further designed for public engagement and communication. Instead, how specific traits should be visualised, which colour schemes should be applied and how to pick the perfect image for specific purposes depend to a large degree upon pragmatic categories and local factors within individual laboratories and research groups, as well as on editorial decisions and a stronger promotional value, at least to some degree independently of scientific preferences and arguments.

Interdisciplinary collaboration in visualising molecular structures lies at the very core of contemporary research processes and products. Bringing art, design and science together is far more than just an interesting experiment in transdisciplinary cross-communication, it is a necessary step in exploring new ways of optimising imagery at the molecular level and thus breaking new ground. We depend upon this in the arts as well as in the sciences in the future university to make things better and to advance our knowledge of life at a molecular level.

Rikke/CRASSH welcomes submissions for presentations broadly within visualisation of science. Send a <250 words abstract, a brief CV and a few lines about your interest in the conference before 1 February 2010 to rsk@mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk (and please use the form here).

Registration fee (includes catering) is a bargain (£30 for faculty, £15 for students.). Registration will be available from the conference website shortly.