Biomedicine on Display

I’ve always found it difficult to bring together my two core professional interests. On the one hand, I’ve spent many years working on scientific biography and have been engaged in scholarly discussions about scientific auto/biography as a genre (see, e.g., this book). I’m fascinated in how texts, memories, interviews and personal (self)knowledge can be used construct the life-course of scientists.

On the other hand I’ve been engaged in museum business for some years now and have very much enjoyed discussions about the museological problems in the science/technology/medicine segment of the museum world, for example, how physical artefacts and visual materials can be used to construct images of scientific practice.

But so far these two fields of interests have remained separated in my mind. I’ve never found a way of integrating them. Probably because I didn’t believe there were others who were interested. (After all, we’re social animals; to engage in a scholarly field constituted by one person (oneself) is pretty boring, unless you are aspergerish.)

Therefore, imagine my enthusiasm when Craig Howes distributed the announcement for a conference on ‘Museums and biographies’ to be held at the National Gallery in London, 10-12 September 2009. The meeting — which is co-organised with the Museums and Galleries History Group and the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University — will bring together scholars who study the interconnections between museums and galleries, collecting and biography: “Drawing together analyses of representation, material culture and personality, we invite papers that can cast new light on the study of lives, objects and display”. Yes!

Invited keynote speakers are Arthur MacGregor, senior keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, and Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery. The rest of us are invited to send in abstracts for papers that cover areas like:

• The lives of curators, dealers and collectors
• (Auto)biographical display
• Institutional histories
• Object biographies
• Personality museums

There will also be opportunities for museum practitioners to detail new acquisitions or recent developments in the sector, and other forms of presentation may be considered as well as conventional papers.

One page abstracts (300 words), including brief CV, should be sent to Catherine Todd (catherine.todd@ncl.ac.uk) by 31 January 2009. More info here.

Maybe this will be an opportunity for me to become an intellectually more integrated person …

The number of conferences of potential interest for medical museologists and historians of contemporary medicine is increasing.

Take, for example, the annual conference of the German Society for the History of Technology that will be held at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach am Main (close to Frankfurt aM), 22-24 May 2009 — on the theme of the history of robotics.

“If ‘the atom’ and then ‘the gene’ were symbols of the 20th century, then ‘the robot’ is that of the 21st century”, say the organizers. (Especially nanorobots, I guess.) The aim of the meeting is to discuss the historiography of robots and robotics and analyze presentations of robots in museums and exhibits.

In science fiction, visions of the future were and are being constructed about the possible use of robots. These visions often show a rather ambivalent view of these machines. Even current robotics casts both positive and negative lights on them. Thus, developers and producers promise that in the future robots will contribute to the solution of such large and manifold problems of humanity as environmental catastrophes or caring for the elderly.

A particularly controversy of the topic lies therein that robots appear not only to be surpassing humans in regards to particular activities, but also to be replacing them: with regard to heavy labor in industry, particular cultural skills such as arithmetic or music, or in social work, such as in the care of the handicapped, children or the sick. Therefore, a challenge is to research if these developments will change the self-conception of people in its relation to itself and to machines.

Possible topics include:
 
History of the vision of the future for robots
Interaction between science fiction and robotics
Historical change in the perception of the man-robot relationship
Robotics in international comparison
Application errors of robotics and its history (industry, medicine, military, service, toy industry)
Historical decisions regarding the use of robots in particular sectors
The sociality of robots
The design of robots in the course of time: humanoid robots as a model?
Historically based technology assessment
 
Proposals for presentations (max. 350-400 words) should be sent along with a one-page curriculum vitae before 6 January, 2009 to Catarina Caetano da Rosa, caetano@histech.rwth-aachen.de.

The 3rd Annual Science and the Public Conference (in Manchester last June) was a very enjoyable affair (see programme here). Now, the 4th annual conference has been announced — this time in Brighton, 13-14 June 2009. The theme for next year’s meeting is ‘Science and the public: uncertain pasts, presents and futures’ and here’s the (maybe at trifle too vaguely phrased for my taste) call for papers:

The relationship between science and the public has provided fruitful material for analysis from a range of academic disciplines, and an important area of policy and practice, in recent years. Studies and experience have revealed a startling complexity, past and present, in science communication, a range of channels (formal, informal, fictional) through which dialogue and debate takes place, and a wide variety of participants in these interactions. Science itself has been reconceptualised, and the complexity of science as a discourse, as practice and as a form of life raises many questions. Science has long been seen as a quest for certainty, even if that goal is unachievable, but our interactions with and examinations of science often reveal, and are characterised by, many uncertainties: what are we encountering, describing and making when we examine science in its many forms? At the same time as this critical examination of the interface between science and the public has been taking place, a dramatic proliferation in modes and amounts of public engagement with science occurred. Science museums, outreach work and edutainment for younger people have achieved new prominence while history of science and popular science texts flourish in the market. This conference will bring together academics and practitioners who have an interest in the intersection of science and non-science, be that in contemporary, past or future societies, to confront and discuss the uncertainties, and certainties, of science and the public.

Possible topics looks like a delicious smorgasboard:
•       Scientific controversies in the media
•       Experts and expertise in public
•       The representation of science in fiction
•       Public expectations of science and technology
•       Historical analysis of the relationship between science and the public
•       The role of museums, outreach and edutainment
•       Science communication in theory and practice
•       The role of news and entertainment media (including the internet)
•       The construction of interdisciplinary projects and frameworks

Not much falls outside this list, I guess — probably a good thing, because the field is so new that it is great to hear a large variety of topics.

Two seasoned practitioners in the field — Patricia Fara (Clare College, Cambridge) and Steve Fuller (Warwick) — have been engaged as invited speakers. Everybody else is supposed to send 300 word abstracts for individual papers, panel proposals or roundtable proposals to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com before 14 February 2009. Someone on that email address can probably also answer inquiries.

The ‘Material Worlds’ conference at the University of Leicester, 15-17 December 2008 — marking Susan Pearce’s long and distinguished contribution to the field of material culture studies, museum studies and archaeology — will take a broad look at material culture and theoretical approaches to it. Themes include how to deal with museums and heritage, the roles and values of objects, designing and making, objects in museums, representing and interpreting culture, collectors and collecting, etc. The draft program is very rich and varied, with plenty of sessions and discussion panels of interest for medical museum people.

Report from Artefact meeting no. 13, October 5-7, 2008.

Artefacts was initiated in 1996 by the three institutions: the Science Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Deutsches Museum. The aim was and still is to promote a meaningful dialogue about the value of objects to serious studies of the history of science and technology. A wide variety of institutions (both museums and universities) have contributed over the succeeding years.
The Artefacts meeting this year was held in Washington, October 5-7. The topic was the relationship between Art and Science/Technology, as expressed through consideration of an artifact or a collection of artifacts. This topic encouraged a wide range of presentations; from the reception and use of the first Hammond Organs in Norway to mathematical paintings of the well-known author and cartoonist, David Crockett Johnson.
The encounter between art and science seems to be a never ending producer of the most interesting situations and artefacts. Take for example the new Artificial Tree Cellular Towers (se e.g. CBS’s report on the phenomenon), which was the topic of the presentation of professor Barney Mergen from Georg Washington University.  

These ‘trees’ are so curious, they need to be seen (a wonderful exhibition object, but probably rather difficult to display unless you have a museum as big as e.g. National Air and Space Museum in Washington). A lot can be said on these ‘trees’. To me they incarnate the human’s ambivalence to technology – it seems that we can’t get enough of the new technologies as long as they don’t interrupt our carefully staged picture of a long gone ‘natural’ world with bird song, endless forests and cozy huts.     

On 11-12 December, the Postgraduate Forum on Genetics and Society — set up ten years ago to ”bring together researchers interested in how biosciences and society(s) intersect” — organizes a colloquium at Lancaster University on the theme ’Social and biosciences - a critical collaboration’. Keynote speech from Steve Sturdy (Genomics Forum Deputy Director), panel session with Richard Tutton (Lancaster), Niall Scott (Uclan) and Adam Hedgecoe (Sussex), and presentations by Paul Oldham and Dita Wickins-Drazilova (both Lancaster). They’re expecting student presentations too (deadline for abstracts is 7 November). Read more about the Forum and the December meeting here: http://www.pfgs.org/.

Next year is 50 years since C. P. Snow delivered his famous lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, suggesting that as cultured citizens we need to know as much about the second law of thermodynamics as the plays of Shakespeare.

To celebrate this event, and to raise the question whether Snow’s notion has any relevance today, Science Museum and Tate Modern are organizing a two-day event on the theme ‘Art and Science Now: The Two Cultures in Question’:

In a world of increasing disciplinary specialisation in which there has been exponential growth of sub-disciplines in both science and the humanities, it will also ask whether the distinctions between and indeed within the two cultures might have become further entrenched. The most fundamental question this celebration of 50 years since Snow’s lecture will ask, though, is how the terms of the debate may have changed.

There will be an academic conference at Science Museum on 23 January and a more public meeting at Tate Modern the day after. The Science Museum conference will consider questions such as:

• How have new technologies such as the internet and new resources like Wikipedia reconfigured our sense of disciplinary boundaries, hierarchies of knowledge and the places where cultural capital is held?
• Has the new dominance within general culture of ideas drawn from the ‘life sciences’ — molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry, ecology, epidemiology — and their unpredictable pressings upon fundamental questions of how and why humans and other organisms should find themselves and their relationships defined in particular ways, led to an ever more complex and porous boundary between science and the humanities?
• How are Snow’s notions of disciplinary and national cultures to be rethought through the paradigms and politics of globalisation?

Good questions, especially the second one. I guess you could say that parts of medicine has always been a meeting ground between science and the humanities.

If someone would like to present, then send a 200-word abstract by 1 November to Laura Salisbury, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, l.salisbury@bbk.ac.uk

On 21 February 2009, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT, are organising a one-day graduate symposium that will explore ways in which art overlaps with science, and with a focus on material objects. Possible topics are:

• networks of artists and scientists
• artist/scientist collaborations
• art and the natural world
• the philosophical concept of the sublime
• theology, art, and science
• the influence of scientific discoveries on the arts
• artistic and scientific approaches to epistemology
• dialogues between art and science in the Enlightenment
• art, science, and education
• science museum displays
• scientific illustration
• travel accounts
• art and exploration
• amateur practice
• photography as science or art
• artistic and scientific concepts of truth

The organisers invite proposals for 25-minute papers across the arts and sciences. Abstracts of max. 300 words by October 14, 2008 to imogen.hart@yale.edu. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Read more here.

Yes, if we shall believe the Aarhus Network for Science, Technology and Medicine Studies which is hosting a one-day conference in Aarhus, Denmark, 23 October, under the heading ‘Challenging hyperprofessionalism: The intradisciplinarity of science, technology and medicine studies’.

To present “the richness of what is going on across the disciplines”, the organisers invite “research based papers or posters, including work-in-progress, broadly within science, technology and medicine studies”, especially contributions that address the intradisciplinarity issue.

Each paper will only be allotted 20 minutes for presentation and questions (not much time, really!). Titles and 100 word abstracts are due 8 October (send to idenklk@hum.au.dk). Slightly more info here.

Following two succesful earlier meetings (in Stockholm in 2006 and in Gothenburg 2007), the Swedish medical history network organizes its third conference, again in Stockholm, on Thursday 29 January 2009. The main item on the meeting agenda is the planned project for writing the history of the Karolinska Institute, founded in 1810, and today one of the world’s leading medical research universities. As the project involves up to ten Swedish medical historians in 2008 and 2009, it will probably dominate the meeting, but the organizers promise that there will be plenty of time for presentation of other current research projects as well. Conference language is Swedish, but you don’t need a Swedish passport to attend. For inquiries, contact Roger Qvarsell, roger.qvarsell@isak.liu.se, http://www.isak.liu.se/temaq/rq/presentation.

Having an affection for scientific biography/autobiography, I was thinking of how I could possibly engage with the conference ’Academic Autobiography, Intellectual History, and Cultural Memory in the 20th Century’ to be held 26-28 March, 2009 at Universidad de Navarra in Spain.

The aim of the meeting is to engage with current discussions among historians, literary critics, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. about how intellectual history and cultural memory may be developed, articulated, and promoted through autobiography. In other words, the organizers emphasise themes like

• the academic as author/historian
• academic life writing as history or cultural discourse
• academic autobiography as intellectual history
• life writing and the definitions of academic disciplines
• the intersection between private and public lives in academic autobiographies
• academic autobiography as a literary or historical genre
• the ways in which the notion of literary or historical discourse may be rethought in the context of this form of writing
• the ways academic autobiographies challenge our notions of historiography or literary analysis.

The limitaton to the 20th century is fine. But what about the organizers’ understanding of what counts as ’academic autobiography’? Humanities and social science scholars like historian Eric Hobsbawm, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, cultural critic Edward Said and others are mentioned, but scientists are apparenty not thought of as ‘academics’ in this context.

Yet the genre of scientific autobiography has a long and interesting history (also in the 20th century), which could be drawn upon for qualifying the discussion. Just think about how James D. Watson’s first autobiography, The Double Helix (1968) has changed contemporary perceptions of the life sciences! Its cultural impact led to it being ranked among the top ten titles on Modern Library’s 1998 list of best 20th century non-fiction books together with classics like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. (Watson’s second autobiography, Avoid Boring People [2007; review here] hasn’t made it to any list yet, though).

How would studies of scientific autobiography add to the conference theme? In many ways scientific autobiography is not much different from literary or political autobiography. Except in one crucial way, namely that the author’s understanding of self in terms of science may influence his/her understanding of what it means to write an autobiography.

Biotech maverick Craig Venter recently employed this autobiographical trope in A Life Decoded (review here). He claimed that he saw his life narrative as the result of a genome that writes reflexively about itself. It wasn’t very convincingly done, and at first I dismissed the idea as terribly naïve. But thinking about it again, I believe he points to an interesting space for future self-writing.

As the postgenomic worldview — and especially the results of molecular neuroscience — is spreading in our culture (at least the secular part of it; religiously based cultures are probably immune), more and more people will probably understand their selves as complex biological systems, as intricate protein-protein interaction and metabolic machines. To think about oneself as a bundle of biomolecular reactions may, I suggest, become a pervasive existential motif in future autobiographical narratives. Michel Houellebecq has already played with similar ideas in The Possibility of an Island (see here).

I don’t think it’s as far-fetched as it immediately sounds. Freudian understandings of the self became an immensely influential trope in biographical and autobiographical writing in the first half of the 20th century. The explanatory power of postgenomic, molecular neuroscience may become equally influentual for the understanding of self in autobiographical writing. Venter’s attempt wasn’t convincing, but other and better attempts will hopefully follow.

Anyway, I probably won’t have time to send something in — they want a 500-word abstract before 15 October. More info about the conference here.

Just a few words about the upcoming conference ‘The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship’ at Deutsches Museum in Munich, 27-28 November 2008 — a follow-up on the conference Research and Museums that was held in Stockholm in May last year.

It will be an interesting conference because — by bringing together exhibition makers, museum experts, designers, artists, cultural studies scholars and historians of science and technology — it addresses the core issue in our work here at Medical Museion, namely, the interplay between research and museum work. Two of us (Martha and myself) will present papers.

The motto of the meeting is: ”No exhibition without scholarship”. In other words: museum exhibitions aren’t just about visualizing results of historical and other kinds of museum-relevant research results; they also stimulate academic scholarship and generate new research question and new knowledge:

How can researchers take advantage of this opportunity? In which way can scholarly arguments be translated into spatial arrangement and at the same time kept serviceable for reading and citing by later recipients? What might the results of the scholarly examination of an exhibition look like? Unlike for printed texts, the traditional publication media of scholarship, common standards of terminology and argumentation for exhibitions have yet to emerge. What exactly is the role of the objects on display? Recent history of science and technology has intensively interrogated the epistemic quality of these material sources of research. Yet how do the objects unfold their properties in being staged for exhibition purposes?

Sessions:

1) What is this thing called exhibition? Reflections on object, text and space

• Ulrich Raulff (Marbach), Old answers, new questions: What do exhibitions really produce?
• Jochen Brüning (Berlin), Exhibitions vs. publications. On scientific achievements and their evaluation
• Martha Fleming (Copenhagen/Toronto), Thinking through objects
• Commentary: Lorraine Daston (Berlin)

2) Stories on display. What and how do we see in exhibitions?

• Uwe W. Brückner (Stuttgart), Scenography – opera as model for integrative design
• Stefan Iglhaut (Berlin), Story telling and scenography: Strategies of science communication in exhibitions
• Commentary: Anke te Heesen (Tübingen)

3) History of science, objects, exhibitions: Interrelations, transitions, transformations

• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin), Making visible. Visualization in the sciences – and in exhibitions?
• Ulrich Großmann (Nuremberg), The Challenge of Objects - CIHA Congress 2012. The object in the focus of arthistorical studies
• Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), Do things talk?
• Commentary: Falk Müller (Frankfurt)

4) More than history of science?! Exhibitions, research, and the public

• Mosbrugger (Frankfurt/M.), Natural history research and exhibitions – a hermeneutical cycle
• Robert Bud (London), Power, belief and trust: a context for scholarly priorities in the history of science
• Ad Maas (Leiden), Tearing down the altar. A new view of displaying scientific intruments in Museum Boerhaave
• Commentary: Jochen Hennig (Berlin)

5) Making exhibitions: Concepts, constraints, critique

• Jürgen Renn (Berlin), Exhibitions as history of science in action
• Walter Hauser (Munich), Artefacts, visuals and topography as evidence: Working on an exhibition on nano- and biotechnology
• Thomas Schnalke (Berlin), Arguing with objects. The exhibition as a scientific format of publication
• Commentary: Karsten Gaulke (Kassel)

The conference is organised for the Max Planck Research Network ‘The History of Scientific Objects’ by Helmuth Trischler, Christian Sichau and Susanne Pickert at Deutsches Museum. You are welcome to contact Susanne Pickert at s.pickert@deutsches-museum.de if you want to attend.

Have forgotten to announce the ‘Physics meets biology’ meeting at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 18-20 November 2008. Interesting because, as the organisers say, collaboration between physicists and biologists has generated a host of fascinating philosophical problems; e.g., they often disagree about the role of hypothesis in research, what an explanation is, etc. Such differences have practical consequences for interdisciplinary research and also for the border area between applied physics and biomedicine. The Edinburgh meeting brings together physicists, biologists, historians, philosophers and science policy makers; confirmed speakers include Evelyn Fox Keller (Science and Technology Studies, MIT), Kevin Dunbar (Psychology/Brain Science & Education, Dartmouth), Steven French (History and Philosophy of Science, Leeds), Michel Morange (Biology & History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, École Normale Supérieure, Paris), Gregory Radick (History and Philosophy of Science, Leeds), Otávio Bueno (Philosophy, University of Miami), and Darrell Rowbottom (Philosophy, University of Bristol). More info on http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/pmb2008.

Science blogging has been on the Nature Group’s radar screen for quite a while. On Saturday 30 August Nature Network organizes the ’Science Blogging 2008′ meeting in London to promote the genre — especially among scientists and science educators:

What can science bloggers do to maximise their impact? Can blogging contribute to scientific research and careers? How can blogs be used to help educate the public about science? What other emerging online tools will play a role in science?

The day starts with a keynote by physician/journalist Ben Goldacre (who writes The Guardian’s weekly Bad Science column), followed by a panel about “how science blogs can change the public’s perception of scientists and provide a support framework for scientists themselves”. The rest of the day is devoted to breakout sessions: 1) Can blogging unlock your creativity?, 2) How to make friendfeeds and influence people, 3) How to enhance your blog?, 4) Science in Second Life: a virtual tour, 5) Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools, and 6) Communicating Primary Research Publicly.

Read more here.

The registration is now open for the ‘University museums and community’ conference in Manchester, 16-20 September. The meeting is organised by ICOM’s International Committee on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) and the registration fee is reasonable low. So this is a good opportunity to meet others engaged in university museums. This year’s topic is important because our kind of museums have to find a way to balance on the one hand our identity as university museums with international research ambitions and on the other hand our identity as university museums that cater for local and regional community interests. Hopefully some of the presentations will address this problem. See program and other details here: http://www.meeting.co.uk/confercare/umac2008.

(thanks to Cornelia Weber)