Biomedicine on Display

I’ve learned about several kinds of DNA — non-coding DNA, junk DNA, satellite DNA, selfish DNA, triple-stranded DNA and so forth — but I’ve never heard about sleep DNA before. Until today:

Clue: I’ve been surfing around to find a new mattress for my aching back (bad REM sleep = bad blog posts) and found this ad by Ergosleep for a new system for measuring your body posture when you lie down.

It’s all about personalized bed adjustment. The French version spells the connection out even better (’Your sleep DNA code is unique. You too’). It’s nonsense, of course, but it sort of sounds reliable and scientific, doesn’t it?

So what’s next? Sit DNA? Look DNA (buzzy neologism for the refractive error of your lens, i.e., the numbers your optometrist writes down for you when you need to order a new pair of glasses or contact lenses)? Or walk DNA? (shoe size).

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) 

The regulation of public health data collection and display is an interesting field of research for historians of contemporary public health. Here’s how I came to think about it:

On our way back to Copenhagen from three days of vacation on the island of Öland off the coast of SE Sweden with its beautiful and peculiar landscape (especially the alvar heath), we took a short break in Kristianopel, once (in the early 17th century) an important and heavily fortified Danish border town, now a tranquil vacation resort.

While Anna went down to the beach to take a swim in the Baltic Sea, I took a closer look at the local billboard where I found, among announcements for local flea markets and invitations to parties for young church-goers, an official report on the bathing water quality issued two days earlier by an accredited laboratory:

saying: 

• E. coli: 0 mpn/100 ml, measured by the Colilert-18 method
• Intestinal enterococci: 13 CFU/100 ml, measured according to ISO 7899-2

Zero E.coli is fine, of course, but 13 CFU (colony forming units) of enterococci (common faeces bacteria) is not so good. Wikipedia informs me that the state of Hawaii accepts only 7 CFU/100 ml before posting warnings! The municipality of Karlskrona, however, concludes that the water quality is “tjänlig” (suitable).

I’m probably about the only person visiting Kristianopel who has ever cared to read, let alone understood, the water quality report. Regulations issued by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency stipulate that local authorities must make such tests (see Naturvårdsverkets författningssamling 2008:8) and make them publicly available. But apparently the local authorities don’t have to announce the results in a way that makes sense to visitors to the beach—for example that the Kristianopel water is twice as bad as what they accept in Honolulu.

Well, Anna didn’t catch any nasty bugs and the rest is for the Kristianopolitians to consider further. But that said, I think their water quality report raises an interesting general issue. Ground-level ozone, pollen levels, etc. are heavily displayed on TV, in newspapers, etc.; for example, the National Museum of Natural History in Sweden issues a daily pollen prognosis report on the web. What other kinds of public health data are displayed in public? How are these data displayed? Through which media? And which are the political processes behind the decisions to have such data collected and broadcasted to the public?

In fact, the history of public health could be understood (cf. Dorothy Porter’s Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health From Ancient to Modern Times, 1998; read a good review here) as the continuous political negotation of such data and their public display.

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!

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)

Participatory web media are increasingly being used for raising the medical scientific awareness of patients, caregivers and doctors (I guess this is the basic idea of ’formation of biocitizenship’). Latest example is a video channel launched Monday by the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF in co-operation with YouTube:

with “the goal of promoting earlier diagnoses and getting more patients into research studies and clinical trials” (quote from the press release).

The UCSF people are also experimenting with two other forms of online communication. To the right you can see their widget with links to the YouTube channel and their own site.

They have also created a ”Defeat Dementia”-group on Facebook.

Says the director of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, Bruce Miller:

The YouTube channel and these other forms of online communications will enable us to engage a broad audience in the fight against these illnesses … One goal is to increase awareness about the earliest signs of some of the less well known diseases … If we can promote accurate diagnoses of patients, we can get them into clinical trials sooner

Looks like a very conscious strategic use of web media for the formation of medical scientific awareness. Expect to see much more of this kind from universities and research centers in the near future.

After the minisymposium with Jens Hauser and Sepp Gumbrecht on the concept of ‘presence’ here at Medical Museion last spring, our research group has repeatedly come back to the relation between mediated visualizations of biomedical objects, on the one hand, and the immediacy of touching them, on the other (see, for example, Jan Eric’s earlier post on Condillac’s statue).

As an anecdotal illustration of the immediacy of touch, I’d like to present the following personal experience.

In mid-March, I accompanied my partner to the National Hospital here in Copenhagen for an ultrasound scan of our then 13 week old foetus. As thousands of other prospective parents we were of course thrilled by what we saw on the screen:

Watching our future baby ’live’ on a computer screen like this was quite amazing, even though we had seen such pictures on the internet before. It’s an experience we share with millions of others:  digitalized ultrasound scanning foetus images have become an integral part of the contemporary understanding of what it means to deliver new citizens to the world. A striking image of early life that is easily communicated in our visual culture and as such an illustration of the formation of biocitizenship, both discursively and substantially.

Back to the anecdote: Six weeks later, we went for the second screening and watched the same kind of picture, just more detailed, with ears, fingers, toes and everything. It was, of course, very satisfying to see that the pregnancy proceeded well, and that there was no need to worry.

Yet, none of us were really moved by the experience. And I realised that even though I had been quite amazed during the first scanning session in March, both sessions left me somehow unsatisfied. There was something lacking which I couldn’t really articulate. My partner felt the same way, especially after the second scanning.

It was no big thing, and none of us found it wortwhile discussing it at length. For my own part, I shrugged it off as one of these many moments of distraction that acompany academic life.

However, two weeks after the second scanning, my partner suddenly said one evening: ‘put your hand on my belly’. I did — and there it was: the ‘rumbling’ that I had read about! Something moving inside. Not really kicking, but ‘rumbling’.

Wow! Double wow! This was our baby, no doubt. I couldn’t see it, of course, and I couldn’t distinguish arms, legs or head from each other. It was just a ‘rumbling object’ deep inside my partner’s belly.

From a medical point of view my subjective haptic experience was of course nothing compared with the detailed, objective and communicable ultrasound visualizations. And yet — as an experience of emerging life it was much more evocative. Touching our ’rumbling’ foetus made a much stronger impression on me than seeing him/her (we don’t want to know ’its’ sex yet) in high screen resolution. Now he/she was real — for real!

And then I understood why the two previous scanning sessions had left us somewhat unsatisfied, as if something was lacking. Despite all the exquisite visual detail, the perception of a scanning image is mediated. That is, there is literally a medium between the perceiving spectator and the foetus. In this case, a technically sophisticated clinical platform — an obstetric clinic with trained technicians operating state-of-the-art ultrasound echoprobe equipment according to standardized procedures and with the newest imaging software, etc. — stand between us and the foetus. While my hand on her belly is unmediated (unless you want to call the belly muscles and the placenta a ‘medium’).

As an anecdote this has rather limited evidential value, agreed. But it nevertheless makes me think about the immediacy of touch, and to what extent the sense of touch is an undervalued sense in a world which is dominated by the sense of vision (and partly the auditory sense). (For further views on this, see Jan Eric’s and my paper to the ‘Artefact’ meeting in Oslo last September.)

It also raises questions about touch as a basic cognitive sense (cf Jan Eric’s post on Condillac), about touch as an emotionally loaded sense, about the communicability and possibility for shared cultural experiences of touch, and so forth. Lots of questions for later posts.

(finally, to medical doctors reading this post: I’m not at all against imaging technologies, of course; I’m just fascinated by the relation between visual mediation and the immediacy of touch :-)

As you may have noticed, this blog has a crush on microarray technology, both as a social and political phenomenon (see here) and as an object of display (see here and here).

Therefore – congratulations to the Berliner Medizin-historisches Museum for being the first museum (as far as I know) to display microarrays in a permanent exhibition.

It’s just one small showcase in the new permanent exhibition ‘Dem Leben af der Spur’ [On the track of life] which opened last October. The text is short and probably pretty unintelligible to non-experts, and the displayed Affymetrix^® chips are not contextualized, neither historically, nor socially or politically. Nevertheless, here they are – the first gene chips in a permanent museum exhibition.

I’ll be back with a review of the exhibition as a whole.

After today’s SLSA afternoon sessions I walked down Luisenstrasse through the Humboldt University medical campus (Charité) and suddenly saw this poster hanging on a fence:

“Are you doing research? Do you want to know more about several biomedical topics? Join this year’s conference and discuss your results with students from all over the world …”

The poster invites passersby to the 19th European Student’s Conference — an event which has taken place at Charité since the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of many East-West reunion activities.

Why am I so fascinated by this little poster? It’s an example of biomedicine on display, yes — but there is more to it. I guess it has something to do with how the biomedical world enters the urban street space and becomes part of our everyday poster display experience, like street announcement of concerts and theatre performances. Isn’t that what they mean by the formation of biocitizenship?

Forget about designing your own animals, molecules, cells and labware on powerpoints. A company called Motifolio (I assume there is a host of similar companies out there) provides an array of custom shapes of biomedical objects: the whole mount of 700 scalable and editable clips costs 149 USD.

Nifty — but like other standardized images and customised power point presentations they will probably become tiring after a while. Isn’t there an emerging blackboard retro movement? 

As previously reported on this blog, Medical Museion set up a very temporary exhibition at the Bella Center congress center in Copenhagen this weekend. The occasion was the annual meeting of ESA, the Europan Society for Anesthesiology, and the exhibition focussed on the events, outcomes and legacies of a few very dynamic years in anesthesiology in general (and Danish anesthesiology in particular) in the early 1950s.

Continue Reading »

A couple of months ago the Danish Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Medicine asked Medical Museion if we were interested in making a small exhibition about the history of Danish anaesthesiology and intensive care in connection with the fourth Annual Meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (Euroanaesthesia 2008) in Copenhagen.

With 5000 potential exhibition visitors in mind, we said yes, of course! So during the last two months Søren Bak-Jensen and Nicole Rehné have worked hard planning the exhibition and setting it up. The European society has supported us with ~10.000 euros, and we have received valuable help from specialists and a few companies (see credits below).

And today it opened in the west end of the main hall of the Bella Center. An 80 sq.m. display area with a Dräger iron lung from 1952 as the iconic object of modern intensive care placed in the middle:

encircled by showcases that display a number of exquisite artefacts from our collections, including, for example, Ruben resuscitators and a curare flask from the turn of the last century. We have also borrowed some objects from medicotechnical companies Radiometer, AMBU and an evocative movie from Klinisk Film.

Here are some more pictures from first couple of hours when the meeting participants streamed into the huge congress building:

And finally the credits:

Special thanks to Dr. Hans Kirkegaard, Chairman of the Danish Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Medicine and a specialist on curare, who took the initative in the first place — here photographed while he is inspecting one of the showcases:

The exhibition closes on Tuesday.

No doubt, this kind of exhibitions is a great opportunity to foster contacts between the medical profession, the medicotechnical industry, medical historians and medical ethnographers. We’ll soon be back with more pictures and reflections on this particular kind of extra-mural medical historical object exhibitions.

In the middle of April I attended the annual Museums and the Web conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. It was 5 days of highly interesting sessions and I got back home loaded with information and inspiration that should hopefully be put into work in the near future.

One of the great things about such a conference is the opportunity to be presented with new excellent initiatives. A webpage I could hardly wait to tell my colleagues about is www.exhibitfiles.org. It’s a community site for exhibit designers and developers and seems to me to be a brilliant idea! 

The site was founded by the Association of Science-Technology Centers about a year ago. At present it has 723 members and seems to be growing fast. The site is user-generated and will thereby develop according to the members’ interests. The team behind the site wants to create a resource that collects information on exhibitions. You can enter what they call a case study of a particular exhibition or write an actual review of an exhibition. Of course there is also a blog where members can discuss whatever topic they like.

Camilla and I just signed up as members. What immediately caught our attention was a recent blog-discussion headlined “Unexhibitable?”. As we are currently making an exhibition proposal on obesity we are facing the problem. At first glance this topic seems easy enough to come around, but the more we think about it the more insecure we get. Can we actually make an exhibition that will be appealing and not offend people? Is obesity one of these unexhibitable topics? We have made our contribution to the discussion on the blog of exhibitfiles.org.

With a background in the history of 20th century life sciences, I didn’t know much about museums when I took this job. But I’m gradually learning the tricks of the trade and must admit that almost everything about museums is quite fascinating, especially acquisitioning becuse it’s so close to research.

I’m much more ignorant about the administrative and economic aspects. But there is one thing about the economics of museums that has caught my interest lately, namely the way museums are entangled in the experience economy.

For example, take the travelling exhibition ”Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics” which was developed in 2005-2006 by the Field Museum in Chicago and which opens today on its fourth and last tour stop at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Judged from the website this is a small and fairly conventional exhibit—it includes original notes, correspondences and a few artifacts from Mendel’s scientific work in the Brno abbey, they have also included some genetic art works, and a few interactives (”Try your hand at comparing the DNA of a flamingo with those of other birds to see how they’re related”), and so forth. Nice, but apparently not earth-shattering.

But the economic side is fascinating: in addition to the usual in-house operation costs, the Academy pays for transportation and insurance (which can easily be 25.000 USD or more). And on top of this, they pay for renting the exhibition, in this case 85.000 USD for 3 months.

So what’s in it for the Field Museum? Well, this particular exhibition has only been booked by four other museums, which means that they only earn a total of 340.000 USD by shipping it around the US (after having shown it to their own Chicago audience, of course). This probably equals what it cost them to develop the show in the first place, so “Gregor Mendel” is presumably a break-even.

But some of Field Museum’s other exhibitions are blockbusters. The dinosaur show “A T. rex named Sue”, developed in 1999-2000, has been to about 50 museums around the world (in two parallell copies; see tour overview here). They don’t tell the cost of renting it on the website. But if a Mendel exhibit costs 85.000 USD, you can imagine the prize of a dino show. Probably this returns a total income around 5-10 mill. USD for the Field Museum, well above their costs for developing it in the first place.

The icing on this particular dino show experience economy cake is that McDonald’s (yes, the hamburgers!) “works closely with each venue to create and support a strong local campaign of advertising, marketing, in-store promotions, and media relations to drive museum attendance” (quote from here).

Admittedly, as a state-employed historian of science/medicine I’ve so far been quite naïve about the larger economic aspects of museums of our kind. Okay, it’s one thing to join forces with a global hamburger chain to sell tickets to plastic casts of 70 mill. yr old dinosaur skeletons in local natural history museums all over the globe; and it’s another thing to co-operate with a national anaesthesiological society to make 50 year old resuscitating balloons engaging to an international anaesthesiological congress, as we are doing right now (see upcoming post in a few days). Apparently two very different museum worlds. Yet, we operate, in principle, on the same experience economical market place.

Food for thought, although I’m not quite sure where this is heading. Perhaps someone can help me to develop these thoughts further?

 About a hundred years ago (or more precisely in October 2007) we opened the temporary exhibition Oldetopia here at Medical Museion. The exhibition is fully texted in two languages, both Danish and English, and last week the catalogue also arrived in an English version. Better late than never… and luckily just in time for the tourist season. The exhibition is on show until December 14 so there should be plenty of time to visit it, if you still haven’t been around Bredgade 62 in Copenhagen.
The catalogue consists of a bunch of well writing articles on age and ageing. It covers the very broad field of the subject with contributions by some of finest researchers within the field:
Camilla Mordhorst’s article Oldetopia is about the making of the exhibition and the ideas behind it. Bente Klarlund Pedersen’s article Those Who Think They Have No Time for Bodily Exercise, Will Sooner or Later Have to Find Time for Illness is concerned with the importance of physical activity. Mette Sørensen, Tinna Stevnsner and Vilhelm A. Bohr write about The Molecular Biology of Ageing and Bernard Jeune contributes with an article on Centenarians and the Long Life. Lene Otto takes an ethnological approach in her contribution We All Want to Live Longer and Nobody Wants to be Called Old and last but not least Eva Smith writes very personally on Ageing Gracefully.

The catalogue also contains the unique series of images of 100 year old men and women by Liv Carlé Mortensen and a series of pictures from De Gamles By (Old People’s Town) in Copenhagen taken around year 1900.

The catalogue is on sale at the entrance to the exhibition, but if any reader of the blog is interested, please contact me and I will happily distribute a copy.