Biomedicine on Display

A profile is (says OED) “a short biographical sketch or character study, esp. of a public figure.” But the National Library of Medicine’s Profiles in Science site is more than a series of profiles—it’s also a potentially useful and searchable online collection of documents and iconographic material relating to “several prominent twentieth-century American biomedical scientists.”

Unfortunately, the site isn’t easy to find through NLM’s main site. It takes some navigational and operative mouse skills to discover it. Better use a search engine. The fact that it comes up first among around 70,000 hits (today) on Google — right before Wes Kim’s celebrated short video about the fictive time-lapse photographer Dr. Albert Chung — is a good measure of its popularity and a rare example of how a history of science site can triumph over YouTube.

Profiles in Science first launched in 1998 and now contains short biographical narratives and digitized documents from nineteen biomedical scientists plus a handful of important U.S. medical doctors and health officials. Parts of the online collection are physically available for inspection at the NLM; in other cases, the repositories are placed elsewhere (e.g., the Linus Pauling papers are in the archives of the Oregon State University Libraries.

There are some good reasons for the site’s popularity. Donald S. Frederickson or Martin Rodbell may not be that well known to the general public or historians of science, but Barbara McClintock and Linus Pauling of course are, and Joshua Lederberg and Marshall Nirenberg are still household names among biomedical scientists.

Furthermore, once you have found it, the site is reasonably easy to navigate and search. It is also regularly updated. Since last summer, five new scientist profiles have been added. Each person’s profile contains a short biography and a sometimes fairly detailed description of his or her professional work. This material — competently written by a group of NLM staff members, and as far as I can judge, authoritative and trustworthy — is definitely the best part of the site. To this should be added the digitized documents (PDF files of published papers, manuscripts, diaries, letters, photographs, audiotapes, video clips, for example) all nicely reproduced; the visual side is particularly strong and reflects NLM’s high standards.

But there are downsides. The site’s usefulness for research is restricted. The NLM staff has selected documents for inclusion that “provide insight into both the development of modern biomedical science as well as the character and life of the individual scientists,” but the criteria for selection are not explained, and therefore the site is probably best used for educational and public learning purposes.

But even for these purposes, Profiles in Science is problematic. Seasoned internet users will find the site quite outmoded. The project’s creators claim to have used “modern digital technology,” but there are not even hyperlinks!! They would be well advised to take a tour around the Web, for example on Wikipedia, to learn some basic tricks of the trade. The academic, archival, and iconographic skills of the NLM are awe inspiring. What’s lacking on this site is a vision of how today’s and tomorrow’s technology can be used to put some Web life into the wonderful material in the collections.

(this is a reduced and revised version of my recent review of the Profiles in Science site published in Bulletin of the History of Medicine’s media reviews section, vol. 82(2), 431-32, 2008)

The Museum Boerhaave in Leiden is organising a conference on ‘Lessons in anatomy made easy: Anatomical models in scientific and cultural context’, 6-7 November 2008.

Anatomical models nowadays are made of plastic and so common that simple ones are sold in the department stores everywhere. The origins of these models are to be seen in the permanent exhibitions of many science museums. […] Museum Boerhaave invites historians of science, art historians and conservators with an interest in anatomical models, whether made from wax, plaster, papier-mâché or glass, to attend this conference.

The immediate occasion for the meeting is that the Museum Boerhaave has completed the restoration of their collection of papier-mâché anatomical models made by Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux, allegedly one of the largest of its kind in the world.

The invitation speaks mainly about comparisons with other early kinds of anatomical models, like wax models. But I guess they would also welcome papers on more contemporary kinds of commercial anatomical models for comparative purposes. For further info, see http://www.museumboerhaave.nl/anatomy/overview.html.

(right: a 24 inch long Auzoux papier-maché model of the tongue, throat, larynx and windpipe: from Alex Peck Medical Antiques website) 

(via Simon Chaplin, MUSHM-link) 

Most autobiographies of scientists are terribly boring—soulless accumulations of facts of hardly any interest for others than the near family combined with humourless vindications of the author’s inflated ego—best used as temporary cures against insomnia.

When I bought Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded (Viking 2007) more than half a year ago I didn’t have high expectations. A rapid look at the plates—with the usual mix of photos of the subject as a young man hiking with friends and as a mature man meeting other famous men—confirmed my prejudice about the genre and I left the book in the perhaps-to-be-read pile. Not even Venter’s commanding blue eyes on the dust cover could persuade me to open it again.

It would probably have remained stuck away if I hadn’t met Joan Leach at the PCST-10 meeting in Malmö last week. We had a short chat about autobiography and popular understanding of science and she mentioned that she had read Venter’s book and had found it “so bad”. Strong opinions use to trigger my curiosity, so I brought it on my summer vacation—and I must admit that I’m captivated by this exciting, elementary well-written story about the maverick who beat them all.

J. Craig Venter is probably best known to the public for being the outsider who won the race for sequencing the human genome in the late 1990s. The entrepreneur who invented the so called ‘shot-gun’ method which proved to be faster and cheaper than the official Human Genom Project consortium approach. The bad guy of genomics who left NIH to found two consecutive private research institutes (first The Institute for Genomic Research, then Celera Genomics) and allegedly wanted to make money out of patenting genes instead of giving the code to humanity.

Venter doesn’t try to diminish his maverick persona. If anything he inflates it. The basic story-line of A Life Decoded could be the manuscript for a Western movie. Venter portrays himself as the honest, outspoken, no-bullshit guy who was seasoned in Vietnam and who has defended fact-production and efficient science-making against a politically corrupt genomic establishment. He doesn’t try to hide his contempt for the big power players in the game, including Jim Watson, Francis Collins and John Sulston, their (in his view) political maneuvring and protection of institutional interests. His Penguin/Viking publisher has probably toned down some of the most acerbic character assassinations but there is still much left. One of the few scientists in a power position that emerges unscathed is the former editor of Science magazine, Donald Kennedy.

There is one important part of the public picture which Venter vehemently rejects, however, namely that he should have had any economic interests in the race for the genome. He argues over and over again that he wasn’t in it for the money; on the contrary, his move from NIH to the corporate world was, he says, the only way he could finance his scientifically and economically superior sequencing methodology and save it from being buried by the HGP politicians and apparatchniks. Accordingly, the villains are not just the HGP officials and Wellcome Trust bureaucrats like Michael Morgan, but also corporate executives who tried to stop him from generously publishing his gene data. The portrait of the profit-hungry head of PerkinElmer, Tony White, is particularly unflattering.

Venter has an axe to grind and he grinds it efficiently. After 300 pages, I’m inclined (without having had time to check his sources) to buy the main thrust of his story, from childhood to the present. Especially since Venter is not a lonely rider. He has bonded with other apparently honest, no-bullshit scientists and entrepreneurs who, like him, believe in the power of hard work and attention to detail, and who always put facts before politics. Venter certainly has his share of enemies, but apparently he also has droves of devoted collagues and friends who support his version of the story of the gene wars.

His knack for organising others to work for him is also reflected in the production of his autobiography. After having written some 240.000 words, i.e., more than twice the size of an ordinary book, Venter hired a Daily Telegraph journalist to help him trim and reorganise the text and to conduct interviews with other main actors in the story. His current fiancée gave him constant feedback, and several friends and colleagues, not to mention crew members of his famous yacht Sorcerer II, read multiple drafts. This doesn’t mean that Craig Venter has had a ghostwriter—it means that A Life Decoded is as much a team-work as the scientific projects he has led. The professional support-team is probably the explanation for why this is also an unusually well-written book: as literature (don’t forget that auto/biography is as much literature as history) it competes favourably with most mystery novels.

One feature of the book that works in favour of Venter’s version is the constant focus on the scientific and technical aspects of the work. True, there is a lot about politics in this book, but compared with many other autobiographies of scientists there is even more about science. Venter goes out of his way to explain the scientific and technical problems he encountered—from his work on the adrenalin receptor in the late 1970s and early 1980s to the jigsaw-like genome assembly in the 1990s.

Accordingly, long stretches of A Life Decoded are lucid introductions to bits and pieces of the history of biochemistry, molecular biology and genomics in the revolutionary quarter century from 1975 to 2000; an aspect of the book which in itself makes it obligatory reading for graduate students in the life sciences and for historians of contemporary biomedicine. It’s all told from Venter’s personal perspective, of course, like everything else in this strongly subjective story; but after all this is one of the limitations (and strengths) of the autobiographical genre. (Those who want another side of the story should also read John Sulston and Georgina Ferry’s The Common Thread, 2003.)

But first of all A Life Decoded is—personally, politically, scientifically—a book about passion in science. Venter describes his frustration when procedures and machinery didn’t function as planned, and he relates the feeling of exctasy and relief when things worked, results were pouring in, and yet another article—about the Haemophilus influenzae genome, the Drosophila melanogaster genome, the mouse genome, and eventually the human genome—was sent for publication in the most prestigious scientific journals.

Venter could have chosen to write yet another boring, self-congratulatory  autobiography. Well, it is self-congratulatory and there are many successes in this story to be congratulated. But in addition to the triumphs, Venter also invites the reader to share his emotional ups and downs, even the painful and depressive feelings and (rare) suicidal thoughts. Forget everything you’ve heard about life sciences as boring. Craig Venter’s life in science has been an emotional roller-coaster.

The impression of a man who is driven by the passion for scientific success rather than for institutional power is reinforced by the fact that this book, compared with many other autobiographies, leaves most of the dinners-and-meetings-with-important-people stuff out. When, on one occasion, Venter and his second wife Claire were invited to dine at Clintons’s table on a New Year’s Eve dinner, he summarizes the event in four lines, concluding that Hillary was “like a sponge eagerly absorbing what I had to say about the genome”.

Me too. I eagerly absorbed Venter’s saga in one reading session and I already look forward to the sequel. The man is only 61 years old and despite having a lot of bad genes (he did of course sequence himself!) and having been diagnosed with early skin cancer, he will hopefully live long enough to write the story about his present work too. His mapping of the microbial genome of the oceans and his new institute’s quest for artifical life promises to put even his 1990s genomic triumphs in the shadow. After these there will hopefully come even more exciting projects out of this man who seems to be genetically determined to live a life in competition.

An elementary exciting read for all boys between 15 and 95. So now I believe I understand why Joan didn’t like it :-)

Veterinary history used to be one of these backward corners of the historical specialities occupied by happy amateurs (read: retired veterinarians). Not so much anymore. Younger professional generations are mobilising current historiographical tools to understand the history of domesticated animals and their health problems, including their relations with humans. And there’s of course also bioethical problems involved.  

As a token of this new interest the Centre for the History of Science Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) in Manchester is organising a one-day workshop on ’The Health and Welfare of the Manufactured Animal’ together with the Veterinary History Society on Friday 19 September. ”By focussing on the differing ways in which animal ‘needs’ have been constructed and understood over time, with particular emphasis upon discourses of ‘health’ and ‘welfare’”, says the organiser, Rob Kirk:

the workshop seeks to explore how animals have been determined by, whilst simultaneously determining, the environments, contexts, knowledge claims, and wider understandings within which they have existed in specific places and times. Papers draw upon a variety of historical and sociological approaches and are organised by three topographic themes: the laboratory, the farm, and the home. Our aim is to determine the extent to which historians can contribute to wider debates that see animals as co-constituents of the relationships within which they live. In so doing we seek to explore how far it is possible to move beyond the representation of animals as passive products of human material and intellectual processes.

Tentative speakers include:

• Stephanie Eichberg (Durham University), “Pets and Scientific Subjects”: Considering the animal body in different environments
• Rob Kirk (CHSTM, University of Manchester), “Living Spaces: Environment and welfare in the lives of laboratory animals”
• Gail Davies (UCL), “Making Mice, Making Space: Tracing the geographies of transgenic mice welfare”
• Richie Nimmo (University of Aberdeen), “Animal Mediations: Cows as contingent actors, co-producers and machines in the early 20th century British dairy industry”
• Abigail Woods (Imperial College London). “‘No room for passengers!’: The construction of the fertile cow, 1930-50
• Karen Sayer (Leeds Trinity & All Saints) “TBC”
• Andrew Gardiner (University of Edinburgh). “How small animals made their medicine”
• Mick Worboys and Neil Pemberton (CHSTM, University of Manchester), “Breeding, Feeding, Leading: Making the modern dog in Britain, 1870-1910″

And because this is a conference organised for intellectual purposes, there is no registration fee! 

For further info, contact Rob Kirk at robert.g.kirk@manchester.ac.uk or visit the website: www.chstm.manchester.ac.uk/newsandevents/conferences/manufacturedanimal

On Friday, June 13 2008 (2:00 - 5:00 pm) Dr Andrea Tone will talk about “The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers” at Medical Museion in Copenhagen. Here is the abstract of Andrea’s talk:

“In the last 50 years, we have increasingly turned to a pharmaceutical solution for the problem of everyday nerves. Today, drugs for anxiety are a billion-dollar business in the United States. Yet as recently as 1955, when the first prescription tranquilizer –Miltown - became available, pharmaceutical executives worried that there would not be a market for anxiety-relief. Instead, Miltown became a commercial sensation, the first prescription psychotropic blockbuster in United States history. The drug’s financial success and cultural impact revolutionized perceptions of anxiety and its treatment.”

Andrea Tone will provide the first comprehensive account of the rise of America’s tranquilizer culture based on her new book ”The Age of Anxiety” (forthcoming with Basic Books, December 2008). Drawing on a range of original sources – manufacturers’ files, FDA reports, letters, government investigations, popular culture, and interviews with inventors, physicians, patients and activists – Andrea Tone has explored the history of the drug’s development, popularity, and later discrediting within the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which America’s contested but enduring relationship with tranquilizers took shape.”

Andrea Tone is Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of numerous articles and books including ”Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America”, named one of the best books by Washington Post.
 
Moderators: Rikke Krølner (DSPM) and Jesper Vaczy Kragh (Medical Museion)

Registration: Due to limited seating, registration recommended before Friday, June 6th, 2008. Send replies to: sej@si-folkesundhed.dk, indicate ‘Andrea Tone’ in the subject line.

See http://www.dspm.dk/ for more information.

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.

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 »

The medical faculty at the University of Oslo has announced a full/associate professorship in medical history, with a focus on Norwegian history. The candidate shall have a research background in Scandinavian/Norwegian medical history, which sort of narrows the field of possible applicants. Read more here. Deadline for applications is already 1 August 2008.

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.

On Friday 13 June, Andrea Tone, Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine at McGill, will give a talk at Medical Museion about her new book ’The age of anxiety: A history of America’s turbulent affair with tranquilizers’ (forthcoming on Basic Books). Among her earlier books are Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America and Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History (with Elizabeth Siegel Watkins). Now she’s working on the history of post-WWII psychopharmacology, which is one of our active research areas here at Medical Museion — see more about Jesper Vaczy Kragh’s research project here.

The meeting, which begins at 2pm, is co-organised by Jesper and the Danish Society for Psychosocial Medicine (Rikke Krølner). Please pre-register at sej@si-folkesundhed.dk.

Historians of contemporary biomedicine are well advised to listen when leading scientists and well-placed science administrators air their views on interesting trends in the field. When Francis Collins announced yesterday that he will step down as head of NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, he also said that he is planning to write a book on the regulatory and scientific issues involved in personalized medicine. Because, in Collins’s view, this is ”a fundamental shift in medical care”. An excellent topic for a research project in contemporary history — but a damned difficult one for an exhibition. 

The new Centre for Museums, Heritage & Material Culture at University College London is organising an afternoon workshop on Wednesday 25 June 2-5pm on the theme ”Heritage and Wellbeing”. The purpose of this workshop is to bridge the relevant work of

academics in various disciplines, medical professionals, researchers, museum, library and archive workers, and arts curators by exploring common themes such as touch and object handling, ethnographies and institutions of care, arts in health, and the histories of hospitals and health. The key focus of the workshop is to define research themes and identify practice-led projects, in order to develop appropriate methodologies and to create a critical framework for assessing wellbeing in the context of heritage.

Attendence is free, but space is limited so advance registration is necessary — write to Sonjel Vreeland s.vreeland@ucl.ac.uk. Read more about the workshop here.

Some medical objects, like stethoscopes or mechanical hearts, are almost 100% ’medical’. They are not made for other purposes, they are rarely used for other purposes, and they are almost always understood by others as ‘medical’ objects.

But what about this worn-out keyboard?

It was produced as a multipurpose keyboard, clones of it are used in a variety of professions and contexts — and few of us would think of any of these as ’medical’ objects.

Yet, this particular keyboard was used by a medical transcriptionist, says Cory Doctorow who cites a colleague:

We have a medical transcriptionist on staff who has been using the same keyboard for the last 8.5 years. My co-worker replaced it yesterday, and when he first showed it to me I thought someone had taken a blowtorch to it! The most frequently used keys have been completely worn through, exposing the mechanism beneath. Zoom in and check out the indentation on the Backspace key! The keyboard still works fine, so there’s something to be said for durability. BTW, it’s a NMB Technologies model RT2358TW

Today’s Medgadget use the image to illustrate their celebration of the (US) National Medical Transcriptionist Week, designated in May 1985 by president Ronald Reagan, who said in a speech:

Record-keeping is a vital function in our society, and one of the most important records for every American is the medical record. That record, including reports prepared and edited by a medical transcriptionist from physician dictation, is the permanent history of a patient’s medical care.

I doubt a historian of contemporary medical history could have better summarised the role of medical transcriptionists in the health service sector.

And I doubt that any other object is better suited to function as an evocative object of the profession – crystallising the daily work conditions of hundreds of thousands, mainly women, transcriptionists.

(originally brought by boingboing)

A couple of weeks ago I received a package which, to my great joy and surprise, contained five copies of my biography of Niels K. Jerne (Science as Autobiograhy, Yale UP, 2003) in a Japanese translation.

The rights were sold to the big Tokyo publisher Igaku Shoin already in 2004. But I never heard anything from them, and occasional inquiries never yielded anything but polite avoidance replies. So it is very pleasing to see it in print at last.

My knowledge of Japanese is less than rudimentary so I churned the title (免疫学の巨人イェルネ) through Google Translate and got another—but less joyful—surprise: ’giants immunology jerne’! Could be a Google blunder, of course, but it doesn’t even remotely looks like anything like ’autobiography’.

The Japanese title is a pretty far shot from (well, even the opposite of) the idea behind the original title. The thrust of the book is that Jerne’s theoretical work in immunology was a metaphorical projection of his understanding of himself. His science was literally his autobiography. Accordingly Science as Autobiography is a case-study of an auto/biographical approach to understanding the construction of scientific knowledge. My claim is that the inner life of the scientist constitutes an emotional and existential context for the production of scientific knowledge which is as important as the cultural or social contexts.

Most reviewers got this message right (like Fred Tauber in Bull. Hist. Med.). But, alas, it gets completely lost in the translation. The new title erroneously classifies the biography into one of these hagiographical works that I very consciously tried to stay away from. Maybe some immunologists believe Jerne was a ‘giant’, but I certainly didn’t portray him as such. It simply wasn’t the intention of the book. The summary on their website (in Google translation) isn’t better.

That said, it’s great that the book is now available for a wider Japanese readership. To Igaku Shoin’s credit, they have kept the whole note apparatus and the full bibliography, and all the illustrations are intact too. And it’s very nicely set and bound, and (as far as I can see :-) there are no typos.

If I were an American I would probably have rushed to my computer already last Tuesday night to proudly announce on this blog that I and Medical Museion had been given Medicoprisen. The prize has been awarded annually by the industry organisation for medical devices in Denmark (Medicoindustrien) since 2001. The industry exports for more than 40 billion DKK per year, which is quite hefty, given the small size of this country (population 5,5 mill).

This year, the award was given for the work we have done here at Medical Museion to collect, preserve and display the medical industrial heritage. As you may have noticed, some of the collected artefacts have been displayed on this blog over the last couple of years (some of them are also displayed on our official website; in Danish only)

I didn’t rush to the computer, however, because in Scandinavia it is still somewhat suspicious to write too much about oneself (ever wondered why there are so few bloggers in Denmark :-). The Danish word for this is ’selvfed’ which is not only untranslatable (literally ‘auto-obese’), but also a kind of behaviour which invites to a certain ridicule, so it has taken me almost a week of reeeally hard emotional work and much support from friends and colleagues to wrestle down my innate Jante Law censor.

After this ritual three paragraph opening caveat, I must admit that I’m quite pleased by the award. We have worked hard for several years now to turn this old museum into an institution that is more oriented towards contemporary medicine and medical technology. We are in the process of formulating a new acquisition strategy based on an awareness of the importance of medical industrial design both for the curation and the design of medical artefacts, and we are interested in opening up for co-operation between the university, the industry and the museum world. Our senior curator with responsibility for acquisitions, Søren Bak-Jensen (a specialist in the history of late 20th century kidney transplantation procedures) plays a central role in these efforts. 

So here are some ‘auto-obese’ images from the prize ceremony. First, yours truly with the award, a small, but very solid (and heavy!) bronze sculpture by the Danish artist Peter Hesk Møller:

And then in conversation with Helge Sander, the Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Development, who handed over the award on Tuesday 6 May:

(there is a less flattering pic on our official website, as well).

(all photos by Michael Altschul, Visuel-medie)