Biomedicine on Display

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.

This is the last part of my project description for the Ph.D.-project called “A genealogical study of the concept of ’successful aging’ and its relation to the idea of ‘human enhancement”. See the first two parts here and here.

 ’Successful aging’ in the neurosciences and the link to ‘cognitive enhancement’
In order to narrow the problem field, the project will look closely at how the notion of ‘successful aging’ has been understood and defined in the field of neuroscience in the last decades, and how ‘successful cognitive aging’ has played together with discussions — both in the scientific literature, in science policy documents and in general public discourse — about the possibility for so called ‘cognitive enhancement’ (‘neuro-enhancement’) [12][13][14][17]. Both in the scientific literature and in policy documents on ‘successful aging’ and ‘human enhancement’, the neurosciences are considered as the primary field of research; neuroscience also figures prominently in the corresponding public discourse [7][21][23], cf. [25]. The brain and cognition are ascribed significant cultural value in the emerging ‘knowledge society’; healthy cognitive abilities are considered necessary for a life-long contribution to the labour market and for well-being in everyday life, and not surprisingly some of the exponents for the notion of ‘knowledge society’ are also exponents for ‘converging technologies’ [17][21].

Current developments in the field of aging research also have strong discursive links to cognitive enhancement. As the aforementioned EU parliament study argues: “The growing problem of neurodegenerative diseases in ageing societies has turned research and development in therapeutic cognitive enhancers into a very dynamic field with significant resources” [21:26]. Likewise, in enhancement discussions special attention is being ascribed to cognitive enhancement: “’neuro/ brain enhancement’ as a research field stands at the centre of the CT [converging technologies] debate. It attracts the largest share of attention due to its plans to simulate and manipulate brain processes, which – if realized successfully – could directly affect our concepts of the human self and identity” [17:382], cf. [21][23][25]. Also here there may be a significant aspect of user-driven innovation: medications developed in research into age related diseases like Alzheimer’s disease is already being used by young, healthy individuals to (presumably) enhance their cognitive abilities [14][17][21], and, conversely, one could therefore expect that the market for cognitive enhancement may stimulate research in the prevention and treatment of age-related neurodegenerative diseases.

These interconnected arenas of aging research, enhancement discourse and general ideas about successful aging will be the focus point of this project. The point of departure is that the connection between the discussion about successful aging and the discussion about human enhancement has been overlooked in the scientific literature and that the two discourses are more closely related than usually presumed. Shedding light on the historical relation between the two notions both in the scientific and popular discourses will potentially have significant consequences for future research, for research politics and for the public understanding of successful aging.

References:
7. Kirk, H. (2008). Med hjernen i behold – Kognition, træning og seniorkompetencer. København: Akademisk Forlag.
12. Balling, G. (2002) (ed.). Homo Sapiens 2.0. Når teknologien kryber ind under huden. København: Gads Forlag.
13. Balling, G og Lippert-Rasmussen, K. (2006). Det menneskelige eksperiment. København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag.
14. Greely et al. (2008). Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy. Nature, 456, 702-705.
17. Beckert, B., Blümel, C and Friedewald, M (2007). Visions and realities in converging technologies. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 20(4), 375-395.
21. European Parliament Science and Technology Options Assessment (2009). Human Enhancement Study. Awailable at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/stoa/publications/studies/stoa2007-13_en.pdf (14.08.09)
23. http://www.humanityplus.org/read/2009/07/human-enhancement-what-should-be-permitted-geneva-october-20-21-2009/ (14.08.09)
25. Dumit, Joseph (2004). Picturing Personhood. Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press

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.

This is the second part of my project description for the Ph.D.-project called ‘A genealogical study of the concept of ’successful aging’ and its relation to the idea of ‘human enhancement’. See the first part here.

The relation between ’successful aging’ and ‘human enhancement’
The project will particularly focus on an analysis of the possible connection between ideas about the prevention and treatment of age-related diseases, on the one hand, and the current merging discourse on ‘human enhancement’, on the other. Like ‘successful aging’, the notion of ‘human enhancement’ — including a large variety of different ideas about the future possibilities for technological improvements of human bodies — became widely spread in the 1980’s and 1990’s [11][12][13][14].

A preliminary survey of the literature indicates that the notions of ‘successful aging’ and ‘human enhancement’ often seem to appear together in the scientific literature and in medical and health policy documents. For example both the European Union (EU) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have published reports that deal with so called ‘converging technologies’, usually defined as a convergence of nano-, bio-, info-, and cogno-sciences and technologies (NBIC). In such reports, the notion of ‘human enhancement’ is a central concept, around which the discussion of the aging population in the developed countries revolves [15][16][21], cf. also [17][18][19][20]. As a study commissioned by the EU Parliament says, “it is safe to say that a side effect of the fast-growing research and development into pharmaceuticals for age-related neurodegenerative diseases will be a number of new drugs which can be used for the enhancement of performance of young, healthy people.” [21:7]

Similarly, in a large number of websites and blogs published by organisations and individuals that support and promote the notion of ‘human enhancement’, the possibility for using such technologies as life extension devices and for delaying age-related physical and/or cognitive decline constitutes one of the central arguments for developing enhancement technologies [11][22]. Websites that express the opinions of the so called transhumanist (posthumanist) movement is one of the most vociferous exponents of this argument. Both these pro-enhancement advocates and science policy reports (like the EU parliament study and the NSF reports) emphasize the fact that the biomedical sciences, biotechnologies and medicotechnical technologies are increasingly producing new technologies capable of simultaneously enhancing the capacities of healthy people and treating diseases, especially age-related diseases [16][21][23]. Thus the discourse about ‘human enhancement’ and ‘successful aging’ are discursively intimately connected.

In addition, this integration of the ‘human enhancement’ and ‘successful aging’ discourses seem to have a strong element of user involvement. The strong ideological commitment to the integration between the two notions among individuals that view themselves as members of a loose ‘transhumanist’ intellectual movement is probably the best example of user involvement. It is unclear, however, to what extent the scientific community, the ‘transhumanist’ intellectual movement and the public at large differ with respect to an active commitment to integrating the two notions. However, I will suggest that the increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs in the general population (especially among young people) and the increasing dissemination of pro-enhancement policies and visions that challenge traditional views of the use of medicine both work in favour of a similar integration between the two notions.

Furthermore one might expect that the general and widely spread popular attitude to performance-enhancing drugs in Western cultures is an underlying Zeitgeist which supports the current political, scientific (and ethical) discussions about the integration of the two notions in the ‘transhumanist’ movement and among scientists. Finally, one might also expect that such popular attitudes will effect strategic market evaluations in the pharmaceutical industry and thus spill over to strategies for future drug pipelines. In all these respects, the integration of the notions of ‘human enhancement’ and ‘successful ageing’ may well be framed with reference to broader user involvement and user driven innovation (cf. [14][15][16][21][24]). These are preliminary hypotheses only, however, which need further empirical substantiation.

References:
11. Bostrom, N. (2005). A History of Transhumanist Thought. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 14(1).
12. Balling, G. (2002) (ed.). Homo Sapiens 2.0. Når teknologien kryber ind under huden. København: Gads Forlag.
13. Balling, G og Lippert-Rasmussen, K. (2006). Det menneskelige eksperiment. København: Museum Tusculanums Forlag.
14. Greely et al. (2008). Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy. Nature, 456, 702-705.
15. Roco, M and Bainbridge, W (2002) (eds.). Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. NSF/DOC-sponsored report. Awailable at http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_report.pdf. (29.05.2009)
16. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 20(4) (December 2007). Special Issue: Converging Science and Technologies: Research Trajectories and Institutional Settings.
17. Beckert, B., Blümel, C and Friedewald, M (2007). Visions and realities in converging technologies. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 20(4), 375-395.
18. Det Strategiske Forskningsråd (2006). Det aldrende samfund 2030 – Rapport fra Styregruppen for det strategiske fremsyn om det aldrende samfund 2030. Awailable at http://fi.dk/publikationer/2006/det-aldrende-samfund-2030-rapport-fra-styregruppen/det-aldrende-samfund-2030.pdf (29.05.2009)
19. Murphy, T. F.(1986). A cure for aging? The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 11(3): 237-255
20. Veatch, R.M. (1979). Life Span: the Hastings Center report on values and life-extending technologies. New York: Harper and Row.
21. European Parliament Science and Technology Options Assessment (2009). Human Enhancement Study. Awailable at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/stoa/publications/studies/stoa2007-13_en.pdf (14.08.09)
22. http://www.humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/transhumanist-values (14.08.09)
23. http://www.humanityplus.org/read/2009/07/human-enhancement-what-should-be-permitted-geneva-october-20-21-2009/ (14.08.09)
24. Maher, Brendan (2008). Poll results: Look who’s doping. Nature, 452, 674-675

I’ve just begun my ph.d.-project here at Medical Museion. Titled ”A genealogical study of the concept of successful aging and its relation to the idea of human enhancement”, the project is financed by the new Center for Healthy Aging at the Faculty of Health Sciences.

Below is the first part of the project description concerning the notion of successful aging. In two following parts I will first introduce the possible relation between successful aging and human enhancement, and then my attempt to narrow the project to cognitive aspects of ageing and cognitive enhancement. Comments to one or all three parts are much appreciated.

The genealogy of the notion of ’successful aging’
At present there is much focus on the notion of successful aging (healthy aging, optimal aging) in Denmark and other developed countries. The increasing life expectancy of the population in combination with low birth rate and low rate of immigration gives rise to both political and economic concerns about the future maintenance of the living standards for an aging workforce. The increasing number of elderly people gives rise to new demands for developing new knowledge about how individuals can live a healthy life and remain healthy, even in old age.

The notion of ‘successful aging’ is not new. It can in fact be traced back to at least the 1960’s and became ubiquitous in the field of aging research in the 1980′ and 1990’s [1][2][3][4][5]. The dissemination of the notion is connected to a development trend in aging research, whereby scientists gradually changed their understanding of aging as a research object for gerontological/geriatric research. From primarily being concerned with the treatment of diseases in later part of a life course to an increased focus on disease prevention and to a broader public health oriented approach to aging involving several different scientific fields, also beyond the biomedical sciences [4][6], cf. [7].

The aim of this project is to undertake a genealogical study[8][9] of the development of the notion of successful aging from the increased focus on prevention in the middle of the 1980’s until today. The literature on the subject is sparse, consisting of a few short chapters with an overview of the historical development of age research, cf. [6][10]. A more detailed historical study of this development based on the primary literature (scientific articles, textbooks, policy documents, etc.), is supposedly going to produce a deeper and better understanding of the notion of successful aging, which in turn will help qualify the current scientific and public discussions about the prevention and treatment of age-related diseases. The study will thus hopefully also help identify some of the conditions that may influence future understandings of what ‘successful aging’ is and the ways in which the future research in the field might develop.

References:
1. Williams, Richard H., and Wirth, Claudine, G. (1965). Lives through the years: styles of life and successful aging. New York: Prentice-Hall.
2. Rowe, J. W. and Kahn, R. L. (1987). Human Aging: Usual and Successful. Science, 237: 143-149.
3. Rowe, J. W. and Kahn, R. L. (1998). Successful aging. USA: Pantheon Books.
4. Baltes, P. B. and Baltes, M. M. (1990) (eds.). Successful aging: Perspectives from the behavioral sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
5. Bond, L. A., S. J. Cutler, and A. Grams (1995). Promoting Successful and Productive Aging. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
6. Amstrup, K og Poulsen, I. (2007). Geriatri – en tværfaglig udfordring. København: Munksgaard Danmark.
7. Kirk, H. (2008). Med hjernen i behold – Kognition, træning og seniorkompetencer. København: Akademisk Forlag.
8. Villadsen, K. (2006). Genealogi som metode: fornuftens tilblivelseshistorier. Kaspar Villadsen & Ole Bjerg (2005) (eds.). Sociologiske metoder: Fra teori til empiri i kvalitative og kvantitative studier. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur.
9. Foucault, Michel (1992). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.
10. Bengtson, V.L. and Schaie, K.W (1999) (eds.). Handbook of Theories of Aging. New York: Springer Publishing Company, inc.

The creative editors or Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science (see earlier mention here) are planning a focused discussion section on scientific instruments in a forthcoming issue of the journal.

With the “practical turn” in history and philosophy of science came a renewed interest in scientific instruments. Although they have become a nexus for worries about empiricism and standards of evidence, instruments only rarely feature as primary sources for scholars in the history and philosophy of science. Even historians of technology have been accused of underutilizing the evidence embodied in material objects (Corn 1996). The fundamental questions are not settled. First, there is no general agreement as to what counts as a scientific instrument: Are simulations instruments? Can people function as instruments? Do economic or sociological instruments operate in the same way as material instruments? There is a second, related debate about how scientific instruments work: Is there a unified account? Do instruments produce knowledge or produce effects? Do they extend our senses (Humphreys 2006) or embody knowledge (Baird 2006)? Third, HPS has seen a variety of approaches to fitting instruments into broader historical and philosophical questions about scientific communities and practices: Shapin and Schaffer (1985) relate instruments to the scientific life, Galison (1997) gives instrument makers equal footing with theorists and experimentalists within the trading zone of scientific discourse, and Hacking (1983) elevates instruments to central importance in the realism-antirealism debate. Finally, it seems plausible that there are methodological concerns specific to scientific instruments: What lessons can we draw from anthropology, material culture, and other allied fields?

I hardly need to emphasise that many instruments for medical and biomedical research fall into the category of ’scientific instruments’ — so, if you’ve got a good idea for a 1000-3000 word essay, don’t hesitate to send your submission before 26 February 2010.

For more details, see http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations

Laboratory equipment for rats or mice have begun to fascinate me more and more. Not in the way the rat guillotine was fascinating, but more in the way of how lab equipment can show so many things about biomedical practices, contexts and knowledge production.

The picture above is from an article in the October issue of The Scientist, which Thomas has referred me to, called ‘Lab Toys – How does cage enrichment affect rodents?’. It is a really interesting article (as he knew I would think) about, well, lab toys – and their consequences for lab practices.

For instance the article illustrates one of the aspects about the use of laboratory animals that you seldom think about: the everyday life in the lab where humans and animals interact. Rats, for example, are not only instrumentalized in an experimental setting but must also, like any other domesticated animals, be cared for and nurtured. And offered toys. As the article describes there is a growing interest and market for this special kind of lab equipment, combined with a growing concern about animal welfare both in public as well as in a biomedical research context.

Another often overlooked aspect (seen from the humanities, at least) about biomedical laboratories that the article shows, is the amount of creativity involved, not only in coming up with new experimental setups, but also in designing facilities for animals. Innovative lab workers apparently do a lot for the well being and the shaping of lab animals’ environment using simple things like cardboard or shreded paper.

The article also had some more critical points about lab toys.

In the 1940s, the famed neuropsychologist Donald Hebb decided to bring home one of his experimental rats, letting it run free in his house and play with his children. The increased variety in the animal’s environment compared to a small bare cage, he found, improved its ability to learn. Psychologists since then have examined the effect of environment on cognitive processes such as learning, fear and addiction.

This and other examples are given to illustrate the fact that the living conditions of lab animals — from materials used for nesting, gnawing or hiding, to temperature and access to other animals — affect their behaviour, stress level, immune system and physical condition. Wheels, gnawsticks and hiding places can therefore in a more or less subtle way influence the results of the experiments the animals are used in.

So if you want to know if your lab’s results are comparable to the results from other labs you have to take these aspects into account and maybe even standardize your lab animals’ living conditions (just like the standardized units, setups or even what you could call standardized mouse like the oncomouse that are used today). As the Dutch researcher Vera Baumans says in the ‘Lab Toys’ article: “The effects of different types of enrichment are often strain-specific and gender-specific, and are even sensitive to the statistical method used in any given study”.

Allthough this is only a relatively small part of the field of modern biomedicine, the living conditions of laboratory animals can, in this way, reflect many of the central aspects constituting the field. One important aspect shown in the lab toys discussion is the way medical sciences attempt to manage complexity by creating controlled lab settings.

But it also becomes clear that the laboratory is a setting for animal and human interaction beyond a simple ‘exploiting the animals’. It is a setting where you cannot separate lab practices from their political and social context — in this case in the form of regulations and concerns for animal welfare. And as the article ends by pointing out, the investment in animal welfare made by Pharma companies like Novo Nordisk can also have a positive effect on the image of these companies as moral entities.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any laboratory toys in the collections of Medical Museion, but they would definitely be items worthy of a museum exhibit. Imagine a rat toy and a rat guillotine next to each other to illustrate some of the paradoxes and themes in recent biomedicine. More lab toys on display, please!

The material dimension of science is back in focus for historians.  As far back as I remember, it was historians of technology who were the ‘materialists’, whereas historians of science were ‘idealists’. Didn’t really matter what kind of studies they did — historians of science have always tended to be intererested in mind (theories, ideas, concepts, discourses, etc.), whereas historians of technology have given higher priority to matter — material matter, not just conceptualised matter.

But historians of science are about to discover the material aspects of science. Next summer’s workshop ‘Scientific Objects and their Materiality in the History of Chemistry’ is a case in point. Organised by Michael Gordin (Princeton), Ursula Klein( Berlin), and Carsten Reinhardt (Bielefeld) and held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, 24-26 June 2010, it will explore the materiality of scientific objects with a focus on the history of chemistry:

For both experimental inquiry and technical application, the sciences depend on working with material things and processes. In this respect, chemistry is arguably the material science par excellence, primarily through the crucial role of the synthesis of chemical compounds, and the strong interactions with technological institutions and industry. In terms of the representation of its objects of inquiry, chemistry has a peculiarly materialized semiology in a long-standing tradition of graphic formulae and three-dimensional structural models, as well as a rich heritage of ordering systems such as the periodic table. In the middle-ground between representation and intervention there stand certain kinds of principles and entities, some of them invisible, that are both objects of experimental inquiry and theoretical speculation. Concepts such as the atom, element, or phlogiston have laid the groundwork for chemical research in defining the units of ordering systems, constituting the goals for material production, serving as limitations to the extent of chemical practice, or having crucial heuristic roles. And all of them have experienced variation, re-definition, development, suppression, and sometimes even extinction in the course of history.

And they tacitly refer to the notion of ‘mangling of practice’:

Commonly, the materiality of scientific objects has been described by two, arguably conflicting, dimensions: First, by studies of materially-intervening practice—the ways in which ‘real things’ are involved in and condition such practice. Second, by the significance and meaning ascribed to things in discursive practice. These two dimensions are not necessarily in contradiction, and their tension can be used in productive and innovative ways.

I hardly need to emphasise how important this kind of inqury is for museums of science, technology and medicine, because materiality is at the center of the museum enterprise.

 The following concepts/objects are indicative of the organisers’ intentions:
• earth, air, water, fire, ether
• sal, mercur, sulfur
• phlogiston, caloric, oxygen, lumière
• element, compound, composition, mixture, alloy
• electron, atom, bond, molecule, structure
• polymer, colloid, crystal, glass
• salt, base, acid
• metal, halogen, rare earth
• gas, liquid, solid, plasma
• natural product, synthetic product
• supramolecular, nano
• pure, impure
• chemical reaction

The workshop will consist of ca. 15 precirculated papers. The want max 350 words proposals by 1 December, 2009. Write to Carsten Reinhardt: carsten.reinhardt@uni-bielefeld.de.

Yesterday, at last, we opened our new exhibition — ‘Primary Substances: treasures from the history of protein research’ — in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen. 

‘Primary Substances’ is about protein research in the long time perspective, from the early 19th century to the present. However, the main focus is on analytical protein studies between the 1930s and 1980s, i.e., before the emergence of comtemporary proteomics.

The immediate occasion for the show was the newly opened Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (the exhibition has been paid for by the foundation; no strings attached!). But the scope is much broader, because CPR evidently stands on the shoulders of generations of protein researchers back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when proteins were first isolated and named as such.

It is this long tradition for protein research that the exhibition deals with. As we write in the introduction:

The word ‘protein’ was introduced in 1838 by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius. He derived it from the Greek word ‘proteios’ (πρωτειος), meaning ‘first rank’, ‘primary’ etc., because he thought organic substances like fibrin and albumin were “the primitive or principal substances for animal nutrition”.

Since then, generations of chemists, physicists, physiologists and medical researchers have elucidated the structure of proteins and their function in the cellular machinery of the body in increasingly sophisticated detail.

Scientists from the Nordic countries have played an important role in the development of this truly crossdisciplinary field of research — not least in the invention of new analytical methods.

This exhibition displays a selection of artefacts — separation apparatus, measurement instruments, molecular models, results of experimental work, etc. — that represent this impressive research tradition in different ways.

The keyword here is ’treasures’. ‘Primary Substances’ displays a rare collection of beautiful and historically important artefacts from the treasure chamber of 20th century biomedicine.

For example, the electrophoresis apparatus (borrowed from the Museum of Medical History in Uppsala), built by Arne Tiselius for the separation of serum proteins (alfa, beta, and gamma fractions), which contributed to his Nobel Prize in 1948. Another example is one of the first physical hemoglobin models (borrowed from the Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge, UK), built from balsa wood by Michael G. Rossmann in 1959.

These are just two of the many precious objects in the exhibition representing highlights of the 20th century biomedical heritage. We also display parts of the original Kjeldahl nitrogen determination setup; lab noteboks from the early 1950s with paper strips showing the result of electrophoresis of amino acids; manuscripts by the chemist Kai Linderstrøm-Lang who made the distinction between primary, secondary, tertiary and quartenary structure of proteins; some of the first ampoules for the standardisation of insulin in the early 1920s; a 2D-electrophoresis apparatus plus gels from the late 1970s; two exquisitely beautiful models of the enzyme subtilisin, etc.

I curated ‘Primary Substances’ with the help of Jens Bukrinski, Adam Bencard, Laura Maria Schütze. We have had the pleasure to work together with the skilled Copenhagen museum designer Mikael Thorsted (see his portfolio here) and graphic designer Lars Møller Nielsen, both at Studio8. The extensive conservation work — you cannot really imagine how dirty and damaged some of these objects were when we borrowed them!) — has been done by Medical Museion’s Ion Meyer with the help of Nanna Gerdes and Siri Wahlstrøm.

Below are more pics (all photos: Mikael Thorsted, Studio8):

The core of the exhibition is a 14 meter long glass wall with 16 separate doors leading into a continuous showcase.

To the left is a row of glass panels for text and visuals, and in the small square room to the left there are two free-standing showcases, displaying handmade models of the enzyme subtilisin made in the late 1960s (borrowed from the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen).

A detail from the 14 meter long showcase, displaying three electrophoretic separation apparatuses used by Arne Tiselius in Uppsala and Hugo Theorell in Stockholm in the 1930s. The bulky thing at the bottom is the power supply for Tiselius’ electrophoresis chamber (placed on top right of the power supply)

Three small bottles with pH indicators used by Danish chemist S.P.L. Sørensen at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen in the early 20th century. Sørensen invented the notion of pH for hydrogen ion activity in the course of his studies of enzyme kinetics.

The exhibition is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. You can see it in the Panum building, 3 Blegdamsvej, Copenhagen until the end of 2009.

The program for the Artefacts meeting at Science Museum, 20-22 September, has been finalised. It looks great! Medical Museion’s former senior curator Søren Bak-Jensen (now at the Copenhagen City Museum) will present some of the ideas behind the current exhibition ‘Split+Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’. Here is the whole list of papers for the meeting:

• Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University.
  Can museum visitors learn about the relation of science and technology in museums?
• Peter Donhauser, Vienna Museum of Technology.
  Science versus technology in a museum’s display. Changes in the Vienna Museum.
• Benjamin Gross, Princeton University.
  “The Antithesis of the Attic”: Historical Artifacts, “Interactive” Exhibits, and the Presentation of Science at the Franklin Institute Museum.
• Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis University.
  “DNA at 50” in Museums of Science and Technology: Regional Culture, Medium, and Message.
• Søren Bak-Jensen,  Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen.
  Relaying the aesthetic and artistic aspects of recent biomedical technologies.
• Alfons Zarzoso, Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya. Gabarro’s Chess-Board Excision and skin grafting: medical exile in Word War II England.
• Alison Taubman,  National Museums of Scotland.
  From Ships to Chips:  Collecting contemporary Scottish engineering.
• Ben Russell, Science Museum.
  James Watt’s Workshop: from steam pioneer to creative professional.
• Dirk Bühler, Deutsches Museum.
  Portraits of Architectural and Engineering Achievements.
• Klaus Staubermann, National Museums of Scotland.
  Science and Technology as Practice: Dividing Engines in Museums.
• Dirk van Delft, Director, Museum Boerhaave.
  The Quest for Absolute Zero: A Human Story about Rivalry & Cold.
• Jane Wess, Senior Curator of Science, Science Museum.
  Pure Mathematics?: The Cleaning up of Context.
• Jennifer Landry, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  Beyond the Black Box: A different approach to interpreting the history of chemistry.
• Frank Dittmann, Deutsches Museum.
  Paper on Robotics (title to be confirmed).
• Tom Crouch,  National Air and Space Museum. Capable of Flight? The Interplay of Science and Technology In the Aeronautical Work of Samuel Pierpont Langley.
• Jennifer Levasseur & Margaret A. Weitekamp, National Air and Space Museum.
  Moving Beyond Earth: Exhibiting the Space Shuttle and Future Human Spaceflight.
• Paul Forman, National Museum of American History, Reflection on the workshop

Just got a letter from the University of Bath librarian, who says that the National [i.e., UK] Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists is closing 31 October. That’s sad, because in the 22 years since the unit moved to Bath, it has been instrumental in securing nearly 200 scholarly archives in institutional libraries around the UK — a very important contribution to the preservation of an important part of the contemporary scientific and engineering heritage. I haven’t heard about any similar closures in other European countries, so let’s hope this is not the beginning of a broader tendency to neglect the history of contemporary science, technology and medicine.

I distributed my memory of being a biochemistry student swinging rats by their tails through the air so the neck landed on a bench edge (no blood, just a momentarily broken neck) to the rete list, adding:

It took some training to land it exactly on the edge, though; some less manually skilled students smashed the rat’s back on the table, which only paralysed it. I must confess that I sort of liked this swinging procedure, to the great admiration and horror of some of the other (female) students. Sublime! Gothic biochemistry, to paraphrase Bruce Sterling.

This provoked another round of comments, which I take the liberty to quote from (they are publicly accessible in rete’s online archive), because they throw some additional light on the rat guillotine phenomenon.

Frank Manasek (cf. earlier post) remembers that “there actually was very little blood – the little critters don’t have a lot”:

Lab rats are pretty big and I never saw the guillotine used on rats – Thomas is right – the swinging technique was preferred. I seem to recall that mice and hamsters weigh about 100 grams and rats maybe 5 times that. Rats also bite so you have to be careful.

and adds that:

A drawback of the guillotine is that the decapitated animal has spasms and if you want to get an organ out very quickly it can be a problem. I used to take out hamster spleens and there was always a slight delay. A table-edged rat only quivered.

Steven Turner at the Smithsonian (see also earlier post), remember chatting with the scientist who brought the rat guillotine in to their collection:

It was part of a large group of instruments that he had pulled out of the trash as the FDA labs were being reorganized. He hadn’t worked with the guillotine personally, but we all assumed that the red base was to disguise the blood released during decapitation. However, since Frank and others report very little blood being “spilled” this may not be correct. It’s possible that the red paint was meant as a caution aqainst cutting off one’s own finger – which seems like a real possibility with this instrument. On the other hand, a busy government testing lab might have sacrificed a lot of animals.

To which Frank responds:

Steve, on a busy morning I might have sacrificed 200 hamsters – very little blood as I recall. Mostly fur clogging the knife. Yes there was danger of finger loss- animals often were sacrificed in a cold room (4 C) – my hamsters were (the reason here was that they were cold-adapted) and fingers could get numb quickly.

These interesting comments remind me about that we are dealing here with a kind of invisible practice in the history of recent biomedicine. A practice that permeats much of the daily routines in the laboratory but is almost unaccessible through the published literature or laboratory notebooks. A practice that, to my best knowledge, no oral historian of biomedicine or biomedical memoir has so far touched upon.

In addition to Split and Splice, we have recently opened another and smaller exhibition in the reception hall — Eye Catchers and Swagger Images: Research in Poster Format (Danish: Blikfang og blærebilleder: forskning i posterformat) — with a selection of our collection of scientific posters, from the mid-1980s to the present.

The idea behind the exhibition goes back to August 2007, when we had a specialist workshop on Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context here at Medical Museion, followed by a conference on Biomedicine and Art.

One of the speakers at the Biomedicine and Art conference was James Elkins (the Art Institute of Chicago), who spoke about the new impulses for art theory and visual studies presented by science, technology and medicine. Rikke Vindberg, who had finished her Masters degree in history and who had quite a lot of experience of exhibition making, attended Elkins’s talk and was intrigued.

Afterwards, we discussed different possibilities for applying Elkins’s ideas (especially in Visual Practices Across the University, 2007) and eventually decided to take a closer look at scientific posters, because it is an interesting hybrid form of expression between science and art.

In October 2007 we attended a medical scientific congresses in Copenhagen to get a first-hand look at a big and active scientific poster session (with many hundreds of posters) and to discuss the content and features of the posters with the scientists that had produced them.

We also wanted to acquire posters for our growing collections of contemporary biomedicine. Rikke contacted research groups at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the National Hospital (Rigshospitalet), and within a few months, she had acquired some 30 posters from different biomedical and clinical research areas, representing a variety of textual and visual expressions; the oldest from the mid-1980s

Rikke summarized her acquisition project in a 25 page curatorial report (in Danish only, unfortunately) before she left to have her first baby. But in March, when discussing how to refurbish our reception room here at the museum, the idea came up to display the poster collection. Fortunately (for the museum that is), Rikke had not yet found a new job and could therefore take on the task at once.

The result is a small, unique and fascinating exhibition. The main idea is simple. In contrast to most sci- and bio-art shows, Eye Catchers and Swagger Images highlights the aesthetic practices within science itself. The guiding idea is that all medical scientific activity, in the laboratory and elsewhere, is permeated by aesthetic practices — there is no medical science action, site or space that is not, somehow, infused with aesthetic considerations, most probably unconscious.

Scientific posters are different, however. Poster production is a lab practice which most scientists are acutely aesthetically aware about. When interviewing medical scientists in connection with the acquisitions, Rikke inquired into their aesthetic views and their choice of graphic and iconic expressions in the posters. Several of these are quoted in the exhibition.

Here’s Rikke Vindberg (right) and museum assistant Jeppe Hørring a couple of days before the show opened in late May:

Eye Catchers and Swagger Images will be open at least until early next year.

Jon Agar at UCL’s Department of Science and Technology Studies quotes an ‘intriguing announcement’ for the new series of BBC Radio 4’s Leading Edge broadcast:

For the past decade this programme’s principal concern has been with the products of science with its findings whether a freshly disinterred fossil, or a distant galaxy, a recent observation or a new theory. Starting this week we are shifting the focus from the findings themselves to the process by which they are found. Instead of treating science as an accumulating mountain of facts we will look at the who, the why, the what and the how. Who does the work? Why is it done? And how scientists operate as people who are more than the sum of their scientific publications [my emphasis]

‘Well that sounds like STS to me’, comments Jon. Well to me it sounds like good old history of science :-) And better late than never!

My friend Michael (who is a regular reader of the German HSozuKult-list) has drawn my attention to the meeting ‘Wissenschaft im Museum: Ausstellung im Labor’, to be held in Tübingen, Germany, 8-9 April 2010.

In contrast to the usual discourse about displays of science in museums, this English-German bilingual ‘Tagung’ will concentrate on the relationship between scientific practices and presentation practices in the laboratory:

Our assumption is, that this two-way relation is not only part of scientific representation, but also shows epistemological processes. Exhibitions and showrooms in scientific work spaces are not only displays of knowledge, but play a crucial role in its production. Thus, the leading question is: How much exhibition is there in science?

Interesting point! In the longer background text for the meeting, the organisers —Margarete Vöhringer at Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin (voehringer@zfl-berlin.org) and Anke Te Heesen, Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft in Tübingen (anke.te-heesen@uni-tuebingen.de) — give two historical examples from the turn of the last century (Bechterev and Haeckel). But I wonder to what extent such exhibitions and displays really play a role in contemporary laboratory practice, e.g., in biomedical and biotech lab settings?

I guess the answer depends on how far the domain of the ‘laboratory’ is stretched. If, as Margarete and Anke suggest, the scientific poster session has evolved from such earlier installations in the lab, you may say that congress posters are extensions of the lab. And maybe lab visualisations online, like the application of lab protocols in JoVE, could be understood as displays in such an extended laboratory rather than communications of moving images from the lab?

Anyway, this sounds like an interesting meeting, which could bring some historical perspective on the relation between museum displays and scientific practices today, and vice versa. Send your paper proposals to Margarete Vöhringer (voehringer@zfl-berlin.org) or Anke Te Heesen (anke.te-heesen@uni-tuebingen.de) before 15 June. You can read more here.