Biomedicine on Display

A very special artefact from Medical Museion’s collections in on display in a new exhibition at the Copenhagen Post and Tele Museum, celebrating the centennial of the Danish Association for the Blind.

The insect compund eye looking thing is actually a Braille version of the writing ball patented by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1870.

Selling well in Europe (Remington was the favourite typewriting machine in the US), it received prizes at a number of international exhibitions, including the World Exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878.

The most famous owner of a Malling-Hansen writing ball was in fact Friedrich Nietzsche, who got one in 1882, but apparently didn’t use it much. (More about the writing ball on the Malling-Hansen Society website.)

Malling-Hansen’s Braille writing ball is part of a collection of more than 4,500 material artefacts (and a number of braille-typed books) associated with the history of blind therapy and training that was acquired by Medical Museion last year when the Danish Museum of Blind History, one of the largest of its kind, was closed down.

One of our conservators, Charlotte Vikkelsø Hansen, has cleaned the writing ball thoroughly before sending it over to our colleagues in the Post and Tele Museum:

The physical writing ball can be seen here from 8 June until 30 November.

(See also the earlier post about Jan Eric Olséns research project ‘Vision and Touch: A Material History of the World of Blindness’).

Our colleagues over at the fabulous rete list are just now busy recommending the Museum of Technology
in Hemel Hempstead in northern London. It doesn’t have regular opening hours; one has to make an appointment. Writes Tony Constable:

If you can manage a short trip north of London to Hemel Hempstead there is the excellent Museum of Technology on the old village High Street there. The instruments are very well looked after and well displayed – and there are some good demonstrations. It is run by Trevor Cass and Rosemary Hourihane. Telephone to make an appointment.

And Brian Styles seconds:

Their collection is astonishing and remarkable for the condition of the exhibits and the standard of display. In a modest space, there’s a vast range of items, many of them really scarce. And it’s wonderful to see some things working. I didn’t think I’d ever see a WWI spark transmitter in action, for instance! Exhibits are labelled with just the right amount of detail and, of course, the curators are well-versed in all that’s there. Many a professional operation would do well to pay them a visit …

According to the website, they have an awesome collection of medical instruments too — not all of which seems to be on display though.

I am currently researching a piece on rollators. Based on artistic research investigating the aesthetics and materiality of these essential but perhaps under appreciated objects I am struggling with finding some further information.

It is generally accepted that the first rollator appeared in the 1970s and was designed by Bernt Leander from Sweden. There is no record of a ‘first’ rollator and no history of the initial designs. Unable to find a person responsible for design and manufacture of rollators  I emailed the general Swedish inquiry contact at Invacare, the overall worldwide distributor but I have had no reply. I know that Dolomite was taken over by Invacare and their factory is in Anderstorp. A specific question I asked is regarding the range of colours available, particularly in 1997 in the Dolomite Futura range.

Thomas has kindly emailed his science/tech colleagues in Sweden but I wondered if anyone else might also have information. Academic texts are few and are mainly concerned with the effects on the joints of rollator users and effects on patients with other health issues and in assisting rehabilitation. There is very little about the actual object and its history.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for further information? Any help would be greatly appreciated

Of course you can, but few history teachers actually take the opportunity. Museum collections remain a remarkably underutilised resource in academic history teaching. And the history of science, technology and medicine is no exception.

Here at Medical Museion we have occasionally brought material objects into our medical history courses and also into the course we’re giving on medical science and technology studies for medical engineering students. We have plans to do much more, especially when it comes to integrating traditional academic and curatorial perspectives on material objects, and we are very eager to learn about other university museums with more teaching experience than we have.

Therefore, the initiative taken by The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies to organise a ‘Using Museum Collections in Teaching History of Science, Technology and Medicine’ workshop on 14 June is much welcomed. The aim is to bring together people teaching history of STM in higher education with staff from major science, technology and medicine museums throughout the UK. The workshop will look at how the study of museum collections can be incorporated into standard taught courses and used for dissertation purposes. Confirmed speakers include Claire Jones (Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick); Jo Booth (National Media Museum); Delphi Tatarus (Thackray Museum); John Beckerson (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry); Tim Procter (National Railway Museum); Alison Watson (Royal Armouries); and Richard Dunn (National Maritime Museum and Subject Centre for PRS)

Attendance is free of charge, but places are limited. Register here, before 1 June.

Historians and curators of medicine might be interested in the conference ‘The Life of New Materials’ organised by the Hagley Museum and Library, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science ,17 - 18 November 2011.

The conference will explore “the lives of the new materials that have made possible many of the technological advances of our age. Whether based on plant, metal, chemical, or nano technologies, the development, use, re-use, and disposal of new materials is an embedded feature of our industrial society”. The organisers wish to understand “the relationships from which new materials emerge, and which they in turn often refashion”, and they are especially interested in proposals that focus on

The life history of a new material: its biography, use cycle, place in supply chains, or features as material culture. We encourage papers to address the reasons and methods for development of a new material: its design, manufacture, testing, and subsequent incorporation into final products or already existing technologies; its reuse or disposal after completion of its primary purpose; and its impact –anticipated or not–on subsequent innovations. Exploration of the creation of new materials should situate those scientific and technological processes within the commercial, institutional, or social contexts that lead to their development.

It’s a great topic for historical and museological investigations. My only caveat is the peculiar use of the terms ‘life’, ‘life history’ and ‘biography’ in this context. What do they actually mean when they suggest that, say, plastic has a ‘life’ and that it can be written as a ‘biography’? What is meant by a ‘biography’ of polystyrene? What does this metaphorical use of the notion of ‘life’ and ‘biography’ add to our understanding?

In my view absolutely nothing. Such unnecessary metaphors only confound the issues at stake. I know it has become fashionable to speak about the ‘life’ and ‘biography’ of inanimate things, but when the metaphors are extended from things to materials in general, fashion becomes folly.

Anyway, deadline for proposals is 1 April.  Travel support will be available for those presenting at the conference. More details here.

One of my favourite fellow bloggers, medical photographer Øystein Horgmo, has just written about how he was recently invited to document a family taking farewell of a young father in an intensive care unit.

It’s a moving story. But what actually caught my interest was this painting (by medical doctor Joseph Dwaihy and artist Sara Dykstra), which Øystein uses the illustrate the story.

Based on a photograph from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s first intensive care unit, circa 1955 (read more here), the painting is reminiscient of Norman Rockwell-realism. Like Rockwell, Dwaihy and Dykstra portray people in mundane situations. It’s people who play the primary role. The instruments are background props.

Compare Dwaihy and Dykstra’s painting of the 1955 ICU motif with a photo of a contemporary ICU unit. Today, there are indeed still people (a patient, a doctor, maybe a relative) around—but they seem to play a secondary role to the instruments.

In the cartoon below, the central role of instruments in an ICU is emphasized. The patient is invisible, the doctor is on his way out. Here the ICU is all about the instruments:

The NIH Office of History has just announced a new batch of Stetten Fellowship for postdoctoral historical research on the biomedical sciences and technology since 1945. The stipends are ~$45,000 per year, include health insurance and office accommodation, computer and phone, and can be renewable to a maximum of 24 months. Application deadline is 31 December 2010. Full announcement here.

One of my favourite objects for acquisition and display from the world of biomedical and clinical laboratories is the microplate (microtiter plate, microwell plate).

A microplate is simply a series of small test tubes (‘wells’) arranged in a regular matrix pattern on a plastic plate, usually made from transparent polystyrene.

The little plate makes it possible to handle many samples in parallell—the most common size is 96 wells, but there are plates with several thousand wells—and the results can be read in an automated plate reader. In addition, the small size of the wells reduces sample volumes (from milliliter scale to nanoliter scale), which in turn saves money spent on reagents, like enzymes, which can be forbiddingly expensive.

So it’s simple, low-tech, modest, cheap and cost-saving—no doubt the main reasons why the microplate is a ubiquitous tool in laboratories around the world for all kinds of biomedical research and clinical diagnostics. Most of today’s high-throughput analysis in genomics and proteomics is unthinkable without microplates.

In other words—the perfect lab technology.

What about the history of the microplate? Professional historians of medicine and/or technology haven’t paid much attention to the unassuming plastic lab device. After a few minutes on the web, however, I found out that the earliest microplate seems to have been constructed by the Hungarian medical microbiologist Gyula Takácsy (1914-1980). The Hungarian National Center for Epidemiology writes on their website that:

To respond to the shortage in laboratory supplies and a severe influenza outbreak in the early 50s in Hungary, Dr. Takácsy developed several excellent innovative lab supplies and techniques much ahead of his age. Describing his technical innovation, the spiral loop instead of pipette and glass-plates with wells instead of tubes, he used the term micromethods published in Hungarian in 1952 and in 1955 in English. He was the first to have the notion to apply calibrated spiral wire loops for multiple simultaneous serial dilutions in plastic multiwell strips.

“… very small volumes of blood taken from the fingertip or from laboratory animals can be taken up and diluted for quantitative work. The technique has been found particularly useful in virus research, since it is not negligible how much has to be used from costly immune sera and antigens”.

His paper focused on the use of spiral loops for serial dilutions and the testing methods for haemagglutination and complement fixation, however, the “8×12 grooves” that “can take up to 0.15 ml fluid” could describe the modern microplate.

So disease and shortage of supplies was apparently the mother of microplate invention. Also in the 1950s, US inventor John Liner (who founded a company called Linbro, which was later merged into Flow Laboratories Inc, which in turn was swallowed by ICN Flow, which is taken has been over by MTX Lab Systems; mergers and acquisitions in the medical and laboratory device industry is an extremely interesting history in its own right) introduced a vacuum-formed panel with 96 wells. Looking back in the late 1990′s, Liner wrote that “I consider myself  the grandfather to the disposable microplate, about 1953 I used a white styrene vacuum formed panel …”. Yet another case of multiple invention.

I also found some technical details about the early development of microplate automation here, and I found a reference to a web publication (Ray Manns, Microplate history. 2nd ed. 1999; http://www.microplate.org/history/det_hist.htm) in L.J. Kricka and S.R. Master, ‘Quality Control and Protein Microarrays’, Clinical Chemistry vol. 55: 1053–1055 (2009)—but the publication seems to be removed from the site.

So the microplate is almost untrodden territory for historians of medical technology. Maybe a medical student would like to explore its history and importance for the development of genomics and proteomics in a term paper?

We’ve just opened our new exhibition, ‘The Chemistry of Life’, in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences (the Panum Building). For the record, here’s the talk I gave at the opening (for images from the opening, see here):

The occasion for Medical Museion’s new exhibition, ’The Chemistry of Life’, is the new Center for Basic Metabolic Research here at the Faculty of Health Sciences.

But the Center is only the occasion. What you will see in a few minutes is not an exhibition about any of the aspects of metabolism—diabetes, or obesity, or insulin resistance, or the metabolic syndrome—which the Center will be focus on in the years to come.

Instead, we have chosen to take a look at the long research tradition that the Center has grown out of. We are presenting four snapshots from the long and complex history of metabolic research. Each snapshot represents a constellation of people, things and ideas from a significant phase in this history. And to make it easier for you to differentiate between these four constellations, we have given them different colours: green, orange, blue and lilac.

We begin in Italy back in the early 17th century, where we examplify an early approach to metabolism with Santorio Santorio, a medical doctor in Padua, who made his way into the hall of fame of medical history, because he applied Galileo Galilei’s quantitative principle to physiology: “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not”. For example, Santorio famously put himself in a chair balance to measure how his body lost weight even when no excretions could be registered.

Unfortunately, our tight budget hasn’t allowed us pay the insurance costs for borrowing original 17th century instruments from our Italian science museum colleagues. So to illustrate Santorio’s quantitative spirit, we had to find objects—balances, pulse meters, and thermometers—from later periods, in our own collections.

Then we make a leap forward, more than 200 years in time, to Copenhagen in the mid-19th century, when Peter Ludvig Panum laid the foundation of the strong Danish tradition for experimental physiology. Medical Museion has a wonderful collection of instruments used by mid- and late century Danish physiologists—it’s every historical instrument collector’s dream-come-true (and one of the reasons why we soon need to strengthen the fire security around these internationally unique collections even more).

Again a leap, now another 50 years, to the Nobel winning research done by August Krogh and by his wife Marie Krogh in the first decades of the 20th century. August Krogh was a pioneer in the study of whole-body gas exchange and also a very prolific inventor of instruments. We actually have quite a few of these in Medical Museion’s collections, and we are very proud to be able to display some of these in this show, for example this balance spirometer, which Marie Krogh used in her clinical studies of basic metabolic rates:

And finally, the last leap. In the fourth (lilac) theme we are entering a territory, which historians so far have largely stayed away from, namely contemporary research in molecular metabolism, genomic research, genome-wide association studies and so forth. We are shaky grounds here, because we don’t have the historical distance to the events. As historians, we don’t really know yet which the significant breakthroughs have been. We don’t know who the Santorios, the Panums and the Kroghs of contemporary molecular metabolic studies are. For us, these people are still Nomina Nescimus (unknown names), and therefore we need your help to identify them and their contributions. I’ll get back to this in a few minutes.

Like all serious science exhibitions, ‘The Chemistry of Life’ is actually research-based. The two main curators—postdoc Adam Bencard and former consultant Sven Erik Hansen—have read quite a lot from the 19th and 20th physiological literature, and spent months looking at objects and images in our collection. Every word in this exhibition has been chosen with great care, from both medical, historical and philosophical points of view. In one sense then (in terms of the making of it) this is a research-based exhibition. But in another sense (in terms of the way it presents itself to the spectator), we think of it rather as a work of art.

Not just as a display of works of art, like this painting by David Goodsell at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (which we commissioned from him specifically for this occasion):

We also see the exhibition itself as an art installation. By taking things out of their laboratory context and placing them in this new setting, they are transformed, from being scientific objects to becoming art objects. Taken as a whole they constitute a joint science and art exhibition. Not sci-art, but joint science and art.

By thinking exhibitions about science in terms of art installations and art exhibitions, Medical Museion in joining a growing trend within the world of museums of science, technology and medicine. Most of these mueums still understand themselves as informal learning institutions. They want to make people, including students, interested in science by teaching the history of science.

But what we at Medical Museion – and some of our good colleagues, like the Wellcome Collection in London – are increasingly trying to do, is to work out an alternative to this didactical understanding of what science museums and their exhibitions are good for.

Instead of making exhibitions that teach and explain science and the history of science, we rather want to engage the audience to reflect. Not because we don’t believe in the importance of learning about science and its history. But because we believe learning is done much better by other means—in teaching laboratories, by reading books, or through the internet—than by means of exhibitions. What the exhibition medium is good at, is to engage people’s aesthetic sensibilities. By whetting the appetite of the senses, exhibitions can evoke a more subjective, personal-based and thereby deeper reflection about science, its history and its future.

Back to the fourth theme (the lilac one) about today’s metabolic research. Like a growing number of museums—but not necessarily the same museums who think in terms of art installations—we believe that exhibition making has to be built on participation. Of course, museum professionals take a lot of pride in trying to produce perfectly researched and perfectly designed exhibitions (and we at Medical Museion are no exception). Yet, we must realize that such pride in perfection does not necessarily result in engaged visitors.

And for that reason, some museums around the world have begun to ask their visitors and peers to contribute more actively to the museum functions. In analogy to social web media, some museums are now thinking in terms of the ‘participatory museum’ (‘museum 2.0’).

With respect to collections, the idea of a participatory museum is not a particularly new one. For example, our museum here in Copenhagen has been participatory since its foundation in 1907, in the sense that most objects in our rich collections have been donated by medical doctors. Also for ‘The Chemistry of Life’ we have collected from scientists and medical device companies.

With respect to exhibitions, however, few science museums have so far thought these in terms of participation. But this is about change. ’The Chemistry of Life’ is an experiment in participatory exhibition making. Like software, which is never really finished, but is improved by the responses from the customers, we have thought it—especially the fourth chapter on ‘Molecular Metabolism—as a ‘beta version’.

By labeling it ‘beta’ we are inviting all faculty, technical staff and students at the University of Copenhagen to help us developing ‘The Chemistry of Life’. Instead of us telling you what is going on in metabolic research, we want you to educate us. For example, we will invite scientists, who have been part of the development of the last decades of metabolic research to a seminar, where we will ask them to tell us what they think are the most important idas, events and people in the history of the field. They may not agree among themselves, but we will nevertheless be more knowledgeable after the seminar.

We are also planning an ‘object’-day, where we invite scientists and medical doctors from the entire region to bring images of their favourite objects, or (even better) bring in the objects themselves. The result should hopefully be that, at the official opening of the Center for Basic Metabolic Research in the spring, we can show a revised version of ‘The Chemistry of Life’, especially a much more interesting and thought-provoking fourth theme.

The notion of ‘beta’ also indicates how Medical Museion will work together with the Center in the years to come. We are right now making plans for a series of exhibitions about diabetes, obesity and the new metabolic syndrome—to be shown both in Denmark and abroad, both to professionals and to the general public—and we very much want to do this in close co-operation with scientists and students here at the Faculty.

Before I give the word back to the Dean, I want to express my gratitude to the individuals, institutions and companies, who have made this exhibition possible:

• Arne Astrup, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen
• Lene Berlick, Illumina, Little Chesterford
• Jan Fahrenkrug, Bispebjerg Hospital, Copenhagen
• Pia Gåsland, Agilent Technologies, Hørsholm
• David Goodsell, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla
• Jens Juul Holst, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen
• Anders Johnsen, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen
• John Gargul Lind, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen
• Oluf Borbye Pedersen, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen
• Jens F. Rehfeldt, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen
• Thue Schwartz, Faculty of Health Science, University of Copenhagen
• Anna Smith, The Wellcome Collection, London
• Mao Tanabe, Kanehisa Laboratory, Kyoto

and to the Novo Nordisk Foundation for its generous economic support.

And finally the exhibition team. If this was a scientific article, the team would be presented somewhat like this:

Bencard A, Hansen SE, Thorsted M, Madsen H, Gerdes N, Vilstrup-Møller NC, Meyer I, Pedersen BV, Soderqvist T. The chemistry of life: four chapters in the history of metabolic research. Panum Building 2010; 4:1

Or more conventionally like this:

• Curators: Adam Bencard, Sven Erik Hansen
• Collection staff: Nanna Gerdes, Niels Christian Vilstrup-Møller, Ion Meyer
• Architect: Mikael Thorsted
• Graphic design: Helle Madsen
• Graphic production: Exponent Stougaard A/S
• Producers: Bente Vinge Pedersen, Thomas Söderqvist

Here we are:

Speaking for all of us: I hope you will enjoy this appetizer to a future co-operative science communication programme here at the Faculty which shall engage both scientists and the public in what has been going on in metabolic research in the past, what is going on today, and what we might expect from the future.

Last night, the curatorial team behind the exhibition Split+Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine received the Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits 2010 for ”outstanding museum work”.

The award was announced at the banquet of the annual meeting of The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), which is ending today in Tacoma, Wa.

‘The Dibner’ has been awarded since 1987. Earlier recipients include exhibitions from the National Museum of American History and National Air and Space Museum (Smithsonian, Washington DC), Powerhouse Museum (Sidney), Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester), and Museum of London.

This is the first time the Dibner Award has been given to an exhibition produced by a museum in the Nordic countries — and also the first time it has been given to an exhibition focusing on medical technology.

As readers of this blog may remember, Split+Splice is one of the results of the combined research and curatorial project “Danish Biomedicine: 1955-2005: Integrating Medical Museology and the Historiography of Contemporary Biomedicine” here at Medical Museion. The project was financed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation for three years, 2005-2008, but the board of the foundation liked the preliminary results so much that they awarded us yet another year to bring the research results out to a larger public in the form of a public exhibition.

The four postdocs in the project — Jan Eric Olsén, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Søren Bak-Jensen, and Susanne Bauer — were prolonged for another year (with Søren as administrative exhibition leader), and to give a strong aesthetic and design edge to the exhibition, we hired the Canadian artist and designer Martha Fleming as creative leader.

After more than six months of conceptual development, the team was joined by museum architect Mikael Thorsted and graphic designer Lars Møller Nielsen, both at Studio 8, who did a great job. One of the best design results, in my mind, was the measuring instrument installation above and this ‘container wall’ (for more images, see here and here).

This is how Martha described the exhibition:

Split+Splice … is about the inter-relations between the culture of biomedicine and the enormous complexities of 21st century living. The exhibition explores these complexities through the material culture, objects and instruments used by biomedical practitioners in research and in clinical activities.

Much as biomedicine itself, Split+Splice is an innovative hybridisation of complex practices. It is not exactly science communication; it will not teach you comprehensively about the field of biomedicine. It is not exactly old-fashioned history of science; it will not show you a triumphalist progression of miraculous discovery. It is not exactly an art exhibition; it will not leave you with a sense that you have seen inside a solo mind.

(read more here).

And here’s the curatorial team’s acknowledgement of the award:

Split + Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine was created by a dedicated, interdisciplinary and international team:

Curators: Søren Bak-Jensen (administrative project leader), Susanne Bauer, Martha Fleming (creative project leader), Sniff Andersen Nexø, Jan Eric Olsén, Jonas Paludan (curatorial assistant);

Designers: Mikael Thorsted (exhibition designer), Lars Møller Nielsen (graphic designer);

Medical Museion Staff: Ion Meyer (collections and conservation manager), Nicole Rehné (conservator), Bente Vinge Pedersen (outreach).

In developing the exhibit we pursued two major goals, which were to show that
· aesthetics can be an analytical tool as well as a communication tool and
· epistemological inquiry can guide what an exhibition ends up looking like.

In pursuing these goals, we are also grateful for the assistance we received from a host of professional colleagues who work in the worlds of museums, academe, biomed, fine arts and elsewhere.

Split + Splice was the first major research-based exhibition project at Medical Museion.  We wish to thank the Novo Nordisk Foundation which sponsored the exhibition through the integrated research and curatorial project “Danish Biomedicine: 1955-2005: Integrating Medical Museology and the Historiography of Contemporary Biomedicine,” for which Professor Thomas Söderqvist was the Principal Investigator.

One of our basic aims here at Medical Museion is to put current trends in biomedicine in a longer historical perspective. Last Friday, we got yet another opportunity for doing this, when the new Core Facility for Integrated Microscopy at the Faculty of Health Sciences opened together with an international research symposium on the state-of-the-art of microscopy.

In the hallway outside the symposium room, we displayed a selection of six of our most beautiful old microscopes that represent the development from early simple single lenses to end of the 19^th century compound microscopes. The aim was to make the symposium participants better appreciate the beauty of early microscopes and the craftsmanship that has gone into constructing them.

During the lunch break, I had a chat with Peter Evennett, who has edited the English version of Harald Moe’s classical The Story of the Microscope together with Chris Hammond. Peter and Chris, who are members of the Royal Microscopical Society’s outreach and education committee, has helped us select the displayed items from our large collection of microscopes and write the showcase texts for the exhibition, which was designed and put together by Bente and Ion.

The oldest microscope (or rather replica of a microscope) selected is actually only a lens in a brass fitting, made in 1670 by Anthony van Leuwenhoek of Delft, who for the first time ever was able to clearly observe life on an incredibly small scale. Holding the lens at a slant towards the light, he was able to see living bacteria and wriggling, human sperm cells. It was the beginning of a whole new era for science.

Peter went on to tell me how early microscopes weren’t used for science, as I thought, but were a kind of intellectual hobby and prestige objects for wealthy gentlemen. Consequently many of the microscopes from this period are quite charming and exquisite. It wasn’t until the 1830s — when the wine merchant J. J. Lister was able to produce objectives that minimised the colour fringing — that the microscope was seriously introduced into science. And so in 1839 a group of scientists got together to propose a toast to the instrument and to found the Royal Microscopical Society.

On display was also a modern single lens microscope from 1848, just like the one Darwin brought with him on the Beagle. The newest microscopes in the exhibition were compound microscopes from the end of the 19^th century. They had a double lens system, with an objective lens that projected the image from the sample up through the tube to the eye lens, which worked as a magnifying glass. The light was redirected from a window or an oil lamp via a small built-in mirror, to hit the sample from below and carry the image up the tube, to the pupil of the scientist’s eye.

And then Peter’s efforts to educate me became technical …

Though it was by means of light that the microscope functioned, light was also the factor setting the limit for how detailed the samples could be shown. Opposed to what many people think, the basic principle in microscopy is not magnification, but  resolution. In the 1860s and 1870s, the German physician Ernst Abbe (co-owner of the Carl Zeiss AG, the famous microscope producer) discovered that the smallest distance you can have between two things before the images of them merge — and thereby determining how detailed a picture you can see in a microscope — is limited by three factors:  1) the angle of the light entering the microscope, 2) the substance through which the light has to pass, and 3) the wavelength of the light.

Of these three limiting factors the last is now being contested by using electrons with a wavelength 100.000 times smaller than visible light. But, as Peter puts it, that’s using tricks.

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on our relationship with plastics in a hospital context, and would like to have Medical Museion as one of their research partners.

Ion showed us plastic dentures from the 1860s, a very realistic plastic arm with painted finger nails, and colourful plastic leg pads for children. Even though museums in general look down on plastics as an inauthentic material, we actually found a lot of objects in the collections, which partly or totally consist of some sort of plastic. The two plastic-lovers enjoyed the tour, even though Susan was a bit frustrated because of not being able to touch the displayed objects. The wonderful thing about plastics is that it can look exactly like any other material. But as Susan put it;”Once you touch, you know”.

Plastics are discount: Plastic is also an interesting material because it is highly used, but not very highly thought of. Unconsciously a lot of people today think of plastics as a discount material, as the fast, cheap unnatural solution. The wide range of functions that makes plastics so usable is the same feature that alienates it from us. One can make anything out of plastic, which means that plastic in itself is invisible and without identity. Plastic is, what it is made into. Alone it is formless, it is nothing. It is hard to develop a relationship to an thing made out of plastics, when one knows that there are a million plastic objects out there exactly like it.

Plastics are clean:  already from the mid 19th century the first synthetic materials began to appear and in the beginning of the 20^th century, Bakelite (phenol formaldehyde), which was used for electric apparatus like telephones and plugs, was invented. It was not until the 1960s that plastics became the most common material to use in almost all areas of human life. Susan and Marcia are focusing on plastics in a hospital context, because in hospitals one will find both plastic object of everyday use and highly specialized hospital objects in the same material. At the same time the many single use objects exemplifies the good aspects of plastic products, like good hygiene, and environmentally bad aspects like waste problems.

In August, the Danish Initiative for Science, Society and Policy (ISSP) will arrange a ‘discussion of the broader implications of living technology’ that might be interesting to anyone who thinks the boundary between inorganic and organic, living and dead, or technology and humans is exciting. Or to anyone who wants to get a glimpse of the future of science and medicine, maybe?

As the organisers write on their webpage:

Today, genetically modified organisms are designed and used in the laboratory to allow pharmaceuticals to be synthesized with precision in large quantities; autonomously working robots acting on the same principles thought to underlie insect behavior are increasingly introduced not only in industrial production but also healthcare; and adaptive network traffic controllers are currently being developed to control the flow of the ‘arteries’ of working life.

I first wondered at the scale of this technology — is this ‘just’ another word for nano-technology or are we talking robots of the more impressive kind (in terms of size)? And is it then robots like the robotic seal used for Alzheimer’s patients or something more science fiction-like, as the picture above, taken from the ISSP website, implies? The answer, according to ISSP, is that it is all of this:

Three examples of living technology are synthetic biology attempts to make living systems from scratch in the laboratory, ICT systems exhibiting collective and swarm intelligence distributed across the world wide web, and robots currently cleaning our households, providing companions for the autistic, and the like.

The preliminary programme for the discussion does not seem to emphasise healthcare, though the need for “thinking through the implications” of this technology looks to me to be particularly important in this field. The concept of living technology might appear to be a contradiction in terms (just like ‘synthetic biology‘), but maybe it will become the next big thing in healthcare.

Here’s the introduction to a talk titled ‘Cultures of Meaning and Cultures of Presence: The use of material objects in the history of science, medicine and technology’ that I gave at the Museo da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa two weeks ago (see flyer here and resumé in Portuguese here); the images are from the web and for general illustration only:

Before I went into history of science and medicine (and then medical museology), I took a Masters in chemistry, zoology and historical geology (major).

Today, when I look back on my student years at a distance, I realise these disciplines were very much about the handling of tangible material stuff, involving all five senses. Chemistry, zoology and geology students were not just thinking about or viewing the world — we were also listening to it, smelling, tasting and touching it.

Chemistry was (at least when I was a student) about reactions between palpable chemical substances; it involved handling glassware and physical measuring instruments; lots of stuff was pretty smelly, we were constantly exposed to the sounds of boiling liquids and suction pumps; experiencing glowing heat and freezing cold were parts of the daily experience in the lab.

Zoology was very material too. We observed birds in the field, collected insects and marine animals, killed and dissected them, made microscopical thin sections and grinded organs down to cells and molecular extracts. Animal beings weren’t just genomic code — they were sometimes smelly, often noisy, always tangible. 

Historical geology, finally, was about handling real stones, minerals and sediments with axes, spades, knives and brushes. We spent weeks in the  field working outcrops and long hours in the lab afterwards, sorting out physical fossil specimens.

After this undergraduate immersion in the material world of science, I started in a PhD-programme in biochemistry at Karolinska Institute. I collected blood from animals which I had killed with my own hands, stood in the lab’s cold room for hours purifying blood proteins, degraded them with chemicals, separated the fragments in chromatography columns which I had packed myself, and then handled different kinds of lab glassware and measuring instruments to elucidate their amino acid sequences. The protein laboratory was a very physical place with lots of machines and chemicals — and again it involved all the senses.

So science was a very material and sensory practice. And if I hadn’t been confronted with its potentially deadly consequences — one day I swallowed a radioactively labelled substance by mistake (always remember to use a pipette bulb!) — I might have become a real scientist.

Instead, I left science to pursue my high school philosophical interests — what is classification? what’s a concept? what’s the relation between a name, a concept and reality? what’s stuff made of? (all classical epistemological and ontological questions) — took courses in philosophy of science and history of ideas, and then started a new PhD project on the historiography of 20th century science, more precisely the historiography of ecology.

The history and philosophy of science was, I realise now, an entirely different experience. Instead of manipulating and being surrounded by material objects, I found myself sitting at a desk, reading old scientific papers and books. I visited archives to look for handwritten documents and interviewed elderly scientists about their past.

In other words, history and philosophy of science was a world of words and texts (written or spoken). There were actually no material objects in my new disciplinary identity, except for the pulp the texts were written on.

Shifting from PhD-studies of the historiography of ecology to postdoc studies of the historiography of immunology, didn’t change my textual practice. True, I sometimes met practicing immunologists in conferences about the history and philosophy of immunology, but these meetings still revolved around texts and words. People read conference papers based on readings of other texts. Again — text, text, text.

My own research practice was also totally text-based. I spent eight years of my life going through the huge archive of a contemporary immunologist, and spent hundreds of hours talking with him. And when I visited his former colleagues to interview them, we talked and inspected documents and photographs together. We never went to their labs to handle a piece of immunological lab equipment together.

It was as if the material and sensory world of science which I had been so thoroughly immersed in on a daily basis when I was a student totally disappeared when I entered history and philosophy of science. From a world of stuff, smells, sounds, tastes and manual touch I had stepped into a world of disembodied text.

What is most remarkable, now when I look back on it, is that I wasn’t at all aware of the gulf that separated the material and sensuous world of science, and the textual and disembodied world of history and philosophy of science. It was as if I had lost the ability to experience the material and sensory qualities of the laboratory, as if I saw the world of science through the textual spectacles of history and philosophy of science. To the extent that when, occasionally, I visited laboratories, I only ‘saw’ papers, inscriptions and documents, maybe a few images here and there.
[..]

(thanks to Martha Lourenco at the Museu da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa for inviting me to give the talk — this post contains the introduction only, the rest needs revision before being put online).

As you may remember, we here at Medical Museion have a soft spot with the aesthetics of decay, especially delapidated medical instruments (see, for example, this post).

This great image epitomizes the notion of the aesthetics of decay.

It’s shot in an abandoned surgery room somewhere in the eastern part of Berlin, in the former Sovjet sector.

Photo by Andreas Swane © All rights reserved. Used with kind permission. More here. 

Andreas describes himself as “a hobby photographer from Oslo”, who hopes that his future photo specialty “will be derelict / abandoned places here and there”.

“The beauty of old and decayed places fascinates me”, he says on his Flickr page.

(thanks to Øystein for the tip)