Biomedicine on Display

I very much like pipettes as mundane lab artefacts. And I’m wild with Eppendorf (see earlier posts here and here) because they produce these little ephemeral biomedical objects (like microcentrifuge tubes) which are museologically much more interesting than the fancy and first-time-ever stuff that is usually displayed in science, tech and medical museums.

I’m also fascinated with biomedical music videos (like Illumina’s breakdancing lab bench objects) because these reveal that selling PCRs and microwells isn’t much different from selling kitchenware and H&M garment. And with biomedicine on YouTube because it says something about how the biomedical and biotech world is rapidly becoming attuned to the participatory web.

So what could be more exciting for a biomedical museologist than this Eppendorf sales video on Youtube on the theme ‘I love pipetting — how about you?’:

(see it in the right context, and better resolution, on Eppendorf’s website). Lyrics here.

It’s all about selling this new automated pipetting system called EpMotion (image from their catalogue):

* * * * * * * * (thanks to Bioephemera, yesterday, for the tip) 

Now at least two companies (ScientificMatch and GenePartner) are providing dating services (down to $199 per single at GenePartner) based on the pretty solid scientific finding (Claus Wedekind and Dustin Penn, Nephrology, Dialysis, Transplantation, vol 15, 2000) that women are more attracted to men who express less similar HLA genes. Sensing and classifying the expression of the HLA genes is something we do subconsciously (animalwise).

Biotech enthusiasts MedGadget, TechCrunch and Bertalan Meskó (ScienceRoll) are excited about the new prospects. Genetically based love at first sniff!

Absolutely fine with my experience. But wait a minute: what does ScientificMatch (”the science of love”) actually say?

• Chances are increased that you’ll love the natural body fragrance of your matches.
• You have a greater chance of a more satisfying sex life.
• Women tend to enjoy a higher rate of orgasms with their partners.
• Women have a much lower chance of cheating in their exclusive relationships.
• Couples tend to have higher rates of fertility.
• All other things being equal, couples have a greater chance of having healthier children with more robust immune systems.(my emphases)

Tendencies, chances? Well the last sentence says it all. “All other things being equal, couples have a greater chance …”. But things aren’t equal. And that’s what we call culture, stupid!

We have repeatedly come back to the art of medical animation on this blog. Although in principle we are more interested in animation of invisible biomedical microstructures, animations of classical macroanatomical structures are still a source of awe and fascination, especially when they are well-done. See, for example, this beautiful animation of a human heart:

One thing is that it has an almost haptic quality — another bonus feature is that you can move an interface slider to seamlessly disclose the working of the valves beneath the increasingly transparent muscular ‘glass’ surface. Nifty! Imagine an exhibition room in which a real, preserved heart was shown with this animation in the background. (I don’t think they used any of these in the Wellcome Collection’s Heart-exhbition?).

The interactive heart is produced by Hybrid Medical Animation, a small Minneapolis-based company which specialises in creative medical and scientific imaging. And they don’t restrict their productions to macroanatomy; for example, they have also done instruction movies about molecular targeting, like the one to the right.

See more examples here.

(thanks to today’s Medgadget for the tip)

Cannot resist spreading this image from the Brazilian advertising agency NeogamaBBH, which is circulating in the blogosphere right now (e.g., Street Anatomy, Frame 2wenty 4our, etc.). For more, see here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This year’s Wellcome Image Awards were announced Tuesday night. The 22 images chosen by a jury from the huge collection in the Wellcome Library’s image repository (Wellcome Images) will be shown in the Wellcome Collection foyer at 183 Euston Rd., London, until some time this summer—and then at the leading Japanese science center, Miraikan (The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in Tokyo.

It’s an amazing feast for they eye; showing an array of images of tissue, cellular and molecular structures produced by a variety of impressive imaging technologies, displayed in dazzling enhanced colours—like this scanning electron micrograph of prostate cancer cells by Annie Cavanagh at the Multimedia Unit of the School of Pharmacy, University of London:

 And there are many more here.

Despite all this impressive biomedical beauty, I have some critical remarks, both about the selection of images, and the genre as such. Will be back later tonight when I have sorted out my views.

A crew from Swedish Television (SVT) has just been visiting Medical Museion. They spent a full 10 hour day walking around the whole museum, from the golden lion on the ground floor to the syphilitic skulls on the third. Here they are focusing on one of Niels Finsen’s (Nobel Prize 1903) original lenses for light therapy of skin tuberculosis:

Bente kept track of everything

and I had to take the role of interviewee (because I speak Swedish :-)

They will send 4-5 episodes in the weekly ’Fråga doktorn’ [Ask the doctor] show in late March and April. Watch it on Mondays at 66.15pm — or see the show on-line here afterwards.

In an earlier post I wondered if the editors of the — otherwise interesting and increasingly successful — Advances in History of Psychology blog were really happy with the use of the word ’advance’ in the blog title (because of the pretty antiquated philosophy of history connotations associated with ‘advance’)

In a recent post, editor Jeremy Burman explains his choice of name for the AHP blog. He is aware, of course, that ‘advance’ is problematic as a historiographical category. But in this case, Jeremy says, it just means that he wants to help further the history of psychology “by bringing together efforts from the various allied disciplines and collecting them into one place, from which further investigations can be launched”.

That’s fine with me. But then Jeremy adds: “More pragmatically, I also wanted an ‘a-name’ so the site would appear at the top of other sites’ blogrolls”.

Read again! I must admit that I’ve never thought about this blogroll position manipulation method before. And I wonder how common it is. I’ve quickly browsed my favourite science/medicine/tech blogs and nowhere have I found a bias towards the first letters in the alphabet.

I guess most blogs stay away from this practice, because it runs against the self-imposed and delicate gift-giving rules of the blogroll listing. But then again, I may be naïve. So I wonder: How common is this? And does it work as intended?

If Jeremy is really serious about this, he should perhaps change the title of the blog to Aadvances in History of Psychology to make sure that he gets ahead of the possibly forthcoming Absolute Psychology :-)

The Bio-Rad corporation has released a music video called “Scientists for better PCR” to promote their new 1000-series of thermal cyclers (PCR machines).

It’s well done indeed. But I think MedGadget get it wrong when they write that ”it does successfully fill the time between test tube changes”.

The model for the Bio-Rad video is apparently the 1985 bestselling “We are the world” song by Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones, which was produced for charity reasons, to raise funds to help famine-relief efforts in Africa. The 45 singers gathered as artists for a better world, like Bob Geldof’s Band Aid and Live Aid concerts.

Bio-Rad is probably not interested in raising funds for anyone else but their own shareholders. So the biotech company is just exploiting the good vibrations of popular culture for commercial reasons. Bad taste! What would Naomi Klein (No Logo) think of this?

Better fill the time between test tube changes with some serious reflections about the advertising strategies of the transnational biotech market instead.

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings.

For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well?

It’s also amazing to see how the collaborative touch screens which Tom Cruise sci-fictionally handled in Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) has become a feature in a pharma advertising company promotional video! (They sort of exist IRL too.)

Otherwise I must admit that I’m a bit sceptical about bringing too much holography and touch screen visions into museum planning. There’s a risk that the high tech stuff will kill the raison d’etre of museums which is, after all, the good old material artefacts. True, these can be augmented by the gadgets – but one has to strike a careful balance here.

What does Charlotte and the digital museum colleagues at Museer og digitalisering think about this?

Forget about subcellular and molecular animation movies being done for research purposes or as didactic tools. The real driving force in the future will be pharma advertising.

Take a look at this demo reel from iMed Studios – a spin-off company from Engineering Animation Inc., now part of the Saatchi & Saatchi family — that ”develops scientifically accurate, visually impactful, leading edge multimedia for clients in the medical and pharmaceutical industries”.

The demo has just won the prestigious 2007 RX Club Award (Vanessa at Street Anatomy explains that the RX Club Awards are “the Oscars of pharmaceutical product advertising and promotion”). In other words, the inner-life-of-the-cell kind of movies will probably become an important part of future pharma advertising. That’s where the money is, so that’s where the animation technology goes.