Biomedicine on Display

The recently published Technology and Medical Practice: Blood, Guts and Machines, edited by Ericka Johnson och Boel Berner (Ashgate), might be interesting reading for medical museum curators. Says the blurb:

The advanced technologies being used in diagnosis and care within modern medicine, whilst supporting and making medical practices possible, may also conflict with established traditions of medicine and care. What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors’, nurses’ and medical scientists’ practices changed when artefacts are involved? How is knowledge negotiated, or relations of power reconfigured? Technology and Medical Practice addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care. Combining science and technology studies with medical sociology, the history of medicine and feminist approaches to science, this book presents analyses of artefacts-in-use across a variety of settings within the UK, USA and Europe, and will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology alike.

For contents, see: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9922&edition_id=12413

All of us who have been following Nina’s blog about museum 2.0 are happy to hear that her book project about visitor participation in museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries has come to a temporary end.

She describes The Participatory Museum as “a practical guide to visitor participation … the nuts and bolts of successful participatory projects” in cultural institutions. The first half of the book focuses on principles, the other on practice, mission and staff culture. It’s available both in paperback and as a PDF/ebook, but Nina is also about to publish a free online version later this month.

True to the participatory spirit of her blog and book project (she has involved hundreds of volunteers in the writing and production process) Nina will continue to make the website for the book a place for continued discussion and debate.

Nina’s visit here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen in October was inspiring and I’m looking very much forward to reading her book — and to see the reviews and the comments on her website.

A new book titled Transnational Lives (eds., Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) discusses how the transnationalism of lives “threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography”. As the editors point out in the blurb, nationality has been determined by “complex combinations of birthplace, language, residence, citizenship, sex, ethnic identity, racial classification and allegiance”; but “human lives continually elude official classifications”.

Indeed. And many scientific lives are among the most transnational of all. In my experience, scientists often think about themselves in terms of their disciplinary background and research specialty rather than in terms of national identity (”I’m a molecular biologist”, rather than “I’m Swedish”). And most disciplinary identities are of course transnational, at least since the 19th century.

Immunologist and 1984 medical Nobel Prize winner (1984) Niels Jerne is a case in point. Born in London by parents who carried Danish passports, he grew up in the Netherlands, married a woman from the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, studied medicine in Copenhagen and then pursued his career in the US, Germany and Switzerland, before retiring in the south of France where he died at the age of 83. (More about his life story here.)

Nevertheless, biographical dictionaries continue to label Jerne as a “Danish” scientist. And so it is with most scientists; short biographers and obituarists are almost always classifying scientists in terms of their nationality, as if this was the most important distinguishing characteristic of a life in science: “American biochemist XX”, “German physiologist YY”, “British molecular biologist ZZ”, and so on. Why does nationality have this strong status in life descriptions and identity formation , even among scientists, who are among the most transnational of all human kinds?

An online-version of Adam’s, Camilla’s and my essay ”Between meaning culture and presence effects: contemporary biomedical objects as a challenge to museums” is now available on the website of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

The acquisition and display of material artefacts is the raison d’être of museums. But what constitutes a museum artefact? Contemporary medicine (biomedicine) is increasingly producing artefacts that do not fit the traditional museological understanding of what constitutes a material, tangible artefact. Museums today are therefore caught in a paradox. On the one hand, medical science and technologies are having an increasing pervasive impact on the way contemporary life is lived and understood and is therefore a central part of the contemporary world. On the other hand, the objects involved in medical diagnostics and therapies are becoming increasingly invisible and intangible and therefore seem to have no role to play as artefacts in a museum context. Consequently, museums are at risk of becoming alienated from an increasingly important part of contemporary society. This essay elaborates the paradox by employing Gumbrecht’s (2004) distinction between ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’.

Wish I could put the direct author’s link to the full version here, but Elsevier will most probably sue me if I do — so alas you will have to access it in a pay version (Science Direct) here or through your local university library (which most probably will give you access to Studies through one of their many subscription packages).

The printed version in Studies won’t be out until December or so.

Two years ago, in January 2007, our own Susanne Bauer co-organised a meeting titled ‘Contested Categories’ here at Medical Museion. Now, a proceedings volume with the same title, co-edited by Susanne and Ayo Wahlberg (formerly BIOS, LSE), has been published by Ashgate. From the back cover:

Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization processes.

Organized around the themes of biological substances and objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume’s chapters reveals the elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology and the life sciences.

Contents:
Foreword, Gísli Pálsson
Introduction: categories of life, Ayo Wahlberg and Susanne Bauer
Human and object, subject and thing: the troublesome nature of human biological material (HBM), Cecily Palmer
Substances of the body: blood, genes, and personhood, Malin Noem Ravn
Governing risk through informed choice: prenatal testing in welfarist maternity care, Mianna Meskus
Visualising and calculating life: matters of fact in the context of prenatal risk assessment, Nete Schwennesen and Lene Koch
Serious disease as kinds of living, Ayo Wahlberg
From society to molecule and back: the contested scale of public health science, Susanne Bauer
Life beyond information: contesting life and the body in history and molecular biology, Adam Bencard
The place and space of research work: studying control in a bioscience laboratory, Amrita Mishra
Almost human: scientific and popular strategies for making sense of ”missing links”, Murray Goulden and Andrew S. Balmer

Nikolas Rose and Margaret Lock have written the blurbs:
‘The vital landmarks that humans use to negotiate their existence as living beings are under challenge by bioscientific knowledge and biomedical technique, and an unstable mixture of venture capital and human desire. What is alive? Who is normal? When is sadness a disease? What is natural and what is artifice? Where does my body end and my prosthetics begin? Who can own what when it comes to human bodies? – These questions are not merely philosophically profound but they shape the ways in which human life is managed today. This stimulating collection brings together the reflections of a new generation of scholars, and clearly demonstrates the crucial role that empirical investigation can play in helping us grasp the challenges posed by this widespread contest of the categories we live by.’ (Rose)

‘This path-breaking collection takes the social analysis of emerging practices in the life sciences in an important new direction. Focusing on the labeling and classification of biomedical objects and entities, contributors to this volume make abundantly evident the extent to which the significance and meanings attributed to such entities are transformed and reworked as they travel among laboratory scientists, clinicians, policy makers, and the public. Classificatory practices are never merely “technical” in kind, but exhibit a social life of their own. This book draws readers into a world of boundary making in the life sciences that demands a generous pause for considered reflection.’ (Lock)

A year ago, Adam and I made fun of the tendency in the humanities and social sciences to invent ‘turns’ — the linguistic turn, the bodily turn, etc. (see earlier posts here and here).

But some ‘turns’ are more justified than others. Melissa Littlefield at the University of Illinois and Jenell Johnson at the Louisiana State University have just sent out a call for papers for an edited collection of essays preliminary titled ‘The Neuroscientific Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences’:

From economics to English, religious studies to recreation, neurology has become the latest theoretical tool for analyzing society and culture. While there has been some backlash against this trend, research continues to emerge in areas of neurotheology, neuromarketing, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics, the neurohumanities, and neurohistory to name but a few. We are seeking essays for an edited collection that analyze and interrogate this recent neuroscientific turn in the humanities and social sciences. We are particularly interested to hear from researchers who apply the neuro- to their own disciplinary work.

Here are some of the questions the editors raise:

• Why has there been a shift to using neuroscience as an epistemological framework and/or theoretical tool in the humanities and social sciences?
• What kind of arguments does it allow / foreclose / refute?
• How is this trend related to the ‘decade of the brain’?
• How do visualization technologies like fMRI shape or limit the neuroscientific turn?
• Is the neuroscientific turn interdiscplinary, cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary?
• What are the rights and responsibilities of such inter/cross/multiple-disciplinary research?
• Should this neuro- research fall under the purview of neuroethics?
• What roles do print and digital media play in the development and distribution of this trend?
• Why and how do the humanities and the social sciences need the neurosciences?
• What can the neurosciences learn from this trend in the humanities and the social sciences?
• How might these fields combine into a discipline of their own?

You are invited to submit a 300 word abstract and a brief (1-3 page) CV to both Melissa Littlefield (mml@illinois.edu) and Jenell Johnson (jjohn@lsu.edu) by 30 October. Final versions of the essays will be tentatively due by 1 June next year.

Anastasia Filippoupoliti at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece
(afilipp@gmail.com) and Graeme Farnell at MuseumsEtc, UK (graeme@museumsetc.com) are soliciting papers for a forthcoming book that will explore:

• the processes involved in developing new science exhibitions in and for museums
• the issues involved in transforming scientific ideas or events into exhibitions
• the challenges faced by museums in communicating science to a wide audience.

Much has been written about the difficulties of disseminating science to the public through a variety of new and traditional media. It is, indeed, a complex subject to tackle in the exhibition space, yet a challenging and multidimensional one.

How best to understand the process of working from scientific data to the ideas-based exhibition? What exactly is lost during the transformation of factual information into an exhibition environment? And more importantly, how can the exhibition work most effectively as a tool for narrating science, its past and present?

They welcome a range of submissions including, but not limited to, the following issues/themes:

• both theoretical perspectives and case studies relating to science exhibitions
• exhibition design for science: problems and opportunities
• successful design techniques and approaches in relation to science displays
• science communication in the museum: interpretation issues
• learning activities and science collections
• developing learning resources for science exhibitions
• object stories and science learning
• exhibitions interpreting the history of science

Please submit an abstract (up to 400 words) and a biographical note (up to 250 words) by email to both editors above. Deadline for abstracts and bio 30 September 2009. Selection for inclusion 30 October 2009.

The paper that Susanne and Jan Eric (who are both working in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ project) presented at the third Surveillance & Society conference in Sheffield in April 2008 (see earlier blog post here) has just been published in the journal Surveillance & Society (vol. 6, 2009). Here’s the abstract:

This article explores two instances of medical surveillance that illustrate post-panoptic views of the body in biomedicine, from the patient to the population. Techniques of surveillance and monitoring are part of medical diagnostics, epidemiological studies, aetiologic research, health care management; they also co-shape individual engagements with illness. In medicine, surveillance data come as digital anatomies for educational purposes and clinical diagnostics that subject the body to imaging techniques, but also as databases of patient collectives that are established in large-scale, at times nationwide, epidemiological studies. We will show that techniques of medical surveillance now include more bottom-up and less-centralized modes as well: with web 2.0 applications, one encounters endoscopic clips uploaded and made public on the internet and tools to navigate through patterns of sickness in urban space. Surveillance techniques directed at individual patients and at population health reconfigure the constellation of the body, space and the gaze into a post-panoptic distributed mode.

Read the full paper online here.

A new issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science is out — with, among other things, a thematic section about science at the nanoscale edited by Isaac Record. For example, Joachim Schummer points out that science can be popularized by its ethics (engineering ethics is often propaganda for emerging technology); Joe Pitt explores the rhetorical and heuristic role of metaphor in nanotechnology (e.g., the information system and the machine metaphors); and Natasha Myers discusses how the metaphoricity of life is shifting from computer programme to machine metaphors. Other interesting contributions to the nano-theme inlude Otávio Bueno’s paper on the visual evidence at the
nanoscale and Eric Winsberg’s piece on nanoscale models and simulations. SponGe is an open access (peer-reviewed) journal and all papers are downloadable here. Enjoy!

I’ve already mentioned the launch of the new University Museums and Collections Journal. The first issue has just been released online — there are two articles of potential interest for reflecting medical museums:

In one of them, Sébastien Soubiran asks “What makes scientific communities think the preservation of their heritage is important?”, and answers the question through a historical analysis of the various role that were conferred to university collections and museums within the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg for the last thirty years.

In the other, “‘The Sound of Silver’: Collaborating art, science and technology at Queen’s University, Belfast”, Karen Brown presents an interesting exhibition approach, viz., an exhibition of silverware and sonic art; she is using technology developed by the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University to display and interpret the university’s silver collection by letting a number of sound artists compose short soundscapes based on individual items from the collection. The artists’ approaches are based on the history and provenance of the items, and on materials, techniques, and the aesthetic qualities or emotions attached to to the objects.

Other, shorter and more descriptive, medical museum articles include Christa Kletter on ”The Drug Collection of the University of Vienna” and “The Collection of Pharmaceutical Objects of the University of Vienna” and Helmut Gröger and Manfred Skopec on ”Medical history collections of the Medical University Vienna in transition”.

Just to let you know that postdoc Susanne Bauer in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ research group has published a new paper on data mining in epidemiology.

“Mining data, gathering variables and recombining information: the flexible architecture of epidemiological studies” is available in the December issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 39 (4): 415-428 (2008).

Here’s the opening paragraph of the conclusion:

This paper has approached epidemiology as a practice of collecting and traced selected data trajectories of a large-scale cohort study. The analysis of two re-assemblages of data from the Østerbro study—in aetiological studies of breast cancer—has exposed the role of data mining and record linkage in stabilising biomedical knowledge at a population level. Various data strategies of epidemiological research practice can be described: active gathering of new variables and samples in a defined study design is key to large-scale prospective follow-up studies. Mining data from registries refers to the deployment of already existing data—data recorded in other contexts but used for epidemiological research—such as routine data, for example social statistics, cause of death data, or, in the case of the Nordic countries, data from central population registries. Recombining information entails a re-assemblage of data into novel constellations, which re-evaluate determinants and outcomes based on molecular techniques. In these re-arrangements, data travel over time, across levels and context of investigation, whilst they continue to carry on contextual categories.

Read the full paper here.

(Pic above: Frozen samples of the Copenhagen City Heart Study – photo by Susanne) 

The journal Performance Research is planning a thematic issue (vol. 14, issue 4, 2009) on ”notions and practices that correlate with ideas on the … formation of bodies, their somatic dimensions and constitution”. Issue guest editors Ric Allsop and Phillip Warnell are looking for contributions along the following lines:

• Guest/ host relationships; the possessed body – disguise and ventriloquism in performance; intimate distances or the distance of intimacy; implanted objects and technologically augmented functionality; ingestion and extraordinary forms of eating; psychic and physical fragmentation – the séance as a place of travel and channel: of departure, arrival, spectacle, transmission and reception between beings and worlds; archival extraction and mobilization (including re-enactments); the psychology of phantom and detached limb behaviour (beheadedness?); the aesthetics (and representation) of embodiment and its affects [...]
• Historical, medical, symbolic and ritual use, storage and preservation of organic material and its associated material culture (canopic jars, organ transporters); the symbolism and sacred role of body part removal: such as castration, removal of the tongue and eye; the camera as an external organ; visible supplements – the consideration of auras, halos, charisma etc; immaterial agencies and modes of contamination – radioactivity or viral forms [...]
• Spatial organisation and disputed territories (transplantation and bodily construction in horticulture and its forms, allotments, hybridisation); displacement and the ethics of place; aloneness and placelessness; the in-between, lacunae and production of space; post-colonial approaches to ideas and histories of plantation and the transplantation of cultures and peoples; temote presence and shared forms of perception; conceptual and geographic displacements of art works and institutions [...]

Much of this could be pretty interesting for medical museum exhibition curators. Deadline for proposals are 26 January 2009. Contact guest editors on ricallsopp@mac.com or info@phillipwarnell.com. Or visit Performance Research’s website and their guidelines for submissions.

University Museums and Collections Journal is a new, peer-reviewed, on-line journal (ISSN 2071-7229) published by the International Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC; part of ICOM).

Editors are Sally MacDonald, University College London; Nathalie Nyst, Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Cornelia Weber, Humboldt University of Berlin. The journal website looks pretty raw at the moment, but it will probably improve soonish.

UMCJ is planned to appear at least once a year. Could become a useful publication outlet for medical museum scholars if it gets through the ERIH and different national ranking exercises.

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary purposes.

‘Le Lab’ makes a lot of sense from the perspective of his own life narrative. But Edwards has the ambition to raise above the particularities of his own personal trajectory, to make a more general argument for what he calls ‘artscience’, i.e., the fusion of aesthetic and scientific methods. He wants to foster ‘idea translation’, i.e., to bring innovative ideas between academic disciplines, and across academia, the corporate world, and cultural and social institutions; he wants to break down the ubiquitous organisational and institutional barriers to creativity and innovation. ‘Idea translators’ are people who happen to be ‘curious’ and above all have the ‘passion’ to traverse cultural barriers. And ‘artscience’, in Edwards’s view, ‘holds a special key to succesful, sustained idea translation’, because ‘art-science barriers are among the most intractable of obstacles in human organizations of all kinds’ (p.172).

One of Edward’s points is a variation of the old science studies theme (popularized by, among others, Bruno Latour), namely that ’science in the making’ (the construction of science) is very different from ‘ready-made science’ (which we read about in journal articles and textbooks). For example, there is a lot of art and science in museums (and sometimes ‘art AND science’ which museums have good reasons for bringing inside their walls). But museums usually only tell the story of ready-made art and ready-made science (and ready-made ‘art AND science’), and rarely give their visitors insights into the creative processes behind art and science. Thus the ‘laboratory’ shall explicitly not be a museum.

Le Laboratoire in the 1er arrondissement in Paris is the first instance of such an artscience laboratory (see earlier post here). It is supposed to become a site where ideas can be translated, where they can ‘accelerate’ and transcend barriers. In Le Lab the public is invited to experience the creative process that drives innovation as a fusion of art production and science production. Experiments by leading international artists in collaboration with leading international scientists are supposed to catalyze changes in cultural institutions, in industry, in educational institutions and in society as a whole. And more generally, by experimenting with the art-science relations in such specially designed artscience laboratories, we will somehow learn in practice how to break down the general institutional barriers that block creativity and innovations.

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The journal Medical Humanities — one of the journals in the BMJ Group portfolio, started in the year 2000 as a twice-yearly special edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) — is on the outlook for new manuscripts.

The incoming editor Deborah Franklin (who also has her own blog), says that the journal has the ambition to (continue to) be

a leading international journal that reflects the whole field of medical humanities, with high quality articles relevant to humanities and arts scholars, social scientists and policy-makers, medical educators, health care professionals, and patients

and so she is looking for original research papers — both theoretical and empirical — written by historians, anthropologists, literature scholars, philosophers, film studies specialists, and economists etc. (she seem to have forgotten reflective doctors and biomedical scientists which used to be the most frequent contributors to the field in ‘the old days’). In other words, Medical Humanities is broadening its disciplinary profile.

The explicit editorial policy is that papers should be readable by

any well informed individual, in particular by both health care professionals without specific expertise in the humanities, arts or social sciences and by scholars in the humanities, arts or social sciences with no practical health care experience

which may give some problems in the future when humanities journals will increasingly be divided into A, B and C etc. levels of excellence. Will a journal aimed at “any well informed individual” survive in this hardening journal policy climate? I cannot find Medical Humanities on the ERIH initial lists, but the 2007 impact factor of its mother journal (JME) is 1.103.

Anyway, if you wish to submit a manuscript, go to http://submit-mh.bmj.com, and if you have any questions, write to mh@bmjgroup.com.