Biomedicine on Display

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.

Yesterday I wrote about my experience of visiting Le Laboratoire in Paris. In Chapter 6 of his recent book Artscience (2008) the founder, David Edwards, explains the background for his art-science center.

The son of a chemist, David was trained as a chemical engineer, then continued to graduate school where he did theoretical fluid mechanics. After his PhD in the 1980s he took up a postdoc in Haifa where the first Intifada opened his eyes to the world outside theoretical chemistry. He started creative writing as a side chore and in the 1990s he shared his time between MIT’s writing programme and working in Robert Langer’s (this year’s Millennium Prize winner) biotech lab on drug-delivery through aerosols. The lab work led to a paper in Science, in 1997, that suggested a new and better method for manufacturing and distributing drug particles.

Like so many other biotech researchers, David used his knowledge to start a biotech company. The aim of David’s company was to deliver insulin in the form of the new kind of aerosol. It apparently went very well, because only two years later he and his co-founders sold to a big pharma company, earning a lot of money (“the largest accrual of value at the time in biotechnology history”), giving David, his wife and his kids enough to realise some of their dreams.

Armed with this new and unexpected wealth, Continue Reading »

Here are the books I brought for the summer vacation (they do fit together in my own mind, somehow):

J. Craig Venter, A life decoded: my genome, my life (Viking, 2007) – see earlier post.

David Edwards, Artscience: creativity in the post-Google generation (Harvard University Press, 2008) – see post on Tuesday (I hope).

Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds), Creations of the mind: theories of artifacts and their representation (Oxford University Press, 2007) – to be reviewed for Isis.

Mark Paterson, The senses of touch: haptics, affects and technologies (Berg, 2007) – much needed food for our next research application to the Danish Strategic Research Council.

Slavoj Zizek, Violence: Six sideways reflections (Profile Books, 2008) – Zizek keeps one’s critical mind alive!

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire (Hamish Hamilton, 2004) – I have to re-read it to understand what they really mean by ‘multitude’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few minutes ago — as I was sitting in my beautiful and quiet room in Schokofabrik (the best B&B in Berlin), struggling with my paper on art and science in medical museums for the SLSA-session on Friday – a mail dropped in announcing a lecture by science writer Phillip Ball on Thursday 10 July, which may be quite interesting for us in the medical museum business.

Phillip Ball lecture is occasioned by his receipt of the 2007 Dingle Prize for communicating the history of science and technology through his book Elegant solutions: Ten Beautiful Experiments in Chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005):

Scientists frequently talk about ‘beauty’ in their work, but rarely stop to think quite what they mean by it. What makes an experiment beautiful? Is it the clarity of the design? The elegance of the apparatus? The nature of the knowledge gained? There have been several recent attempts to identify ‘beautiful’ experiments in science, especially in physics. But Philip Ball argues that, not only is chemistry often neglected in these surveys, but it has its own special kinds of beauty, linked to the fact that it is a branch of science strongly tied to the art of making things: new molecules and materials, new smells and colours (my emphasis)

The making of new molecules and materials, smells and colours isn’t restricted to chemistry, of course. Same with biotechnology, tissue engineering, etc. The beauty of, say, a new bladder tissue should then lie, pace Bell, in its new materiality, smells and colours. Good point. Must read the book!

The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London, at 7pm

(thanks to Patricia for the mail).

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

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

 About a hundred years ago (or more precisely in October 2007) we opened the temporary exhibition Oldetopia here at Medical Museion. The exhibition is fully texted in two languages, both Danish and English, and last week the catalogue also arrived in an English version. Better late than never… and luckily just in time for the tourist season. The exhibition is on show until December 14 so there should be plenty of time to visit it, if you still haven’t been around Bredgade 62 in Copenhagen.
The catalogue consists of a bunch of well writing articles on age and ageing. It covers the very broad field of the subject with contributions by some of finest researchers within the field:
Camilla Mordhorst’s article Oldetopia is about the making of the exhibition and the ideas behind it. Bente Klarlund Pedersen’s article Those Who Think They Have No Time for Bodily Exercise, Will Sooner or Later Have to Find Time for Illness is concerned with the importance of physical activity. Mette Sørensen, Tinna Stevnsner and Vilhelm A. Bohr write about The Molecular Biology of Ageing and Bernard Jeune contributes with an article on Centenarians and the Long Life. Lene Otto takes an ethnological approach in her contribution We All Want to Live Longer and Nobody Wants to be Called Old and last but not least Eva Smith writes very personally on Ageing Gracefully.

The catalogue also contains the unique series of images of 100 year old men and women by Liv Carlé Mortensen and a series of pictures from De Gamles By (Old People’s Town) in Copenhagen taken around year 1900.

The catalogue is on sale at the entrance to the exhibition, but if any reader of the blog is interested, please contact me and I will happily distribute a copy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Left Coast Press is starting a new peer-review journal called Museum History Journal to explore ”the history of museums, the museum profession, and the sociocultural context in which museums developed and operate”.

The editors (Hugh H. Genoways at U Nebraska and Mary Anne Andrei at U Virginia) will operate with an inclusive definition of ‘museum’, i.e., also ”aquaria, zoos, botanical gardens, arboreta, historical societies and sites, architectural sites, archives, and planetariums”, and they are expecting contributions from a large variety of scholarly approaches, for example:

cultural and social histories that evaluate the impact of museums in the context of a particular time period; intellectual histories that emphasize museum philosophy; histories of museum-related professions; histories of museum exhibits and educational programs; histories of development, management, and use of collections; architectural histories; analyses of the contributions of significant museum figures; issues of professionalization of the field; comparative histories; critical institutional histories.

Museum History Journal will be published twice a year (also on-line). Here is the contents of the first issue.

I’ve just stumbled upon The Museum Detective, a website/blog dedicated to finding stories “from behind the scenes of the museum world”, edited by museum advisor/consultant Joanna Cobley in Christchurch, NZ.

Particularly noteworthy is the large number of posts with podcasts. For example this interview with Conal McCarthy, Director of the Museums and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University in Wellington, NZ, who “takes us into the world of over-crowded display cases, ferocious custodians and sparse museum labels”. The perfect companion during my 25 min bike trip between home and work!

Joanna has also added a guide for podcast-beginners, including seven good reasons why museums should podcast:

• It can help build more audiences (especially the digital native generation).
• Extend the virtual museum visitor’s experience (which we know is growing).
• Enhance existing educational resources.
• Extend the reach of the museum’s public programmes e.g. lecture webcasts.
• Disseminate research undertaken by museum staff.
• It’s a relatively low cost, low risk venture.
• It’s fun.

(quoted from here)

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When Jens Hauser gave a seminar here at Medical Museion last spring, he talked, among other things, about his next exhibitíon – on skin. His idea of exploríng skin “as a place where art, science, philosophy and social culture meet” is now becoming realised in Liverpool (UK) under the title of sk-interfaces.

“What used to be understood as a surface that represents the limit of the self and between the inside and the outside can today be seen as an unstable border”, says Jens on the website. He has gathered an awesome crew of bio-artists — a few old hats, but mostly exciting new acquaintances — to explore this tough, yet fragile bodily interface:

For example, ORLAN presents Manteau d’Arlequin (Harlequin Coat), a patchwork life-size mantle, which fuses in vitro skin cells from various cultures and species. The Tissue Culture and Art Project’s Victimless Leather are problematizing the concept of ‘garment’ by making it semi-living:

Art Orienté objet have created “biopsied, cultured, hybridized and tattooed skin made from their own epidermis and pig derma to create living biotechnological self-portraits”. In hymNext Designer Hymen Series Julia Reodica uses her own vaginal tissue combined with animal muscle cells to create designer hymens. And so on and so forth.

The director of Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) that hosts the exhibition, claims that sk-interfaces pushes “the boundaries of how and what creative technologies and art can be”; he wants to use the exhibition to invite debate and conversation “around life sciences and our changing relationships with our bodies and technology”.

Here is the full list of confirmed art works at the exhibition:
Art Orienté objet (France) Cultures de peaux d’artistes, Roadkill Coat
Zbigniew Oksiuta (Poland) Breeding Spaces
Yann Marussich (Switzerland) Bleu Remix
Julia Reodica (USA) hymNext Designer Hymen Series
Jun Takita (Japan) Light only Light
Tissue Culture and Art Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr) (Australia) Victimless Leather
ORLAN (France) Manteau d’Arlequin
Neal White (UK) Truth Serum
Wim Delvoye (Belgium) Sybille
Olivier Goulet (France) Skin Bags
Zane Berzina (Latvia) Touch Me Wall
Critical Art Ensemble (US)
Eduardo Kac (Brazil)Telepresence Garment
Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barriere (France) World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War
Jill Scott E-skin: Somatic Interaction
Stelarc Extra Ear: Ear on Arm

The exhibition opens on 1 February and runs until 31 March. The week after the opening, FACT is organising a conference to examine the topics and issues surrounding this exhibition. They are also publishing a book by Jens Hauser – SK-Interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society – on Liverpool University Press.

Looks like a three-star exhibition, i.e. worth a travel. 

Speaking about the formation of biocitizenship: Non-fiction writers Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg (who have written about the science behind James Bond) have now published The Science of Stephen King (Wiley 2007).

The preview from Amazon doesn’t raise expectations of a particularly scholarly experience, but it could nevertheless be fun reading for King-fans during the upcoming holidays. And maybe there are some nuggets in it for those of us who are interested in the formation of public engagement with medicine? Several of Stephen King‘s books and movies deal with more or less probable social and cultural (and deadly, of course) effects of biomedicine and biotech. For example, The Stand was about a deadly plague that vicious scientists let out of the secret lab, with dire consequences; the movie Golden Years took its point of departure in ageing research and regenerative medicine.

Gresh and Weinberg’s Bond-book was mainly about the physics, of course, because Ian Fleming created the Bond character in the 1950s and 1960s when atom bombs and lasers were the favourite fictional mass killing instruments; in the last 30 years mystery books and action films have moved to bugs, alien life forms, pharmaceuticals and vicious recombinant DNA specialists. The formation of biocitizenship is a diverse and multichanneled practice.

Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd – who are currently co-directing a two-year research project on ‘Rethinking Disability Representation’ in the Dept of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester — are soliciting some 20 ”original, provocative, timely and scholarly papers” to

explore issues surrounding the cultural representation of disabled people and, more particularly, the inclusion (as well as the marked absence) of disability-related narratives in museum and gallery displays.

Here’s their synopsis to the edited volume they are planning together with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University), titled ’Re-Presenting Disability: Museums and the Politics of Display’:

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