Biomedicine on Display

Some years ago, I wrote a pretty critical review of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington DC. Now the museum has reopened on the new site in Silver Spring, Maryland, a little further north of DC.

The new building features, they say, “a state-of-the-art collections management facility” to house the museums 25-million-object collection (that sounds pretty much, and it’s probably because they have a rather unusual way of counting their artefacts, but nevertheless, their collection aren’t exactly miniscule).

The first exhibits available to the public will feature artifacts and specimens related to Civil War medicine and human anatomy/pathology.

See more on their website: www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum and Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MedicalMuseum.

I am repeatedly thrilled by news of events arranged by the European Neuroscience & Society Network (ENSN). If it does not clash too much with my planned research stay at BIOS in London in September, I will definitely find my way to Groningen for this conference as it fits very nicely with the next part of my ph.d.-project. See the conference description below.

In a museum context, I am also curious to see what kinds of objects the conference will contain. I have been thinking that it is very difficult to make neuroscience tangible, but maybe this will give some clues as to how it might be done. Neurodevices could be seen as very powerful objects in the sense that they literally touch upon (or mess with) the merging of self and materiality. Interesting stuff!

BRAIN GEAR – Discussing the design and use of neurodevices in neurosocieties

University of Groningen, the Netherlands, September 15-16th, 2011
http://www.gmw.rug.nl/~braingear/

European Neuroscience & Society Network; The Theory & History of Psychology Group

Scientists, sociologists of science, philosophers, and artists explore the emergence and implications of new ‘brain gear’ to repair and enhance our emotional and cognitive abilities.

What are the implications of brain-changing instruments that change our individual and collective self-image? Does their rise imply a fundamental change in the meaning of human life and should societies rethink fundamental concepts of justice and responsibility?

Various kinds of braindevices are in the making or already available. Firstly, there are implantable ones such as instruments for deep brain stimulation (DBS), epidural cortical stimulation (EpCS), vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) and on a molecular leven neuronanotubes.

Secondly, there are external devices including apparatus for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) or repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS).

And, thirdly, there are digital tools like ambient intelligence (wireless microprocessors integrated in the body or the environment like clothes and walls), ‘digital drugs’ (audio files giving people a high) or software programs for neurobio-feedback built into computers as well as ‘neury bears’ (teddy bears training children’s brainwaves through sounds).

While many welcome this kind of apparatus as ways to eradicate the woes and inconveniences of human life, others fear they will cause a loss of human dignity and freedom. Do such devices blur old distinctions between ‘human beings’ versus ‘things’ or ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’? Or were these untenable distinctions anyway? Do they imply fundamental changes because they operate directly on the brain or are they not that different from more traditional means of enhancement like cars, contact lenses, or microphones?

Chemical technologies inducing neurobiological changes are already widely in use. Maybe arguments about psychopharmacological changes of our selves can be directly applied to non-chemical molecular technologies. The analogy brings debates to mind about safety and efficacy, and the regulation of admission to the market. In addition, fundamental issues about individual freedom and responsibility also rise. Will the same social pressures that encourage people to use psychopharmacological drugs from childhood on make them use brain changing apparatus from childhood on? What to think of electric devices to boost children’s learning abilities?

Such debates unavoidably revolve around questions about the nature of responsibility. A number of neuroscientists argue these days that such concepts are superseded notions from the past, since the mind is nothing more than what the brain causes us to do. If so, it would not make a difference if the already material mind is extended with material hardware or software.

If ‘my brain made me do it’ my technologically enhanced brain made me do it no less. Legal philosophers however, argue that neurobiology can never have an impact on our notions of free will and responsibility since such notions do not need a non-material basis. Would that imply that we remain as responsible for our enhanced brain as we are for our non-enhanced brains?

These and related questions will be discussed during the workshop from various perspectives. Each in their own way scientists, sociologists, ethicists and artists will express their views and expectations.

The conference takes place on September 15 and 16 (departure September 17) 2011 in the artists’ center at The Palace in Groningen (www.hetpaleisgroningen.nl). The University of Groningen offers a satellite program on Monday September 12 and a debate on Wednesday September 14 (http://studium.hosting.rug.nl).

Who would have thought that the torrential rain during the dramatic storms seen in Copenhagen this weekend would have had such devastating consequences? The collection stores here at Medical Museion bore the brunt of it. In some places the water rose to 90 cm.  Dedicated members of the team arrived on Saturday and worked in the evening while the rooms were pumped. On Sunday, many others arrived to plough through the black gooey sludge and salvage more precious boxes.

On Monday, we were organized into groups, some carrying heavy boxes filled with flood damaged artefacts that still remained in the basements. Water was still leaking out of the soaking walls and the humidity did not help the situation. Others have been removing bones from sodden boxes, attempting to dry them a little and repack them temporarily in safer conditions before they will be packed more permanently. Paper, medical photos and other precious documentation was carefully peeled apart and placed between conservation papers and put under weights.  The smell is terrible and the actual cleaning of the damaged rooms will be a whole new and different problem. One floor has completely split open and cracks have appeared on the walls of these beautiful old buildings.

Everyone is working to salvage what he or she can. There is great sadness, determination and a sense of camaraderie.

Let me take this opportunity to present another new member of staff — assistant professor Adam Bencard:

I started as assistent professor in science communication here at Medical Museion in November 2010. I have two major tasks: I’m doing research in experimental science communication and I make exhibitions. I’m particularly interested in material objects and the philosophical aspects of materiality and the meaning of artefacts in a science communicatioin context. I have a background in history and philosopy (MA, Roskilde University, 2001) and finished my PhD here at Medical Museion in 2008.

After defending his PhD-thesis ‘History in the Flesh’ in February 2008, Adam worked as a research assistant together with me and Camilla Mordhorst on the concept of ‘presence’ (resulting in, among other things, this article on biomedicine as a challenge to museums). Now he is moving deeper into the philosophical dimensions of material museum objects — those who read this blog may have noticed that Adam is the author of quite a few posts on subjects like ‘object oriented ontology’, ‘the material turn’, ‘existential materialism’, ‘the digital delusion’, etc.

Adam has been main curator of the exhibition The Chemistry of Life: Four Chapters in the History of Metabolic Research that opened in our satellite exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciecnes, and he is now working on yet another exhibition about the humoral vs. chemical body that is planned to open in mid-October.

Adam’s position is financed by a grant through the NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research.

I’m proud to present our new staff member, Daniel Noesgaard, who will work with biomedical science communication on the web, especially through social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc., and maybe especially the many forthcoming cetera).

Daniel’s position is financed by the science communication grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation through the new NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research (which I will tell more about on this blog later).

Daniel’s first task (besides attending the Museums and the Web 2011 conference in Philadelphia last month) is to work out a new web platform for Medical Museion that will have all the usual functionalities, but which will hopefully also integrate our blogs and our presence on social media into the site. When the platform is ready some time later this spring or early summer, he will begin to fill it with exciting content — and specially incite the rest of us and other users to make the site flourish.

Daniel has a Master’s degree in molecular biomedicine. For his Masters thesis he did laboratory work with lysine deacetylase inhibitors (see publication here) and their use for the treatment of type 1 diabetes. He has also worked in the internet business, where he worked with all possible kinds of things, from domain registration to network design, and has also done quite a lot of a voluntary work in a student association, including communication through social media.

Martha Fleming, who was head curator on our award-winning exhibition Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine (2009-2010) will speak at the Danish Royal Academy of Art on Friday 1 April. The title of her talk is ”Museum as Material, Exhibition as Scholarly Publication”.

What does it mean to consider an institution to be a kind of ‘material’? What sort of research is it possible for an artist to effect inside a science museum? What does research itself mean in different scholarly contexts, and how does the artist facilitate interdisciplinarity beyond the studio and the gallery? This seminar will be of interest to those who want to know about intellectual and logistical issues of working with non-art museums, those whose conceptual work engages with science practice and history and philosophy of science, and those interested in the work that has come out of the radical aesthetics of 1980s site specific projects. Martha Fleming has made large-scale site specific installations, museum collection interpretation projects, and now works at the Natural History Museum in London. She will be speaking about her work as an artist, as a museum professional and as an historian of science.

The lecture takes place in the Italian Auditorium, 1 Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen,  at 1 pm.

Some background reading:

• www.marthafleming.net
• Studiolo: The Collaborative Projects of Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe (Artextes 1997)
• “Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices”. Editor: Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Cambridge Scholars 2010)

We got this cuddly edition of the malaria parasite from Marco Herbst who was here visiting the museum last week, to get inspiration for his upcoming Malaria Museum in Berlin.

Marco’s approach to making a museum was refreshingly nontraditional. Far from being webbed up in museological concepts and theories, he builds on a growing fascination with his subject along with the human instinct to collect interesting things.

The former owner of a night club in Dublin and a bar in Berlin, Marco has some of the passion and personality of the renaissance collector with his cabinet of curiosities. I’m looking forward to popping by his museum for my daily gin and tonic – a drink originally invented to prevent malaria, as the tonic water contains the alkaloid quinine.

But of course background knowledge, and above all interesting objects, are essential. So Marco is at the moment traveling the world from Japan to Copenhagen, to meet malaria experts and museum people and ‘suck’ their knowledge.

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.

We were so pleased to hear, a couple of days ago, that our own Jesper V. Kragh has just secured a two year external research grant for his project “The History of Drug Abuse in Denmark, 1870-1955″ from the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication.

Jesper distinguishes two different narratives about drug abuse. One is the well known story about psychotropic drugs being introduced in the late 1960s, “when groups of counterculture rebels began experimenting with heroin and other narcotics, but this experimental and recreational use of drugs turned into a social problem which still persists today”. Most drug abusers suffer from a lack of education, and are unemployed and homeless.

But, reminds Jesper us about, there is another, and more interesting narrative, which is unfamiliar to most people today, at least in Denmark (the British, of course, have the story about Sherlock Holmes as a reminder). Drug abuse was a problem already in the 1870s, when the use of morphine and other opiates became a problem for certain groups of Danes. But these people almost exclusively came from the upper or well educated middle classs.

So far, there has been no study of Danish history of drug abuse in the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. In addition to exploring this unknown history of drug addiction, Jesper also wants to focus on aspects of drug abuse that have received only scant attention in the international historiography of addiction, viz., the psychiatric treatment. In doing this Jesper will draw on his extensive experience in using psychiatric hospital records as a major source.

So look out for publications from Jesper’s keyboard in the next couple of years — and maybe some intermittent blog posts as well.

On Thursday 2 December, a new Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen is inaugurated with talks by Sarah Franklin and Ken Arnold.

Sarah Franklin will speak about “Life After the In Vitro Fertilisation: Biology Has Become a Technology?”. Sarah Franklin is well-known for his studies of in vitro fertilisation, cloning, embryo research and stem cell research. Her latest book is about the cloned sheep, Dolly. Since 2004 she has been a professor at the London School of Economics, where she has led the BIOS Centre together with Nicholas Rose.

Ken Arnold, who will speak about “Art and Communication of Medical Science”, is Head of Public Programmes at the Wellcome Trust, where, among others things, he has been responsible for the Trust’s collaborative projects between scientists and artists. He is primarily known as the initiator of and creative director of the Wellcome Collection, which is one of the world’s most successful arenas for biomedical science communication. In 2010-2013, Ken Arnold is visiting professor at Medical Museion, where he will contribute to the museum’s efforts to build an integrated research and public engagement programme for medical science and technology.

The Centre is a collaboration between Medical Museion and the Section for Health Services Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences’ Department of Public Health. The faculty of the new Centre includes Lene Koch (head of center), Thomas Söderqvist, Signild Vallgårda, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Klaus Høyer, Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, Henriette Langstrup, Annegrete Juul and Adam Bencard. About ten postdoc’s and PhD students are currently attached to the Centre..

The Centre is co-operating closely with the new PhD-program for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the Faculty of Health Sciences, led by Thomas Söderqvist.

The opening takes place in Medical Museion’s Anatomical Theatre on Thursday 2 December at 3pm. After the talks there will be a wine and sandwich reception.

If you happen to pass through Copenhagen in the weekend, don’t miss the opportunity to visit Medical Museion on Friday night. We’re open 6-12pm during the Copenhagen Culture Night, with the following highlights:

1) From wooden leg to robotic arm:
Together with the Amputation Group of the Danish Handicap Society we are focusing on amputation and prosthetics. At the entrance level of the museum we are displaying selected artefacts from our historical prosthetics collection together with hight tech artificial arms and legs. Throughout the evening an expert in contemporary prosthetics will talk about his daily work of making prosthetic arms and legs to Danish soldiers. We’ve also invited users prosthetic limbs to show what they can actually do with such things. Finally, our head of collections, Ion Meyer, will talk about the history of amputation.

2) Check your lung capacity!
2010 is the ‘Year of the Lung’ here in Denmark. Accordingly, the Danish Lung Society focuses on one óf the most devastating public health problems — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Lots of people have disfunctional lung capacity without really knowing. A group of medical doctors and nurses will make a COPD-test in one of the rooms on the first floor — and also give advice about further investigation, if necessary.

3) Medical Museion’s Investigation Room opens
Postdoc Lucy Lyons inaugurates our Investigaton Room, in which you can learn to see by means of drawing. You are invited to investigate selected artefacts from our collections with a pencil. We don’t care if you “can draw” or not; it’s about using the pencil to investigate physical objects.

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.

Today, Ken Arnold is starting his temporary appointment as Visiting Professor in Medical Science Communication and Museology at Medical Museion.

When he is not visiting Medical Museion, Ken Arnold heads the Public Programmes team at the Wellcome Trust, where his role is to creatively direct Wellcome Collection — a very successful public venue in London that seeks to explore the connections between medicine, art and life. It has received very positive press attention throughout the world, attracted over 300,000 visits per year since 2007, and has been nominated for the Museum of the Year and European Museum of the Year awards.

The Wellcome Collection has emerged as the culmination of 15 years of innovative public work at the Trust, where Ken Arnold has run a variety of arts and exhibitions activities, including a gallery at the Science Museum devoted to exploring medicine in context. He also co-ordinated the establishment of the Wellcome Trust’s arts funding initiatives, which support collaborative work between scientists and artists. He was also Chief Curator of the highly successful exhibition Medicine Man: the Forgotten Museum of Henry Wellcome shown at the British Museum in 2003.

Ken Arnold gained a B.A. in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Princeton University, and worked in a variety of museums (national and local) on both sides of the Atlantic, before joining the Wellcome Trust in 1992. He regularly writes and lectures on the culture of museums past and present and on the contemporary relations between the arts and sciences.

Some of his articles in collected volumes are highly original contributions to the problem of how to use art in the presentation of medical science. Other articles have raised the problems of the relation between history of medicine and medical museums in new and fruitful ways. In the monograph Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (2006), Arnold draws on the historical experiences of the classical 16^th and 17^th century curiosity cabinet as a resource for opening up a new field of discourse for contemporary museum innovation. The Collector’s Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting (2000) raised new issues about the role of collecting in the history of museums. His academic activities also include supervision and examination of PhD-projects in science communication and museums studies at the University of Leicester, Leeds Metropolitan University, Oxford University and Open University.

We are very happy to get this opportunity for close encounters with Ken Arnold and thereby draw on his long experience in research-based exhibition making. If anyone wants to meet him during his Copenhagen sojourn, please contact him at k.arnold@wellcome.ac.uk.

(image credit: LabforCulture, www.labforculture.org)

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.

Will this become the abstract of the 2010s?

We report the design, synthesis, and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information and its transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum recipient cell to create new Mycoplasma mycoides cells that are controlled only by the synthetic chromosome. The only DNA in the cells is the designed synthetic DNA sequence, including “watermark” sequences and other designed gene deletions and polymorphisms, and mutations acquired during the building process. The new cells have expected phenotypic properties and are capable of continuous self-replication.

From Gibson et. al., “Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome” in today’s issue of Science. Et al. in this case of course includes Craig Venter, who has now made an important step towards synthetic life.

It’s not really synthetic life yet— it’s ‘just’ a synthetic genome, which has been designed in the computer, assembled from chemically synthesised oligonucelotides, and then put into a recipient cell, where the new synthetic genome took over control, thereby creating a new Mycoplasma species. Nevertheless — it’s pretty mindblowing.

In this video, Venter shortly explains the work behind the paper, and then discusses the many possible applications, including vaccine production. He predicts, for example, that the production of flu vaccine can be speeded up considerably, making it both cheaper, more reliable, and more on-demand.

Tons of ethical, religious, environmental etc. issues will of course be raised in the wake of this.