Biomedicine on Display

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Calling on a million minds for community annotation in WikiProteins” is the catchy title of an article in Genome Biology two months ago (vol. 9, issue 5, 2008; see online version here). The paper has received some attention in the blogosphere—not least because Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is one of the 23 co-authors of the paper.

Celebrity aside, both the project as such and the ”million minds” metaphor is fascinating. WikiProteins is the first project (so far in beta) by the new semantic (concept) web initiative WikiProfessional-life sciences. It’s a database which automatically searches for information about proteins from a variety of other databases, e.g., UniProt/Swiss-Prot, and for associated concepts in articles from PubMed, and then makes the digested information available to the public (in practice = scientists) for further curating, editing and annotation.

In other words, instead of waiting for potential contributors to start from scratch, the WikiProtein-people are initiating the wiki fun by filling the database with a lot of information, so that the protein experts (”the million minds”) out there have something to work with and improve. As they say in the abstract: “We call on a ‘million minds’ to annotate a ‘million concepts’ and to collect facts from the literature with the reward of collaborative knowledge discovery”.

Most pundits are impressed, but there has also been some criticism. On Nature’s Nascent-blog, bioinformatician Euan Adie has expressed his irritation with the hype: “There’s a very high crap to content ratio”.

This alleged hype aspect is what makes the metaphorical dimension of ”Calling on a million minds” so interesting. One thing is that the title quite explicitly draws on the positive vibes of the wiki and web 2.0-movements. But aren’t there also parallells to the new forms of political process that we have been witnessing in recent years, for example in the last and the current US presidential elections? Like when Barack Obama calls on a million activists for taking part in the campaign and for fund-raising. (And hasn’t Obama too been accused of high crap to content ratio?)

So what’s the next catchy title in a systemic biology article? What about “Yes We Can: A Million Scientists Demand The Right to Curate Data for the Human Metabolome Project” (for HMP, see here).

(More comments on Scienceroll, bbgm, ars technica, The Tree of Life, Spreading Science, David Rothman, and Cellnews)

The regulation of public health data collection and display is an interesting field of research for historians of contemporary public health. Here’s how I came to think about it:

On our way back to Copenhagen from three days of vacation on the island of Öland off the coast of SE Sweden with its beautiful and peculiar landscape (especially the alvar heath), we took a short break in Kristianopel, once (in the early 17th century) an important and heavily fortified Danish border town, now a tranquil vacation resort.

While Anna went down to the beach to take a swim in the Baltic Sea, I took a closer look at the local billboard where I found, among announcements for local flea markets and invitations to parties for young church-goers, an official report on the bathing water quality issued two days earlier by an accredited laboratory:

saying: 

• E. coli: 0 mpn/100 ml, measured by the Colilert-18 method
• Intestinal enterococci: 13 CFU/100 ml, measured according to ISO 7899-2

Zero E.coli is fine, of course, but 13 CFU (colony forming units) of enterococci (common faeces bacteria) is not so good. Wikipedia informs me that the state of Hawaii accepts only 7 CFU/100 ml before posting warnings! The municipality of Karlskrona, however, concludes that the water quality is “tjänlig” (suitable).

I’m probably about the only person visiting Kristianopel who has ever cared to read, let alone understood, the water quality report. Regulations issued by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency stipulate that local authorities must make such tests (see Naturvårdsverkets författningssamling 2008:8) and make them publicly available. But apparently the local authorities don’t have to announce the results in a way that makes sense to visitors to the beach—for example that the Kristianopel water is twice as bad as what they accept in Honolulu.

Well, Anna didn’t catch any nasty bugs and the rest is for the Kristianopolitians to consider further. But that said, I think their water quality report raises an interesting general issue. Ground-level ozone, pollen levels, etc. are heavily displayed on TV, in newspapers, etc.; for example, the National Museum of Natural History in Sweden issues a daily pollen prognosis report on the web. What other kinds of public health data are displayed in public? How are these data displayed? Through which media? And which are the political processes behind the decisions to have such data collected and broadcasted to the public?

In fact, the history of public health could be understood (cf. Dorothy Porter’s Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health From Ancient to Modern Times, 1998; read a good review here) as the continuous political negotation of such data and their public display.

The BIOS Centre at the LSE is organizing a conference about the politics of the life sciences in an ‘age of biological control’, 16-18 September next year (i.e., 2009). The organisers are particularly interested in papers that develop the following three themes:

1) Biological citizenship in a global political economy:

• biosocial identities and solidarities
• global health inequalities or orphan diseases
• the sustainable and democratic governance of the life sciences, and the challenges of public policy making in conditions of uncertainty
• the impact of these policies on the formation (and transformation) of biological citizenships, in particular relating to identity, gender, or ethnicity
• analyses of the pharmaceutical industry, its management and regulation in a globalized world.

2) Identities and power in a neuro-age:

• explorations of ways in which recent developments in neuroscience are changing power dynamics between state, industry, expertise and consumers, patients, children, parents, employees and offenders
• analyses of the role of neuro-expertise, the problems of uncertainty and strategies of risk assessment in the context of regulation and control of the neuro-technologies and the rise of ‘neuro-markets’
• examinations of the impact of neuroscience on categorization in psychiatric disorders, and on shifting patterns in ‘normalcy’ and ‘pathology’.

3) Biopolitics in an age of regenerative and synthetic technologies:

• explorations of politics and ethics in relation to synthetic biology and regenerative medicine
• research on the ways in which developments in these areas are changing conceptions of self, identity and embodiment
• analyses of the political and ethical frameworks guiding biomedical research and interventions in the ‘age of regeneration’ and in the light of concerns about biosecurity
• research on the socio-political and ethical aspects related to biosecurity, bioengineering and the markets for DNA, tissues, organs and other synthetic devices.

Send 250-300 word abstracts to v.dyas@lse.ac.uk before 1 December 2008. For further info, see www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/vital_politicsIII.htm.

Last august, we invited the founder of Le Laboratorie in Paris, David Edwards, to our workhop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’. His presentation was short and (and at least to me) not very clear, so last time I was in Paris I took the opportunity to see his new art and science meeting spot.

Le Laboratoire is placed in a former film studio close to the Louvre in the heart of Paris. The exterior is non-assuming; you have to look for it to find it.

Inside/downstairs is a big room with a raw, industrial look. Texts explain this is a “center of experimentation in art and design based on the notion of art and science as process toward a creative end”. It is emphatically not a museum (it eludes “classical curatorial care”) but is about innovation—to “facilitate discipline crossing” and “catalyzing innovation” by means of “artscience, this ability to appreciate and develop an aesthetic and scientific sensibility”:

We work with highy creative artists and designers and seek dreams of idea translation that cannot be formulated without the participation of a leading scientist

When I visited in April, the current show (by colloid scientist Jerome Bibette and renown chéf Thierry Marx) was about colloid chemistry and molecular gastronomy.

In one end of the room two girls made coffee—served, not with a cookie, but with a small plastic inhaler tube, le whif, through which you could take a sniff of chocolate colloid particles:

Pictures of colloids were projected on screens and tables scattered around the room, and billboards explained aspects of taste and molecular cuisine.

There should have been some other tasting activities as well, but these were cancelled for reasons I didn’t quite understand (my French is rusty).

The room and the lighting was great, but the whole experience somewhat enigmatic. I wasn’t really sure about what the place is supposed to do. So I bought Edwards’s recent book Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Harvard University Press, 2008; cf. yesterday’s post) to learn more about the background for the project.
(continued tomorrow)

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 :-)

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades?

I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s a topic for a serious research project and even a book. Instead I will take on a more preliminary task: I will try to reconstruct a handfull of ideal-typical rationalities for why STM-museum curators around the world are engaged in bringing art and the biomedical sciences together.

I hasten to add that I haven’t done any fieldwork, or asked curators to fill in any questionaires. The reconstructions that follow in the next couple of posts are based primarily on websites and occasional discussions, and especially on my own experiences as the director of Medical Museion in Copenhagen.

Sizewise, Medical Museion is somewhere between the Jurassic midgets and the contemporary Power giants. We are placed in an old 18th century palace-looking building (the former Royal Academy of Surgeons) in the Copenhagen inner city area, with approx 4000 square meters of storage, exhibition and office space. Our biggest asset, besides the building, is a huge collection of medicotechnical artefacts, wet specimens and hard human remains — actually one of the biggest collections in northern Europe — ranging from 18th century medical curiosities to 20th century everyday medical care objects. We believe we have a total of around 200.000 objects plus another 60.000 images.

Like many other similar medium-size traditional medical history museums around the world, our museum was – until recently, when it was still called the Medical History Museum at the University of Copenhagen – content with taking care of and displaying the old treasures. Some medical history museums are in fact still quite satisfied with such a role; they are not interested in becoming engaged with the rapidly changing biomedical landscape, i.e, all these revolutionary things that are happening on the interface between postgenomic cell biology, pharma production, medical technology, biotech industry and computer science. It’s a messy world, so I think it’s perfectly legitimate (and probably even quite wise) to stay away from it.

But we decided to jump on the life science bandwagon, to engage with the hurly-burly of the contemporary life science world. So in the last four-five years we have turned both our research efforts, our acquisitions of new artefacts, and our temporary exhibitions towards investigating and displaying contemporary developments in the biomedical field. And a few years ago, a private Danish research foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, decided that this approach was worthwhile supporting.

So now we are in the midst of a combined research and curatorial project called ‘Biomedicine on Display’. I say ‘combined’, because we seek to integrate research, the acquisitions of the material and visual culture of biomedicine, and the creation of exhibitions. And we do indeed have a great interest in bringing art, aesthetics and medicine together.

So in a sense, we are not just a medical history museum anymore, but a medical museum. That’s one of the reasons we changed our name to Medical Museion. So, which were our reasons for going into art and aesthetics?
[I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow].

The annual clean-out day at the Panum Institute, which houses the Medical Faculty of the University of Copenhagen, took place last week. With the sun shining from at clear blue sky and temperatures rising to the high twenties, employees at the Panum Institute went on a building-wide cleaning spree. And just like last year, Medical Museion was in position, lurking around garbage containers, ready to rescue the cultural heritage of recent biomedicine from certain destruction.

The clean-out day in 2007 produced in excess of 48 tons of waste. The numbers from this year are not in yet, but it is clear that we were nowhere near that amount. For Medical Museion, the day also resulted in the acquisition of fewer objects. One reason was that we were much more critical this year about what to take in. So when the hard work of clean-out was over and a treat of cold beer and hot saussages were handed out to the participants, we were able to enjoy our harvest of a few but very interesting (and slightly bizarre) objects.

One group of objects were three maniquins from the Department of Odontology. The training heads immediately caught the attention of Camilla Mordhorst and Monica Lambert, who saw numerous possibilities for use in the exhibition.

Another quite unexpected find was a collection of bladder stones, complete with a specially worked-out typology.

In addition to these acquisitions, the Panum Garbage Day once again proved to be a very effective means of alerting scientists to Medical Museion’s interest in quite recent biomedical equipment. It seems that the awareness that things do not have to be terribly old, rare, or valuable in order to be relevant as museum objects is spreading among the people who work with biomedical technologies every day and who are in the position to donate objects to the museum. For that reason, Medical Museion will definitely be in place for next year’s clean-out day.

As you may have noticed, this blog has a crush on microarray technology, both as a social and political phenomenon (see here) and as an object of display (see here and here).

Therefore – congratulations to the Berliner Medizin-historisches Museum for being the first museum (as far as I know) to display microarrays in a permanent exhibition.

It’s just one small showcase in the new permanent exhibition ‘Dem Leben af der Spur’ [On the track of life] which opened last October. The text is short and probably pretty unintelligible to non-experts, and the displayed Affymetrix^® chips are not contextualized, neither historically, nor socially or politically. Nevertheless, here they are – the first gene chips in a permanent museum exhibition.

I’ll be back with a review of the exhibition as a whole.

Yesterday morning, before our session on art and science, I took a walk through the beautiful old Charité area — now one of the joint medical campuses of Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität — with 19th and early 20th century buildings spread out in a large park.

When I passed by one of the buildings that houses some of the veterinary medical departments, an aluminium-box to the right of the entrance caught my eye.

Went closer and discovered a small handwritten red label on the front of the box:

‘Refrigerated samples (4^o)
Institute of Virology’

Apparently it’s a refrigerated drive-in (or walk-by) virus sample delivery box:

I asked a man who was standing smoking outside the building to open the lid to demonstrate how it works:

My anonymous assistant had no attachment to the veterinary virology department, so he couldn’t really explain how the box is (was) used. What kind of samples are (were) delivered here? By whom? A night-delivery box? What kinds of tests? And how does (did) the sender get the information back? Is (was) it a foot-and-mouth disease sample emergency delivery box?

And then I saw that someone has glued a green label below the official one:

‘bürgerinitiative / rettet die fleischerei’ (‘citizen initiative / save the butcher-shops’).

One of these witty anti-establishment micro protests and art installations which has made the Berlin autonomous movement world famous. Perhaps a vegan tongue-in-cheek criticism of a food industry which would be in serious trouble if institutes of virology weren’t producing knowledge that kept animals alive for later slaughter and sale.

A nice item for acquisition if we were a museum responsible not only for human medicine but also for understanding and displaying veterinary medicine as well.

After today’s SLSA afternoon sessions I walked down Luisenstrasse through the Humboldt University medical campus (Charité) and suddenly saw this poster hanging on a fence:

“Are you doing research? Do you want to know more about several biomedical topics? Join this year’s conference and discuss your results with students from all over the world …”

The poster invites passersby to the 19th European Student’s Conference — an event which has taken place at Charité since the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of many East-West reunion activities.

Why am I so fascinated by this little poster? It’s an example of biomedicine on display, yes — but there is more to it. I guess it has something to do with how the biomedical world enters the urban street space and becomes part of our everyday poster display experience, like street announcement of concerts and theatre performances. Isn’t that what they mean by the formation of biocitizenship?

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

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

PS to last post: don’t miss the Medical Museion/’Biomedicine on Display’-born session “Recent biomedicine and vitality” on Wednesday 4 june at 15.45-17.15 in the Virchow-Raum, Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus. The session is chaired by Jan Eric Olsén and contains the following papers:

• Sniff Andersen Nexø: A matter of disposal: Enacting aborted foetuses in hospitals.
• Hanne Jessen: Vitality of a scientific model: The coming into being and trajectory of a new laboratory animal.
• Susanne Bauer: Risk assessment software and the biopolitics of prevention.
• Jan Eric Olsén: Life struggles and the invaded body.

If you happen to be in Berlin next week, you are welcome to take part in the session ‘Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences’ at the 5th Biannual European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). The session takes place in the Kaiserin-Friederich-Haus (Robert-Koch-Platz 7) on Friday 6 June, 11-13 and has papers by Suzanne Anker, Rob Zwijnenberg, Thomas Söderqvist and Ingeborg Reichle.

First Suzanne Anker (New York), will present a paper about “Semaphores and Surrogates: Stand-ins and Body Doubles”. In 2004 she published (with Dorothy Nelkin) The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004; see http://www.geneculture.org/

Then art historian Robert Zwijnenberg (Leiden) will talk about “Bio-Art: Concepts and Matter”. Rob is head of The Arts & Genomics Centre at the University of Leiden, see http://www.artsgenomics.org/

As the third speaker, I will talk about “Five (Good and Bad) Reasons why a Medical Museum Director wants to Bring Art and Science together”.

Finally Ingeborg Reichle, who organizes the session will talk about ”Art in the Age of Technoscience” and will present some issues she is dealing with in her forthcoming book “Art in the Age of Technoscience. Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art ” (Springer, New York 2009; see: http://www.kunstgeschichte.de/reichle/pub_technoscience_EN.html

For an updated program for the whole SLSA meeting, see here: http://www.zfl.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/bilder/Projekte/slsa/update_20080529.pdf